Development methodology - lean

How are we developing Open Your Diary? 

We are keeping it lean.

As we are self funded, we don't have massive amounts of cash to blow so by necessity we have to keep a very tight reign on costs. 

For a start we have a core development team of four, myself as consultant and PM, Dmitry and AlexP as developers and Slava on design. We bring in help where appropriate Yori for iPhone development, AlexL for templates and accessibility, Jules for security, but we try to keep a tight focused development group to reduce communication overheads. 

We are using proven open source technology for the delivery platform - Linux and Ruby on Rails as well as using low cost virtual machines - www.rimuhosting.com for both our test and production servers. 

We are also trying to keep the application itself lean, keeping just the core features needed rather than adding everything Microsoft word style. This is proving to be a bit of a challenge as we have lots of things we'd like to offer our customers, lots of ways to edit and change things, but we also need to keep the app simple to use and easy (and cheap) to develop and maintain.

For a little inspiration, take a look at the book Getting Real by the guys at 37 Signals.