We’re in the middle of a prototype build for a client at the moment.
It’s roughly targeted at Concept Validation level maturity.
If it meets the business goals they’re expecting, we’ll probably build more.
But if it doesn’t make much money, it could be a one off.
To avoid reinventing the wheel, and keep costs down until we’ve validated the idea, we’re including an off the shelf component to accomplish a key function.
There isn’t great documentation available for it, but the vendor assured us it would meet our needs.
Obviously, we wanted to trust the vendor. They know their product, and know what it can do.
But we’re using it a little differently than most applications, which adds a bit of risk.
Instead of putting it on a shelf and waiting for the rest of the project to be ready for it, we did a quick mockup.
And it didn’t work 😬
Our application was different in just the wrong way. The vendor had never seen the problem before.
But since we tested it as soon as we could, we had time to recover.
It turned out that the small design change required to make it work actually improved a couple other features. Win Win!
Test early!
-Brian Schoolcraft