And not only the development.
For too many years now we’ve been enamored with Agile. Supposedly the successor of the fountain development model, agile is all about short iterations and faster feedback.
In larger places, agile is usually just the next undertaking of the program manager – or whatever equivalent you have in the company that deals with processes. I remember hearing the term “we must be agile”. With the end result being… 18 to 24 months product release cycles.
That’s nice, but it isn’t really agile – at least not more than the Geek & Poke caricature above.
I had an interesting discussion with a consultant during the London WebRTC conference two months ago. He complained that browsers are moving too fast, making it hard for enterprises to follow suit and adopt WebRTC.
Here’s a quick reminder – WebRTC doesn’t care about enterprises. It cares about innovation and forward moving. If something breaks, then you’re just out of luck.
WebRTC today forces enterprises to think and act Agile
Why is this the case?
- Browsers are updating at the speed of light – every 6 to 8 weeks
- Each time they do, something gets deprecated
- And other things can get broken
- This is doubly so with WebRTC, which is essentially a perpetual work in progress
- And will stay that way well into 2017
- Enterprises need to be prepared for it and willing to update their own deployments to keep pace
- WebRTC’s codecs are changing – and upgrading
- VP9 is upon us
- H.264 is here to stay
- R&D teams need to adopt new codecs to keep their service pristine
- Otherwise, competitors will do it and win the market simply by offering better user experience and media quality
- New capabilities
- Browser side recording?
- Playing video from a canvas?
- Pipelining media?
- WebRTC has it all, and things are only improving
- Do these affect your product? Do you need someone to define how this changes things for you?
What Needs to Change
Enterprises need to change their stance. They aren’t in control anymore. They should act accordingly.
This means having product managers, developers, testers, support and IT all working in concert in an agile way – thinking about launched products as living and breathing entities that must be updated continuously.
Thinking of launchng a WebRTC based product? Especially if it is an on premise one – you must make sure you understand the implications AND that your customers understand the implications as wlel.