Part of the Process

BOOK REVIEW: Fifty quick ideas to improve your user stories by Gojko Adzic and David Evans It has taken a while since my last book review to get the time to do much reading with moving. But here is my round up of "Fifty quick ideas to improve your user stories" by Gojko Adzic and David Evans Formats : Paperback, ePub, Mobi, PDF Where can I get it? From Leanpub , Amazon or any good bookshop.   Who is it for? Anyone involved in a software development project working in an iterative manner. As long as they understand some of the basics around user stories, e.g. they know what INVEST stands for. What's it about? As the title suggests "how to improve user stories", but it is a bit more than that. It covers the whole process including planning and iterative delivery activities. What's the book like? Each double page spread follows a similar style starting with an introduction to a new tip. Often illustrated with an anecdote fro...

Looking at my notes I forgot to blog about November's meetup "From Startup to Corp: The differences, and how to adapt to the change ." sponsored by 15below . There were three very good talks on the difference between very small companies and massive ones . Some highlights from the three talks: Don't feel like you have to aim for moonshots if you aren't Google Ventures - you only get a limited number of bets compared to GV, so a 10% incremental improvement every year is nothing to be ashamed of ! Don't feel too embarrassed by your peers - if you start of at the same time as JustEat but have a much more niche market it's OK to have more modest growth . Just because you can see everyone doesn't mean that they know what you are doing - large organisations have the privilege of knowing communication is poor so actively do things to encourage it, in a small startup you have to make ensure people are informed . Large organisations ca...

This post is the story of a personal journey. It starts with a legacy product. Both powerful and flexible having grown to meet needs over time. But it is my view on steps to improve the process in my context - so your mileage may vary. Phase 1: Transactional DB as source Started with looking at the transactional data. Some things were obvious, one option in the UI is recorded as true/false in the DB. Some were more complicated and required more investigation. To back this up we conducted a user survey. Followed up by a workshop to find the most important user journey to concentrate on. This highlighted three related journeys. The key characteristic of activity in this phase was mining different structures of data. The format of the data coming from custom reports. Getting to the questions to ask was guided by a user survey to almost the whole user base, a smaller workshop looking at the "job to be done" for the platform. Other than that the skills needed where accessib...