Table or Booth?

What Makes a Great Product Owner?

A friend of mine is working with scrum.org and was asking questions about product ownership.  This got me thinking.  So, I threw together this quick list of things that, I think, make a great Product Owner.

Continuous Integration Server Review: CruiseControl, Hudson, TeamCity and Cruise

Comparison of two open source and two paid continuous integration servers:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhkskk4s_54f749s7dc

Introducing the WACD Methodology

Pronounced 'whacked', WACD is short for:

• W - Wild
• A - Ass
• C - Cowboy
• D - Development

RIAs - The New Web UI

SproutCore is slick; has a RoR + Apple pedigree & leverages Javascript very nicely.  MobileMe integrates it.  Apple contributes heavily to the project.  Silverlight, AIR, and Google Gears compete.  Silverlight and GG require browser plug-ins.  Only GGs is open-source.  Here's a good overview: http://rapidappsgroup.com/content/desktop-web-applications-using-sproutcore/

Yellow Pages.com Rewrite

Lessons Learned:

• Freeze existing functionality
• Field small, co-located, talented team (4 developers)
• Dedicate long technology evaluation, prototyping, and planning period
• Assign technical decision maker and communicator to management
• Leverage UX team: all page design and HTML gen, then give to dev to slice up and wire
• Change only the obvious
• Deploy beta frequently and actively recruit feedback  

RailsConf 2008

I'm at RailsConf.

Portland, Oregon is, well, Portland (overcast and wet). Got in late last night and walked over to Stanford's. The service was friendly, even at 10:30 PM.  Everything about the burger was above average.  And it came with hot, crispy, slightly salty fries.  It was all devoured with sips of a local wheat bear that I forget the name of.

So far, having been away from Ruby and Rails for over a year, it feels like going back to a place you used to live. Some things are still the same. In other ways, I hardly recognize the place.  New techniques like elastic computing (and plenty of competing commercial hosting options), new tools such as git, tarantula, and hobo, etc.  Good stuff.

I'll pretend I blog and let you know how it all goes.

Book Review: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Sketching User Experiences:  Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies), by Bill Buxton, is an excellent read on the scope, purpose, and implementation techniques for designing good user experiences.  Buxton's narrative style is easy, warm, and conveys his rich experience and passion for the subject.  He includes a rich set of stories and case studies that demonstrate the importance of design and techniques for doing it.

Enterprise Bearware

The price customers pay for software and the level of usability they get with that software is inversely proportional.  As long as it solves a big business problem or two, it doesn't matter how easy it is to actually use the stuff.

Romantic Keyboards

Advanced users need toolbars like Lance Armstrong needs training wheels.  As application designers and programmers we must pay attention to how user needs change as they progress towards advanced user status.  And, in doing so, we must help them to learn and maximize the right tool for the job.

Opting for Opt-in

"News and updates" pollute our mailboxes every day.  They're not always the infamous kind of spam we all know and hate; now they're 'newsvertisements,' sent to you because of that little, afterthought-checkbox at the bottom of on-line account sign-up forms.  They're usually checked by default.  At the rate new web apps are created, this is an increasingly common occurrence.