Category Archives: Software development

Software development articles generally relate to the implementation stages of the development process. We also discuss overall approaches and strategy to creating and managing software products, including waterfall, agile, and other methodologies.

Personas Make Blue Ocean Strategy Proactive

Blue Ocean Strategy provides an interesting reactive analysis of companies and markets.  Personas are used to understand your customer’s needs.  Combining the two provides powerful proactive insights when positioning your product for market success.

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Failure To Launch (Your Product)

Jump forward in time to the day of your next big product launch (first release, new features, new market segment, etc).  And your site/application crashes due to the “unexpected” demand.  All you can do now is look for a bucket of water to put out the fire.  What could you have done to prevent this disaster?  Jump back to today and start doing it!

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Agile Non-Functional Requirements

Just because your requirement is not a user story does not mean you have to throw it out when planning your next sprint.  See one way (that is working) for managing non-functional requirements with an agile team.

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User Stories and Use Cases

User Stories are one of the key agile artifacts for helping implementation teams deliver the most important capabilities first.  They differ from use cases in some important ways, but share more commonalities than you might think.

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2009 Bad Usability Calendar

Netlife Research brings us the 2009 Bad Usability calendar.  Get it while it’s hot.

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Stakeholders in a Barrel

There’s really only one way to travel down a waterfall – in a barrel.  A lot of people died this way, but some survived.  Software projects have been predominantly waterfall projects since the start of software projects.  And stakeholders rode down those projects, basically in a barrel.  The people riding Niagara Falls 100 years ago didn’t know if they would survive until they got to the end.  Stakeholders in waterfall projects don’t know if they will succeed until the end.

An agile project is dependent upon tight interaction (and feedback) with stakeholders.

If you’re running an agile project, and your stakeholders are old-school barrel-riders, how do you make it work?

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ProductCamp Austin Winter 2009

The second productcamp for Austin is just around the corner!  Are you going to be there?  You should.

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Simple Agile Model Example

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation, and it values customer collaboration over contract negotiation.  With that in mind, how much is a picture of a model worth?  Check out a simple example, how it helped, and what we didn’t do.

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Satisficing Sprints

Satisficing probably makes more sense than perfecting your product.

Can?  Open.

Worms?  Everywhere.

Are we really saying “don’t make it perfect?”  Yup.

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Plan Your Next Sprint By Bang For The Buck: Part 2

Planning by ROI.  Hmmm.  Isn’t that impractical?  In an econometric way, yes.  But you can still estimate the relative value of the capabilities / stories you’re planning for your scrum sprints.  The point is – don’t look only at value – also look at costs.  While “ROI” may be a poor choice of terms, “bang for the buck” is not.

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