Covid-19 the great disruptor. Disruption. I’ve been used to working from home one or two days a week for several years. So when the coronavirus situation turned here in the UK and the need to WFH was announced I thought I and the team would be prepared. In reality, it […]
Agile Thoughts
15 posts
With Covid-19 lockdown measures in place I thought it a good time to review how environmentally friendly working from home could be. Removing the carbon from the daily commute into the London office had already seen a net gain. But how much more electricity are we using working from home? […]
I had a dream. I’d just sold my latest little watercolour on Instagram. It went for $Z55.95, enough for Brian Eno’s Music for Installations I’d seen on Amazon for $B45.99. Ah, but wait a minute, Emanue_art has a copy of Installations for $Z38.50 on Instagram and saves me the 2% […]
On a recent assignment to transform a legacy application to cloud we came across a good example in finding the real user need. As with many IT migration projects this incident tracking application had a tight deadline and a set of assumptions about user needs. ‘Lift and shift’ was the […]
How to make discovery successful? I’ve found the best form of discovery is to reach a balance. Here’s some reasons why. Most of the recommendations for discovery phase out there focus on researching user needs to ensure you build a service users actually want. For example the GDS service manual […]
After some persuasion by colleague Patrick Sansom I presented the 3 Tribes Experiment at UX Camp Brighton 2017, an annual event full of shared learning and fun. This year there were five rooms that offered a choice of presenters and subjects covering diverse topics as user experience, user research, lean […]
I’ve used several ways to capture or address non functional requirements (NFRs) with user stories. Agile practitioners such a Mike Cohn have written about the challenge. Most agree there are two main approaches: write each NFR as a user story or include NFRs in the definition of done (DoD). Let’s see […]
In the UK the Government has sought to improve digital service design by focusing on users and their needs rather than more traditional requirements driven approaches. User research is at the heart of a project’s discovery or inception phase and follows through subsequent alpha and beta phases. The user researcher […]
You may remember Fred Brooks’ Mythical Man Month – a classic book on software engineering of the early seventies. He introduced the idea software development by a surgical team with a highly skilled code smith – the surgeon – who cut the code surrounded by assistants who facilitated the surgeon. […]
Having grown up with case tools that over promised, under delivered and cost the price of a good family holiday it’s refreshing to find an innovative way to create a quick model or diagram without blowing the sprint budget. And avoiding the need to raise a software support request to […]