Part of the Process

Some notes from last night’s ThoughtWorks' Quarterly Briefing on Mobile and the “shattered future” Session 1 : Giles Alexander Mobile Lead (Europe) at ThoughtWorks Talked about move from Clients -> Apps -> Products Clients are the old world desktop thick clients that started to get replaced but apps and everyone needed an app on their phone. But now increasingly the world is multi-screen and product is across devices, these are just ways of getting to product. It's not just a case of laptops, smartphones and tablets. Also have to consider other input types/devices like siri, Google glass. there are multiple channels and accessibility is important. Is Google glass just Segway for your face? e.g. Siri is a bit of a gimmick, not used for regular/serious use, is Google Glass the same? Couple of examples: realestate.com.au is a property listings site that started in print media. Business suited the internet well then along came mobile. While ...

While watching the Little Cat Diaries the other day, the experiment comparing cats and dogs behaviour to an earlier experiment with children stuck me. In the original experiment the children were pleased to see parents who left then returned to the room as they saw them as a provider of security. They repeated this experiment first with dogs, who used their owners as points of reference and providers of security. The cats however, were different. They showed more interest in the stranger present in the room if anything. The conclusion was that the cats saw their owners as providers of resources. I like to think we can make a (fanciful?) analogy here with project managers and the team. Formal command and control processes guide project managers into becoming dog owners. I would suggest that agile techniques put them in the position of herding cats and therefore "merely" providing the resources needed to achieve the team goals. Be interested to hear peoples thoughts on th...

I am currently lucky enough to be working on a project where the developers are looking into what they can learn from academic computer science and spiking various options to explore the solution space. This got me thinking to how relatively rarely you see this, in my experience programmers tend not to read industrial journals in the same way that say civil or electrical engineers might.  One thing that I would expect to see more in agile literature are Grice's conversational maxims (Grice 1975) Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Maxim of Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant. Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. For me the...