“We’d like to offer a poll on our site. How long do you think it would take to create a polling tool?” A good question, and, like any good developer, I thought about how long it would take.
A few days for the frontend screens design. A couple days to create the backend “data entry” tool and db storage. One week to reinvent the wheel in a very basic, ho-hum fashion.
But, wait. WordPress has a polling widget developed by the community, right? Sure, that would take care of the frontend and a significant portion of the backend too. We’d have to massage the db storage a bit and spend a day getting familiar with the prefabbed tool but then we could benefit from all the future community updates.
Ok, we’re down to 2 days from 5 and get “free as in beer” updates. Shall we start development?
Well, how will we measure success after deployment? What are we hoping to achieve by hosting a poll on our site? Hmmm…also good questions.
Hey, PollDaddy offers free, customizable polls with reporting, support and a development community! Cool, how long would it take to get that up and running? I just finished a sample poll during lunch and it’s on our test site now. Take a look.
Long story short, we’ve been using PollDaddy for a few weeks now and the business folks are tickled pink with the gathered data. Nobody’s asked me since how long I’d need to write our own tool because the urgent business need has been fulfilled (and in just a few short hours).
I can’t think of a better way to go lean then to bundle free, best of breed, non-core competence, shrink “wrapped software” services.
Did you enjoy this article? Please subscribe to the RSS Feed to receive updates on Agile Methodologies & DevOps.
