The Rails Rumble is a 48 hour web application development competition. As a contestant, your team gets one weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web application that you can, using the awesome power of Ruby and Rails. Some members of Schoolbinder’s development team entered the Rails Rumble this year and developed an application called Lowdown.
What is Lowdown?
Lowdown keeps your software project on track by helping developers, designers, project managers and owners all focus on satisfying stakeholders. How? Simple.
Feature Stories
When developing an application the client and the developers need to make sure that the ideas that the client has in his mind are exactly what the developer has on his mind. Feature Stories are basically the stories that are created to describe the many features of the software application.
Lowdown allows the client and the developer describe exactly what is going to happen in the application. It lets you create, edit and discuss feature stories using a fun and helpful interface. After using the application, I realize that the interface keeps you focused on the exact details of the functionality of the feature. It does not let you drift off like one would in a long-winded email.
Estimates
Once the stories are complete the developers can then enter the number of hours they will need to develop that specific feature. It gives the client a clear understanding of the full cost of the feature. It keeps a running total of the cost of the complete project too!
Prioritize
Once you have an idea of what the features will cost, you can drag and drop each scenario to create a group of features that will make up your next release or iteration.
So why is this all so special?
I have been on the client side of building an application. The developers and I built a good working relationship. All of this that I spoke about was being done using Basecamp, Google Docs, emails, etc. As the project evolves and the pace picks up it becomes very difficult to manage all of this information and ideas and requests can easily slip through the cracks.
Lowdown, even in its infancy, is the equivalent of a task master. It organizes everything. It gives you a clear picture. Best of all, when it comes down to development decisions, picking features is like picking off of a fast food menu. “Let me get number one, number four, and let’s also go with number 6.” All you do is drag and drop and you are done. You know exactly what you are going to spend and there is no confusion over what is going to be done next.
This is my ‘client perspective’ review of Lowdown. I did not even get into the Cucumber features. I’ll leave that for the hardcore programmers. As a client, you should demand that your developer use Lowdown. Trust me, it will make for a better development project.
