Archived copy.
This page was recovered from the Internet Archive snapshot of
/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=16711819 taken on 2022-08-19.
The original wiki at wiki.opf-labs.org is being decommissioned.
The SPRUCE Mashup Manifesto
This a rough collection of approaches, working practices and mindsets for developers participating in a SPRUCE Mashup:
- Be agile
- Develop in short bursts, demo, and get feedback from your user(s) and practitioner(s)
- 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 existing code where possible
- Keep it small, keep it simple
- Functional preservation tools should be atomic
- Modularise in the face of growing requirements
- Think about how someone else will integrate your tool in a workflow
- Wrap it up and make it easy to use, build on, or re-purpose
- Share your source
- Automate your build
- Package for easy install
- 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.