Fail fast, fail better
It was in the year of 2015 in which a relative unknown tennis-player Stan Wawrinka wrote history. What nobody suspected was that this unknown player would win his first Grand Slam in the Australian Open. What made this so special was that until that time the setting was dominated by the big four; Nadal, Federer, Murray and Djokovic.
During the tournament Wawrinka defeated both Nadal and Djokovic. Never ever in the 7 years before did he win a single match against these giants. He lost 12 times to Nadal, 14 times to Djokovic.
Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s quote, after failing to beat one of the giants in 2014, he realised a key element. There will always be disappointment, headaches and losses. However, the real question is how do you use that for the better? As a constant reminder he tattooed the following quote on his arm, marking the road to success.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. (Samuel Becket)
Ever tried, ever failed
In IT, as in other activity, project failure is part of the journey to success. Between all the different reasons why, there are 4 that dominate the group:
- Immense backlog
- No time to innovate
- Scarce resources
- Complex systems
So in 2001 an unknown player entered the stage in the world of application development. They called themselves OutSystems a “low-code” platform.
19 years later OutSystems won an immense number of “Grand Slam” titles in the world of software development. Showing that failing fast, embrace feedback can be accomplished. It shifted the perspective on how project should be done and opened up a whole new way on how to deliver value to users.
Fail better
Even with an Agile way of working in creating mobile apps, there is always feedback, new stories/requests to pick up.
The art of failing better is about how to best embrace feedback and changes.
Doing so you enables you to withstand the powers of the big four dominators. That is when OutSystems introduced the AppFeedback solution. It enables you to receive feedback, where you can enable all/a group of users to submit their feedback at any given moment using the app.
So an AppFeedback reported issue a day, keeps the bugs away ;-)
Extremely useful when you’re in a Prototyping phase and key-users are constantly giving you feedback.. Inspired by what Samuel Beckett wrote, with OutSystems you can say; “Embrace change. No matter. Publish again. Embrace again. Embrace better!”
One more thing, embrace again
We all know this user who for some reason does not seem to get anything working. For all the users it works fine, but not for this poor person. Let’s call her “Mary” for illustrative purposes. How is it possible that Mary always runs into trouble, errors and is frustrated all day.
Is it fair to blame her, or make fun of her frustrations? To be honest, at first I was making fun of Mary as well, until I realised that the system has failed and Mary is actually the hero in this story. She has a gift and is the only one who can point out the flaws in the system. You need a Mary as a key-user when you want to create an app that everyone including Mary loves.
So how can we help Mary? Well it is quite easy actually to find where she is encountering unexpected behaviors. Just use the Mobile Debugger, plug in her Phone or Tablet and debug on the go. No need to be online, let’s go squashing bugs.
Thanks Mary, because you show us how we can “Fail again” and embrace again!
