The sad story is: there are too many UX professionals with high stress and even burn-outs. This article takes a systemic view on development teams and introduces the concept of a burn-out system. The goal of the article is to raise awareness for burn-out and stress, gain understanding of contributing factors and exchange ideas on how to improve the situations. Therefore: spread your word and your experience!
By Markus and Rahel *)
Continue readingAgile software development relies on teamwork. The idea: a team can create more complex software and it can create it quicker than a single person. However, different teams do not fulfill this promise equally well. Some teams stoically pull a cart with square wheels and do not even spot the fault. This article explores a wide range of aspects around team work with probably one key message: Collaboration creates the team and thus providing room for collaboration is an easy way to strengthen a team.
When developing software, teams discuss what can be done and what cannot be done given available resources, skills and technology. Three dimensional scopes visualize the potential for this kind of negotiation: they question breadth, depth and the newness of features. This comes in especially handy, when the scope appears to be tightly defined.
It is sometimes beneficial to ramp up a large software step by step. This promises doing earlier business, reducing risk and gaining momentum. Just slicing a large development into arbitrary pieces will however not work well. Teams need a bit more strategy so that each delivery is useful and provides significant value. This article introduces business scenarios and 6 slicing patterns that help product owners and agile teams to align incremental product development with growing the business.
Continue readingOver the last years, many companies adopted user experience (UX) good practices and hired professionals. Some created centralized teams of UX consultants, other included designers into development teams, yet others created a team to contribute a design system or user research. This article is a collection of five approaches on how to include UX skills and UX professionals into organizations, open for discussion and refinement.
Classifying customer expectations, Noriaki Kano created the well-known Kano model more than 40 years ago. I felt this model deserves a more in-depth presentation on stars to road for a couple of reasons: First, it helps to prioritize features over the lifetime of a product. Second, it points to typical issues you encounter during product development and provides hints how to improve. Third, it is not too difficult to assess the categories and they are easy to understand. Fourth and most important: you need good understanding of customers and markets to work with the model, a real indirect benefit! All in all, the Kano model is an important foundation in product development one should know.
In software development, some functions can be discussed, implemented, tested and then shipped. Other functions need several iterations to really build the right thing in a good way. Incremental building and iterative development are completely different things and need different approaches to manage.
Retrospectives are great to improve collaboration in teams. To add to the many options available, here are ten or so questions you can use for you team retro. The questions follow up key success factors and have the potential to reveal blind spots of a team.
Continue readingSome companies take a quite structured approach to creating user experiences. Others create user experiences unwittingly. Looking back, I detected six principles in regards to creating user experiences.
Continue readingUnderstanding what people need and require from a product is important. So requirements are important. But what is a requirements and what are “good” or “bad” ones? I set forth to find the ultimate answer and found 42. So lets add a bit more structure and talk about the problem, solution and the conversation side and conclude with a question: where should the development team invest their energy: into creating the specification or into discussing the best possible solution given the constraints?
This is not about a Sherlock Holmes mystery and no engineer lost a thumb over it. Even though the machinery involved could easily achieve the latter. It is about industrial robots and tons of machinery to fold metal sheets into origami swans. But mainly it is about a case where creating the right user experience solved the relevant problem.
Continue readingSometimes we do stuff without actually understanding the purpose behind it. We write user stories because we do and we miss the gist of it. Why are we doing it? Or to be more precise: what for?
Continue readingThe stuff I find most exciting is making something work for the users or to put it in more modern terms: people have a great experience when using something I helped create. So I focus on users and user experience. Some people rather talk about customers and customer experience. Whatever the name, it is basically the same isn’t it?
It’s quite easy to rush through creativity workshops enumerating, rating and selecting ideas to hand-over for later implementation. This article is however about a different kind of creativity, the creativity that comes from gaining deeper understanding – together in a workshop.
By Beatrice*) and Markus
Continue readingTeams form an entity – and they can have disorders. There are a couple of team disorders worth looking at. One of them is Featuritis. And here is the not really serious medical guide to this disorder.
Requirements engineering (RE) has a long and successful tradition. Different approaches always existed. Still it is optimized for an artifact driven setup: Individuals pass on documents. Agile practices are however geared for an interaction driven setup where individuals form one “super-brain”. The discussion about requirements is part of the agile conversation. And now, the proven approaches from RE suddenly create friction and bad smells. So, should we forget about requirements?
On March 6, I had the opportunity to play the burn-out machine game with about 40 agile consultants in Zürich. We spent two hours with engaged discussions and insights about the very serious and highly relevant topic burn-out. We even had a good time doing so.
https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Agile-Breakfast-Zurich/
Here’s the situation: A customer asked us to improve the quality of their core system so that they again can act on the demands of their users and customers in a timely manner. We had a team room at our disposal and we again made extensive use of the walls. It turned out that the team wall made the difference!
Keeping knowledge about a product alive is no easy task. Software teams struggle with manually mainting vast documentation in UML tools, text documents, wiki sites and more. We all know about the amount of effort and dedication needed to do this well given the amount of redundancy. There is a promising vision of a living documentation, i.e. a documentaiton automagically created from those things the teams create anyway, like automated and manual tests, backlog items, meeting protocols and more.
An important management tool to improve team performance is the Team Squeezer. It’s really simple: just use hierarchical power and exert pressure to make the development team hurry up. Usually the Team Squeezer backfires.
