Our CEO makes the rounds with other CEOs, entrepreneurs and investors. One of the themes that gets batted around is the concept of Continuous Development, Continuous Integration (CDCI). At the CEO level, it is taken to mean that the company releases products more or less continuously and not on a fixed schedule every few weeks or months or even years.

In the good old days of Brook’s book “The Mythical Man Month”, software projects followed that same cycle that you would see in a major construction project. First, someone draws up a list of requirements (Make a bridge from point A to point B that can handle Y traffic per hour). An architecture creates the overall design and architecture plans. (Civil) engineers draw up a complete design on paper that is then reviewed to see if it meets the written and unwritten requirements (Don’t break the bank, Don’t make it look like a Picasa painting). The construction company reviews the plans for implementation. The project owner arranges for the right permissions from the appropriate agencies. The parts and materials are ordered. The builders build. Test and review the result. Open for traffic.

In the last year or so we were witnesses of an ongoing battle, a battle between HTML5 and Flash lovers.
(Although the last thing we could see in the conversation was love)

People were complaining about Flash for a long time, saying it crashes browsers, it’s unsafe and kills puppies, but actually I don’t think it would have been such a big deal if it wasn’t for one guy. Yes! You’ve heard about him. His name is Steve Jobs. Yep, one day he decided that his products (iPod’s, iPhone’s and iPad’s) would not support Flash. He even wrote a nice letter explaining why. Then it all started. People actually started to take it all seriously and the great Flash vs. HTML5 saga began.