[TOOLS] Transparent development progress

One of the biggest movements in software development is that of transparency: telling all observers, especially stakeholders, exactly what the team is building right now.

For example, the Scrum development methodology suggests the use of a "burndown chart", a publicly visible graph that shows how much work is left to do in a sprint.

I found another cool example of this when following the Natural Selection 2 video game's blog. They released an alpha version of their game to people who have pre-ordered the game, and want to keep people updated on their progress towards completion and which features they're working on.

Through the use of Pivotal Tracker (I've never used the tool, so I can't say good or bad things about it) and a simple web page (actually the web page might be built through the tool) the company has created a great transparent window into their development process and increased the connection with their customers.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/progress

This is a huge step forward in communication with the customer. Anyone who has ever pre-ordered something still in development (a phone, some software, even startup capital in a new company) knows how frustrating it is to sink money into a black hole and not know what happens to it.

With a simple but effective interface like the one shown above, people can have faith that their money is actually being spent on real features and get a handle on the direction of the product. It also encourages new investment by displaying the progress of the team.