New SynthaSite version up

Our first SynthaSite new version deployment of the new year went live yesterday.  The most visible feature is our integration with Picnik, a cool Flash image editor/enhancer, so people can manage their images through the web instead of on their own machine with The Gimp or Photoshop or whatever.

We also added a toolbar to the widgets, to allow for commonly accessed functionality on a widget to be more easily found and used.  I think we made the right move with this one... 

Other features include being able to publish under your own domain but hosted on our site (you've always been able to download your site and host it yourself), being able to save copies of pages, and auto-saving.  We've got better about publically visible release notes too, with known issues in the release and workarounds.  Oh, we also redid the web site a bit, and I much prefer the new style.

It's been a learning process - which is to say that things didn't go perfectly smoothly.  But with our improving QA process in place, we managed to avoid all but one or two problems from being discovered in the deployment-to-live phase.

Improving process in a software team is hard - you can't change too many things at a time, and you can't change the same thing over and over.  You have to avoid trying to optimise something when it's good enough, and effort would be better spent elsewhere... or if the effort will cause churn and instability, hurting the confidence in the process.

We had our first bigger-team iteration planning session today.  I'd only been at two of these at SynthaSite so far, and I feel it was a much smoother process than the previous two.  As you can see on the picture of the iteration planning board, there's a lot of stuff planned for the next three weeks.

(My column, of course, is the longest.  And, well, filled with little things to help make everyone's lives more streamlined and pain-free.)