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Culture & Methods

What Makes Joy,Inc Work? Part 3 – High-Tech Anthropology®

This is the last of three articles exploring the culture and practices that makes Menlo Innovations such a joyous workplace. This article examines their approach to user experience and requirements - a set of practices they call High Tech Anthropology®

Shane Hastie
on Nov 19, 2015
The Hierarchy of Needs

What may be valuable to customers whom you do not even know in an unstructured and completely individualized market? This article suggests prioritizing your backlog using an enhanced quality model based on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Search for most valuable features using the Need-Feature-Capability matrix and give those features highest priority in your backlog.

Manfred Rätzmann
on Jul 24, 2015
Q&A on Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly

The book "Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly" by Bertrand Meyer provides a review of agile principles, techniques and tools. It explores the agile methods Extreme Programming, Lean Software, Scrum and Crystal and provides suggestions on what to use or not to use from them, based on software engineering principles and research and personal experience of the book author.

Ben Linders
on Mar 13, 2015
Getting RID of Risk with Agile

One of the largest areas of waste in development are poorly formed requirements. This post presents a very simple technique that can be applied to all user stories to improve quality and reduce waste, as well as examining how this can fit into your current planning and estimation workflow via the underused ‘definition of ready’. It’s a very actionable concept that you can apply immediately.

Jacob Creech
on Jan 21, 2015
Working Together, Sitting Apart

There are essentially two factors that determine whether your offshoring adventure is successful or not – people and process. This article is the first article in a series on managing remote teams, sharing experiences in developing a process for remote collaboration. As people sit apart in (several) remote locations, extra attention must be paid to articulating how people work together.

Hugo Messer
on Oct 05, 2014
Meet Elaine: A Persona- Driven Approach to Exploring Architecturally Significant Requirements

Often, requirements elicited from stakeholders describe a system’s functionality but fail to address qualities such as performance, reliability, & availability. Documenting these requirements is often overlooked because there are implicit assumptions that the system will perform to expected levels. This article describes a process developed on the idea of persona sketches to address this problem.

Jane Cleland-Huang
on Dec 15, 2013
Discover to Deliver: Author Q&A

Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman have written a book titled Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis. The book addresses the planning and analysis activities needed in implementing business products, with a focus on software products and business process change initiatives.

Shane Hastie
on Oct 14, 2013
Interview with Eduardo Miranda about Estimating and Planning Agile Projects

Eduardo Miranda, associate professor at the Master of Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University explains the need for planning in agile projects, and describes various planning techniques that can be used with agile. He also looks on the impact of agile on project management offices and on the role of project managers in agile projects.

Ben Linders
on Jun 24, 2013
Interview and Book Excerpt: Mastering the Requirements Process

Suzanne and James Robertson have released the 3rd edition of their book Mastering the Requirements Process. This edition includes material focused on the challenges of requirements in modern project environments, including agile and outsourcing relationships.

Shane Hastie
on Mar 13, 2013
Faster, Better, Higher – But How?

One of the main challenges when designing software architecture is the consideration of quality attributes. Not only their design turns out to be difficult, but also the specification of these attributes. Consequently, many problems in software systems are directly related to the specification and design of quality attributes such as modifiability or performance, to name just a few.

Michael Stal
on Feb 20, 2012
Interview and Book Review: Specification by Example

Gojko Adzic has written the book Specification by Example, explaining the set of techniques for describing the functional and behavioural aspects of a computer system in a way that they are useful to the development team (expressed ideally as executable tests), understandable by non-technical stakeholders and maintainable to remain relevant despite changing customer demands.

Shane Hastie
on Oct 24, 2011
Architecture & Design

Are You a Software Architect?

The line between development and architecture is tricky. Some say it's fake, that architecture is an extension of the design process undertaken by developers; others say it's a chasm that can only be crossed by lofty developers who believe you must abstract your abstractions and not worry about implementation details. There's a balance in the middle, but how do you move from one to the other?

Simon Brown
on Feb 09, 2010