This week’s topic is about social application design. There are many aspects involved in designing application. On our wiki page brought in many contribution of topics from many different perspectives. There are discussions on project management, UI/UX design, API, security, development methodology, etc.  I am most interested in the deployment methodology and strategy of these popular social sites. This link posted by professor Dron shows a very different approach to conventional programming style. “Release early and release often”, in the case of Flicker, new version was released every half an hour which is something I have experience with and I have used a few continuous integration tool such as CruiseControl.net to automate deployment directly from source control repository. This is a great way to capture user feedback to the changes of the software as early as possible. The feedback can come in form of bug report or suggestion to software changes which sometimes only triggers when a tester/end user sees a particular update and have the chance to play with it. In a way, this is like accelerated software prototyping development method where the prototype isn’t a throwaway code but to be maintained and revised as production code upon user feedback. I always find that allowing end user to interact with the actual software is the best way to spark interest and suggestion that otherwise would have been overlooked.

Dickson