Do you follow the ideas from "Getting Real" by 37 Signals?

Question

"Getting Real" is a book by 37Signals, describing their ideas on how to develop successful web applications. If you've tried applying these to your own work, how was your experience?

Answer 1

The Don't do Dead Documents section will be not be feasible in any company required to follow Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, so you will probably not find Getting Real done 100% in public companies in the US whose business is not selling software.

Answer 2

I had a flick through. 90% of it seems like common sense, the other 10 is just hippy waffle.

Answer 3

I agree with Aiden. But I did stop reading when I saw this:

* Less features
* Less options/preferences
* Less people and corporate structure
* Less meetings and abstractions
* Less promises

I know we nerdy types are supposed to be less eloquent than some, but reading this is excruciating. (fewer vs less)

Answer 4

I follow most of the ideas in "Getting Real" and "Rework", and I still have a kind of blind faith in them. The trouble is, other people tend to get in the way of finding out if they work.

For example, I tried to convince the managers at work that meetings were toxic and that distractions were the biggest productivity killer. They suggested we have a meeting about it.

In another (whole day) meting, I must have said 10 times - "We intend to proceed by implementing the most important thing on the list, get it in front of users, and decide where to go from there". The product manager agreed - and then went on to say, "and I want you to take a couple of days to make a detailed breakdown of all the features and write down how your team are going implement them, and when, and what is the roadmap for delivery all these features because our customers will want these features and will want to know what our roadmap is for the next 6 months" - and he must have added another half a dozen ad-hoc features to list during the meeting.

The investor chipped in by saying "and I want you to write documentation for everything so we can hand it off to our man in India because I believe the developers should never take responsibility for supporting the software"

I can't remember if "Getting Real" advises to leave a job like this.