Dev teams are like football: the paparazi, the glamorous wags. But also the (not quite so glamorous) stats.Football has stats such as the proportion of games won when a particular player plays. Great! So whats it got to do with software development?Well, large dev teams often split into two. And if people slowly rotate (e.g.…… Continue reading Why dev teams are like football
Category: Agile
Self-organisation: Team Maturity Model
I’m sure there are lots of team maturity models out there. This one is about the level of self-organisation. It’s a simplifiction (like all models). How does your team score? (1). Team members need to have specific tasks assigned to them e.g. build widget X for the TV section of the website. (2). The team…… Continue reading Self-organisation: Team Maturity Model
Data, users, agile.
Everyone seems to be talking about data. User data. Understanding users. Good, it’s important. The catch is that users don’t care about giving you data. Some companies equate data with user registration but users don’t like registration (even via social login). It’s easy to forget that there are other approaches to user data – especially…… Continue reading Data, users, agile.
Political Systems and Agile
In politics, people have long realised that too much power is dangerous. Some bright spark came up with the idea of “separation of powers” to mitigate it. It’s a system of checks and balances. In the UK, power is split between the government, the judiciary and the civil service. Agile teams typically have a similar…… Continue reading Political Systems and Agile
Business projections: beware the crystal ball
The chances are that your company has a graph of projected profits over the coming years. It is dangerous. It is dangerous because profit cannot be predicted. Profit can be wiped out by an nimble competitor or shift in consumer trends. Profit can skyrocket due to unforeseen success. Past performance is not a good indicator…… Continue reading Business projections: beware the crystal ball
The Lean Startup – Highlights
A startup isn’t about size, it about extreme uncertainty. Startup = experiment. The measure of innovation is the rate of validated learning. In fact, the best way to achieve sustainable profit is validated learning. Validated learning is THE NUMBER ONE OBJECTIVE. Only borrow big money if it’s the best way to pursue validated learning, otherwise…… Continue reading The Lean Startup – Highlights
Product Owner Essentials
From “Getting Real” (37signals). Underdo Your Competition Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope Less Mass Lower Your Cost of Change Embrace Constraints Half, Not Half-Assed Start With No Hidden Costs Rinse and Repeat The book contains loads of other useful advice too. Genius.
Bottom Up Organisation and Innovation
Google and Facebook where the vanguard but now it’s taking off. Here are just a few of the books on the subject published in the last few months. Adapt by economist Tim Harford (FT, BBC). Inspiring. Original. Great stories. A classic. Loose: The future of business is letting go The Power of Pull. Good intro on…… Continue reading Bottom Up Organisation and Innovation
The Scientist
You are measuring traffic, right? Number of hits. Unique users. Good, just checking. Do you measure the impact of each feature? Metro don’t (watch this space). Here’s an example. We recently redesigned our masthead – the header, logo, background, navigation, search tool and banner space. It took us quite a while. Some people thought this was…… Continue reading The Scientist
Testing. Usability. Awesome.
The dev team recently got showed up by the newspaper iPad team. Their usability testing was awesome. Firstly, they actually did some usability testing. Secondly, the subjects were from a range of teams and “ranks”. Thirdly, the tests were with one subject and one observer at a time. As a subject, i found that this…… Continue reading Testing. Usability. Awesome.
Why products are like a works jolly to Paris
If you’ve ever been to Paris (or anywhere else) with 50 people you will know that the bigger the group the harder it is to get anything done or to get anywhere. The length of time it takes for the group to make a decision increases drastically with the number of people in the group.…… Continue reading Why products are like a works jolly to Paris