engineering bits

[engineeringbits]

Book review: User Story Mapping (Jeff Patton) - "Read This First"

What a great start. We're not even into chapter one and General Patton has already started his charge addressing pivotal points of product development. Common sidesteps like trying to produce perfect documents instead of achieving simple shared understanding are introduced, and practical methodologies to achieve this are explained and discussed. Another great bit is the "change-the-world" model that we should be aiming for, which is a different take on your usual GAP analysis; the difference between "output" and "outcome" is also very well underlined.

"Minimize output, and maximize outcome and impact"

[engineeringbits]

The Programmer’s Price

The world is being rebuilt in code. Now there’s an agency to help top programmers get superstar salaries. Lizzie Widdicombe reports.

Death to the "bodyshops" business model!

[engineeringbits]

"Shared documents aren't shared understanding"

User Story Maping by Jeff Patton

[engineeringbits]

Start developing your product, before you build your software.

There is an insane amount of focus on finding the right technology, IDE or platform to build your product on, when you actually haven't even began to understand what your product will be. One of the caveats of the agile revolution is that suddenly we're expected to just prototype everything, and keep on iterating on something that is destined to fail from the start. The reason is obvious, good software development cannot happen when you have bad product development behind it.

We still want to have prototypes. Of course we do. But keep in mind that a prototype can very well just be that. And that you should probably have a different product vision by the end of the prototype development.

So, instead of spending the majority of time evaluating all the tech that we will use to build the software, we should spend a lot more time evaluating methodologies and workflows for our product development.

[engineeringbits]

Patton leads the charge against bad product development!

Finally got my hands on the acclaimed book "User Story Mapping", by the also acclaimed author Jeff Patton. I think he has earned himself the title of "General" Patton of the Product Development Division, and I will be sharing here my thoughts on the book as I read it, like a dedicated recruit.