Agile Dossier

by Anupam Kundu & Maneesh Subherwal

<essay originally published in Agile Journal>

Introduction

“Smart may have the brains, but Stupid has the guts.” Have you heard this before? Diesel used it recently (but with a word more crass than “guts”) as part of its “Be Stupid”marketing campaign, arguing that it is better to be stupid and bold than smart and creative. It’s a terrible, uninspiring attempt to match up to the essence of Steve Jobs’s “Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry“ commencement address at Stanford University.

As business-technology consultants, we often meet bold, smart product managers who are willing to take risks to build and launch new products and services in the face of extreme uncertainties. However, we never advise these executives to stay “stupid” by continuing to run risk-laden experiments without having the “smarts” to review the results, distill the feedback gathered, and adapt by evolving their strategy. Staying stupid is not a smart option!

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All

I have signed up for the Technology Entrepreneurship classes from Stanford. This is part of the (currently) free online classes that Stanford opened up to the whole world. I have successfully finished first two assignment and working with an international team of classmates on my third assignment.

Our goal is to create a tool / service for anyone and everyone who is interested in well designed quotations and shares them over the social network. A platform that allows to create and share your thoughts, beliefs, citations, phrases; quotes that inspire you through the unique use of imagery and design. You know something like “I always have a quotation for everything – it saves me from original thinking”. We created a business model canvas with key monetizing sources being partnership for printing or B2B channels with greeting card companies that look for well designed quotations – except in this case the designs will be crowd sourced by the service. As part of the assignment, we have to do some kind of lean start-up like Customer Validation. For customer validation, we created a little survey

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGJKUVhkOVJJN2RhdnJWeTUycEFCb0E6MQ

by Julia Salem

<re-posted from Oxford Technology Ventures blog with due permission>

Agile works well for products that need continuous improvement, but it could be hard to adapt to a new development process without taking time to adjust the process while people are learning. Here are a several reasons why Agile can work for your UX team.

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by Pete Hodgson

Introduction

Smart-phone usage continues to soar, but the market is still primarily split across two dominant platforms (iOS and Android). In addition there are other platforms which either hold important market share in certain demographics (Blackberry) or have the potential to grow in popularity (Win Phone 7). Finally there are larger form-factor devices like the iPad and Android tablets of various sizes. If you’re developing a mobile application today you seriously need to consider which platforms you should be supporting and how best to achieve that support. 

In this article I’ll summarize the various different architectural approaches one can explore and select from when building a mobile app with cross platform support as the key driver. Decisions made in terms of one approach over another can affect your product feature set, quality, schedule and budgets. Finally it’s up to the team to decide on one approach over another, based on the ground level realities that affect decision making, however, I hope that the approaches listed here will be a guiding factor. 

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by Anupam Kundu

Product developent is always challenging, more specially so when you are already renowned for making products that shape and reshape how humans interact with technology. I’m referring to Apple, Inc. Everybody is eagerly anticipating the release of the new iPad 3 (or iPad HD as some bloggers are calling it).

With new retina display, quad core Apple processor and possible support for LTE on both Verizon and AT&T, iPad 3 is hyped to be a super hit – more than any of the other iPads released before. Despite all that jazz, I have my doubts about the success of Apple iPad 3. Here are few reasons for my skepticism

• No ‘Jobs’: The mere fact that Steve Jobs no more will be doing the launch for this device is a big risk to the success of iPad3. I’m not sure how much media buzz Tim Cook will be able to generate. It’s really hard to be successor to a larger-than-type CEO like Steve Jobs.
• Too many iPad sold:  Between April, 2010 and June, 2011, Apple sold roughly 25 million iPads. Also as per Q4 2011 Apple financial results, about 11 million iPads were sold only in that quarter alone.  With most folks (in the early adopter category) already having iPads, we may not witness a mad rush for buying a new one so soon.
• Android Tablets: are catching up fast. Ton of competition for iPad 2 from Android tablet makers both here in USA and globally have made people aware of the choices they have in terms of tablets. iPad3 runs the risk of being launched in a much more mature tablet market than ever before.
• FoxConn connection: The build-up of aluminium dust that caused two explosions in the iPad2 factories run by infamous FoxConn in China has earned Apple some bad PR.  Labor rights concerned tree-huggers and others close to them may shun iPad 3.

by Jeff Wishnie

<re-posted from Jeff Wishnie’s blog with due permission>

We live in a time of global revolution—a revolution enabled by technology and, as with all revolutions, driven by people. It’s not a socio-political revolution like the Arab Spring or the Occupy/99% movement—though those movements have been substantially enabled by technology.

This revolution is more mundane, yet deeply transformational. It is driven by two key technologies: Mobile Networks and Cloud-Hosted Services.

These two technologies give organizations—governments, giant international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), social enterprise entrepreneurs, community organizations, and even individuals—the ability to:

1. Communicate readily with field staff, volunteers, and the beneficiaries of their services, however remote.
2. Scale their services to national and global levels.

This technology-enabled ability to “talk to everyone, everywhere, without a ton of technical expertise, and for not a lot of cash” is literally changing everything for people who live and work where there is little of the big infrastructure (power, wire-line phones, wired-Internet, highways,plumbing) of the “developed” world.

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by Meaghan Waters 

Introduction

New Product Development (NPD) in large corporations are fraught with challenges, specially for products that involve user interface. What are the options available for the product team to arrange the specialized and coveted UX (User experience) folks? What kind of talent they should look for? And what are the pros and cons of various structures used by different product teams? Meaghan Waters, Experience Design Consultant with ThoughtWorks (she is based out of Australia), shares her thoughts and recommendations for agile product owners and managers in this concise yet thought-provoking article. You can reach Meaghan at mwaters@thoughtworks.com.

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by Shaun McGee

Shaun is a Lead Consultant with ThoughtWorks Inc., and hence my esteemed colleague. Like other ThoughtWorkers he is strongly opinionated about Agile principles and practices and he spares no chance to explain his stance on stuff. In this particular article, Shaun discusses candidly the role of documentation in software projects. Shaun cites how there is a qualitative difference between documents produced at different stages of a project and we better start recognizing those differences  now!

Introduction
“We have come to value…working software over comprehensive documentation.”
The Agile Manifesto speaks to the importance of focusing effort and attention not on the documentation we produce, but rather on the functioning product that results from our work.

Why do we write software documentation?  Traditionally, it was accepted that by thoroughly documenting the “what” (requirements) and the “how” (specifications) we would be able to effectively develop some software, much like the way careful planning and design can produce a bridge or a house. Unfortunately this just doesn’t work most of the time. You can spell out in great detail what an application should do and how the development team should produce it, but what we often find is that as the system grows from an idea into lines of code the underlying requirements evolve or the original specification turns out to be impractical or impossible.

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by Anupam Kundu

Agile Day 2011 (organized by Joe Krebs of Incrementor) was held on September 27th at Pace University. This the largest gathering in Manhattan focusing on agile project management and development practices and a great opportunity to listen and learn from local practitioners alongside industry experts and obviously engage in shameless networking. I volunteered for the event and also ended up providing some quality air-time at the ThoughtWorks booth (my employer and one of the sponsors of the event).

(the pictures are just one click away)

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