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The most important career skill for this century: fixing what’s broken
Companies are a complicated beasts. Reporting lines, structures, process, heirarchy, politics… finding your way through the corporate maze and working out how to get things done and ship meaningful work can be tough. If you look around in any company, I’m sure you’ll see things that don’t make sense. You’ll see ineffective managers and inefficient…
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Driving innovation with agile: a short case study
A prototype of the first mouse We all know the story – but it’s still remarkably easy to forget that some of the most influential innovations in the field of personal computing, including the mouse, the laser printer, computer generated bitmap graphics and the graphical user interface, were not invented by Microsoft or Apple, but…
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User testing: an input to innovation, not a source of it
Benz “Velo” model (1894) It’s hard to imagine a life without cars. Before the automobile was invented getting around was a costly and particularly time-consuming business. That quick drive to the hardware store that takes 15 minutes in the car might have taken several hours on horseback, or an entire day in a horse-drawn carriage.…
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Release it: now
Release your software to real users as early as possible. Building software for years without ever releasing any of it is like working in a kitchen and letting the food go cold and mouldy before serving it up. Building software is a collaborative process – not just amongst you and your colleagues – or between…
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GPS, turn-by-turn guidance and location-based services: what are they doing to my brain?
There’s a motorcycle accessories store that I go to quite a lot. It’s quite a distance away – 10 kilometers through the city or so – but I like it because it has the best range and quite good prices. Anyway, I was there the other day buying some new touring pants, and as I…
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Tracking software bugs: keep the important ones; drop the rest
In ancient neolithic farming communities, the size of the average tribe or village was about 150 people. That’s also about the size of most military units dating back to Roman antiquity and earlier, and it’s a number that features frequently in a variety of social antropological examples. It turns out, as Robin Dunbar popularised with…
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Let the team decide…
In a typical agile development team a few hundred decisions get made every day, by everyone. Should we build this user story first or that one? Should I refactor this method now or do it later? Is this bug more important than that user story? Should I call that meeting for this week or next…
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Continuous delivery: release early, release often
If you’re in the business of building a car, you only really only have one chance to get it right. Those years of research and development, trials, testing, marketing and building culminate in a single, big release – your car launch. You only have one chance because by the time your customers drive your car…
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Better SCRUM User Stories: Connect the story with the real user value
Everything you do to your product has a reason. There’s a reason that button is blue, or that message contains those words. There’s a reason you display that data or that notification. Every reason is, at its heart, about the user. This is why I like using user stories to talk about specific product developments…
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Darwin and the theory of software evolution
Female bower birds prefer males with colourful blue tail feathers and an impressive nest filled with lots of blue ornaments. To a bower bird, the brightness and quality of your tail, as well as your ability to gather a stunning assortment of blue nest decorations, indicates how healthy and strong you are, and how likely…