If you take a moment and Google “automotive dashboard user design”, you will find thousands of sites that discuss the thinking behind past, current and future car dashboards. Regardless of which site you visit, there is one theme that runs throughout: User design makes sense. Continue reading…

What is Usability?  Usability is the ease of use and “learnability” of a human-made object such as a book, tool, or software. Usability isn’t just a concept, it is also a process that includes scientifically derived methods for measuring usability, such as needs analyses and testing of product ideas on end users.

When it comes to software, you can find out pretty quickly if it is usable. Continue reading…

The other day I sat in on a product sprint demo that was comprised of product leaders, stakeholders, and some other interested parties who were in neither camp.  They weren’t the pigs who are committed to getting the project done and they weren’t the chickens who are the stakeholders.

Vic Fees’s post “Scrum for Chickens” helps anyone who doesn’t understand agile… understand it.  He lays out the classic barnyard metaphor describing the pigs as committed to the project and the chickens as only “involved”… Continue reading…

I was talking with a friend the other day who told me a funny story that illustrates how we often don’t think about what we do, but just do what we’ve been taught.  The story goes like this…

While helping her mother create their Thanksgiving dinner, a little girl noticed that her mother cut off the ends of their ham.  Noticing this, she asked “Mummy, why do you cut off the ends of the ham?”  “Because that is what my mother did,” her mother replied. Continue reading…

I can’t imagine life without a VPN. A working VPN is – arguably – the epitome of how technology can enhance the life of a software/IT professional. For techies, a VPN can prevent the need to drive to the office in the middle of the night to address a software emergency (HUGE), and it affords a level of work flexibility unheard of in the pre-internet days. Additionally, it does so while maintaining a fairly high level of security. Note the key word working! A non functional VPN epitomizes another quality of technology – it can be downright frustrating and make you want to toss a laptop through a window. Continue reading…

Chicken wants to start a restaurant but needs start-up capital. He asks Pig to invest. Pig says, “Great idea; what are you thinking of naming your enterprise?” “Eggs and Bacon,” Chicken replies. “No thanks,” Pig snorts back. When Chicken asks about the sudden change of heart, Pig responds: “Because you’re only involved . . . . I’m committed.” Continue reading…

In Scrum development, User Stories are the vehicle by which stakeholders identify and prioritize application features and requirements. On the first day of each new Scrum sprint, the Team and Product Owner meet to negotiate the sprint. User Stories are the terms of that negotiation and Story Points are the currency of the negotiated contract. Continue reading…

Quality is the degree to which the inherent characteristics of a thing (i.e., your product or service) fulfill requirements and meets expectations. The process of producing something of “high quality” is commonly called “Quality Assurance.” The measurement of quality to ensure that output meets expectations is a process called “Quality Control.” When QA is based on continuous improvement and when QC precisely and accurately measures output, “high quality” is the natural result. Continue reading…

If you happened to read my last article, Documentation – What’s The Secret Sauce of Enough But Not Too Much?, you may have caught that the products I work with run on an open source stack. Open source is the one constant characterizing most of my career. My first introduction to professional development was at a government contractor that ran Solaris on old sparcs. I also dabbled briefly with Microsoft writing Excel customizations through Visual Basic for Applications. From this point forward I’ve done nothing but write and manage applications that run on some distribution of Linux. Continue reading…

I’m not certain when agile was first used to describe software development, but over the last few years, it’s become the term of choice for so many in describing their environment and approach (though not always the actual methodology being utilized).

So what does Agile methodology really mean? Let’s start with a couple of very basic descriptions: Continue reading…