When we’re working on projects for clients there’s always new ideas being thought up throughout the project. Ideas are great as an indication of a positive development.

The other side to this positivity coin though is the impending doom of “feature creep”. Sometimes its inevitable. It’s just the way it is. Get used to it! Over the years we’ve created a system that has evolved into something that seems to work for the client and for us. It’s even spurred us to build an application to manage the process.

We call this process the “bucket of love”. It’s a virtual bucket that all ideas go into. The term is fluffy and golden enough to take the edge off of a client feeling like they’re being ignored. They’re not of course, it’s just a sound way to remove feature creep until the end of a sprint. When we reach the end of the sprint, if it’s still a good idea we can discuss implementing it. Voila, everybody is happy.

This brought us to actually creating a system to do this and thus Rusic.com was born. A user logs in with their social account (Twitter or Facebook) and they then create “idea buckets”. Each idea bucket holds the basic premise of a question, “how can we improve sprint X?”. Everybody can contribute their ideas, “like” and comment on other peoples ideas. It’s a great way to see what is interesting (and what isn’t).

Interest doesn’t necessarily mean “like” either. I can make a negative comment but it still shows that I’m interested in an idea, just like in a real conversation.

There’s also a lot of social goodness going so that each idea bucket gains some momentum. Momentum is necessary for the generation of ideas. Ideas breed ideas…

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