Part of the Process

The Amadeus blog recently posted an interesting take on the fad "less is more" in a post entitled  Why the ‘less is more’ concept in software design often falls short of its intentions . At first I agreed wholeheartedly as the title and intro had lead me into some nice confirmation bias ("grrr! gosh darn those gurus selling us different flavours of snake oil every year!"). Then I thought about it a bit more and the new feature being discussed was meeting a need; people wanted it and were pleased it was now present. That made me think that there was possibly some effective product management going on .. lo and behold the post was written by a product manager! This sentence was the most telling : "how we define the worth of adding more features. For me, it is worth it if you are doing something for the human being who will be using the feature." So a focus on user need is important, as if by magic later that day I read the brilliant post   How to Work...

Woah, the past six or so months since I last posted to this blog have been a bit hectic in my personal and professional life! I still have about seven draft posts to write up. So hopefully I'm back on track for about one every week or two :-) mild warning for tenuous link and conclusions jumped to ;) Last week I had two conversations on very different subjects that boiled down to the same thing - constraining options (or ways of working) to ensure quality without change the quality of any other part of the system. The first one was entirely work related. One of our project teams is extending a feature that had been sent for design review for input, in my role as an internal technical consultant and as probably the last person to do extensive work in this area (about six years ago!) I followed up and had a chat with the team's senior dev and his team mate. We talked through the possible options and the technical debt that could be repaid. The option with greater opportunit...