Rishikesh Tembe shared twenty rules for software product delivery last month. His rules are from the perspective of a former software developer. Some we like. Some, not so much.
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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Software Silver Bullet
“I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct,[…] If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.” – Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. 1987
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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Skip The Requirements, Empower The Developers
Enough of the debates about requirements and what we call them. Why don’t we just hire great developers and empower them to work directly with the customers?
Design / Interaction design / Prioritization / Requirements / Software development / Software requirements specification / UX
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Fifteen Ways to Shut Down
There are 15 ways for someone to shutdown a laptop running Windows Vista. This adds unwarranted complexity to our software. How can we avoid the same problem in our software?
Interaction design / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / ROI / UX
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Gathering Implicit Requirements
Johanna Rothman just wrote an article titled Implicit Requirements are Still Requirements. She points out that her expectations were not met, even though her needs might have been. Johanna also implicitly begs the question – how do we gather implicit requirement?
Interaction design / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / UX
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How To Not Suck At Design
Michael Shrivathsan just wrote an article presenting five tips for creating products with great design. Michael’s List Start with the user interface. [Roger Cauvin adds, start with a working first iteration] Work closely with UI designers. Pay attention to details. Simpler is better. Be brave. Our Thoughts User centric design […]
Usability / UX
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Bad Usability Calendar From Netlife Research
What a great way to demonstrate 12 key usability concepts – creating a calendar where each concept is demonstrated. You’ve heard the saying – “If you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning.” Here is that saying manifested in calendar form.
Interaction design / Marketing / Product Management
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How To Apply Market Research Better
Mike Mace provides us with some great insight about market research – helping us to avoid ‘the blender’ and ‘the gap’. The gap is a reflection of the inability of most customers to innovate. The blender is the loss of useful market information into a homogenized input that pushes only the lowest common denominator – again stifling innovation. We have to avoid the blender and the gap to get useful data from our research.
Communication / Design / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / ROI / Software development / Usability / Writing
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Goal Driven Upgrades
Kathy Sierra writes (another) great article at Creating Passionate Users. This time, she talks about why users don’t upgrade and presents ways to get users to install the latest version. We focus in this article on one way in particular – using goal-driven documentation to encourage upgrading.