The SPRUCE Mashup Manifesto

This a rough collection of approaches, working practices and mindsets for developers working in a SPRUCE Mashup:

• Be agile
  • Develop in short bursts, demo, and get feedback from your users
  • Practitioner+Developer=Success^2
  • If you don’t achieve results within a few hours, you are probably doing it wrong. Try a different approach
  • Get crude results quick, perfect and polish later
  • Scripting languages can be useful for delivering quick results
• Re-use, don't re-invent the wheel
  • Most problems have already been solved, although often not by the preservation community
  • Experiment with existing solutions first
  • Re-use code where possible
• Make your stuff easy to install, use and re-purpose
  • Functional preservation tools should be atomic
  • Modularise in the face of growing requirements
  • Share your source, automate your builds
  • Package for easy install
  • Think about how someone else will integrate your tool in a workflow
• Share outputs, exchange knowledge, learn from each other
  • Knowing that a tool doesn't work so well in solving a particular problem is just as valuable as knowing a tool that does the job perfectly
  • Write up your experiences and share them
  • Publish results for evaluation and comparison with other tools

This manifesto was developed from wiki posts by Maurice de Rooij, along with discussions over the years with clever people such as Andrew Jackson, Carl Wilson and David Tarrant.