Edge of Chaos

• Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy. “Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth. Trust is the new competitive advantage.”
• So, Now You’re an Agilist… What’s Next? Interesting presentation from Jurgen Appelo with attempt to bring complexity science into agile software development. And interesting debates thread between Jurgen, me and Glen Alleman.
• Feature Crews: kanban systems for software engineering in the large. We are using branch-by-story at TargetProcess and something similar to feature crew. I think the idea is very good.
• Getting Things Done Mind Map Diagram. GTD is quite interesting technique, I am trying it right now (and liking it so far). This mind map is really good quick intro to GTD.
• Things — task management software. Great GTD software for Mac users. Very clear concept with perfect implementation.

• Why Can’t Error Messages Be Fun? Indeed, Chrome does it right.
• Scheduling in Scrumban. “We eliminate iteration planning and instead implement a system of continuous rolling-wave planning.” I think rolling-wave planning provides great benefits to Product Owner. Backlog becomes more flexible and adaptable.
• Successfully Adopting Pair Programming. Nice article, describing real pitfalls of pair programming adoption. Beware “Spellchecking Pair” :)
• Sell Your By-products. What by-product you have to sell?

• I Love Pair-Programming. Fantastic real-life experience of pair programming. It is hard to advertise it more.
• 21 ways to hate pair programming. Nice list of mistakes people often make when doing pair programming.
• Fantastic sign up form. Creative way to provide sign up form. Not sure about usability (on my opinion not much difference from usual form), but it is eye-catching and “tangible”.
• Continuous Deployment is about deploying code changes to production as rapidly as possible. “Every commit should be instantly deployed to production”. Is it possible? IMVU proved it is. Nice goal we should strive for. Extreme case of Continuous Integration is Continuous Deployment.

• Martin Fowler emphasizes that technical practices are very important in Scrum process and team can’t succeed without them. The same thing is true for Lean.
• If you don’t know how pull systems work, here is a good article that describes that in details. Moreover, it shows how to create various pull systems from a single workflow by applying various limits.
• “Do You Austrians Have a Better Idea?” Creative recommendations for President Obama. Recommendation #5 – “Eliminate the DEA and the SEC. Since the SEC failed to catch Madoff, despite nine years of warnings, I think its $950 million annual budget is obviously a waste of money.”

• Distinguishing decorative from meaningful elements in UI design. Ryan from 37signals shows how small decorative elements may influence usability.
• 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs. I am not a big fan of articles like “99 advices to web design”, however this article is really useful. I especially like number 3 “Using contrast to manage focus”, number 8 “Custom input focus” and 9 “Hover controls”. We are going to use hover controls in v.3.0 design.
• Konigi.com is a great resource for UI developers. Many very useful links and examples.
• 2008 – The Year In Pictures. Nice photos. Nice atmosphere. Taste the last year as a good wine…

• Is there an alternative to Scrum of Scrums? Will Read proposes Mesh network as a Scrum of Scrums replacement. Looks interesting as an information exchange flows in an organization.
• After The Crisis: A Parody of 15 Corporate Logos. Apple logo is very funny :)
• Jeff Atwood thinks that web application should not follow desktop application design. “A web app that apes the conventions of a desktop application is attempting to cross the uncanny valley of user interface design. This is a bad idea for all the same reasons; the tiny flaws and imperfections of the simulation will be grossly magnified for users.”
• Herb Sutter found two fallacies in Jeff’s post and think that this is a natural evolution. “Today, everyone writing rich Web 2.0 applications is doing their own thing, borrowing as best they can from Macs and Windows and others — but the results are all over the map, and will continue to be until there actually is such a thing as a UI standard for rich-GUI web applications.”

I tend to agree with Herb. I don’t feel bad when using web based app that looks familiar. And I definitely agree that in the future we will have several common frameworks for rich UI applications development with quite similar paradigms and interface concepts.

• New ASP.NET Charting Control. Looks good, but I prefer flash charts.
• Trashing Scrum or Reflecting Reality? David J. Anderson thinks that Scrum in it’s current state is almost opposite to agile development “My observation from the outside is that the Scrum community reflects the antithesis of our agile values. It is run from the top. The message is strictly controlled. Dissent is not permitted. It resembles a cult of personality and appears to be the very definition of command’n'control in its execution”.
• Is Scrum Failing Us? Alan Shalloway does not have such extreme feeling, but believe that there are many misunderstanding in Scrum “I want to mention some misunderstandings I have seen many people in the industry have and how we, as practitioners, can get beyond them. I have also included a few things many Scrum trainers believe that I don’t agree with”.

• TIME’s posted Best Inventions of 2008. I wonder why LHC has 5th position…
• Are you spending too much time planning? Traditional project management tools are really dangerous sometimes :) Nice example how to not plan your project.
• The End. The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. “The way we thought about it was, ‘By shorting this market we’re creating the liquidity to keep the market going.’ ” “It was like feeding the monster,” Eisman says of the market for subprime bonds. “We fed the monster until it blew up.”
• James Shore thinks that “Agile is failing all around us , and I’d hate for the failure of the fad to take down the truly useful ideas that we started with“. I tend to disagree. There were thousands failed software projects with traditional methodologies. And MS Project still the most popular PM tool over the world. Agile just should not be treated as a silver bullet.
• How Kanban and time boxing may be applied for game development. Pretty detailed article. It shows that Kanban in fact may use a kind of iterations to line up work.

• Dozens examples of pricing table design.
• Jeff Atwood thinks that The Web Browser is the New Laptop. I wholeheartedly agree. All latest trends, including Google Chrome release, support this vision. I noticed that I use less and less desktop applications. Maybe around 20% of my working time.
• Pixlr is the best online drawing tool I’ve ever seen. I tried to draw some pictures and it did not feel much difference with Photoshop. Yes, it is simpler and has less features, but all MUST HAVE features are there (layers, basic tools, filters). It is just a matter of time to add more functionality. You see, WebOS is coming :)
• Kanban, Flow and Cadence. Great article with good explanation of Kanban.
• The Anatomy of an MMF. MMF – Minimal Marketable Feature. In this post author shows that MMFs may overlap, thus flowing through the development.
• Testing Ext JS & Ext GWT Applications With Selenium. Good introduction about how you may test ExtJS apps.

Some links I found interesting last week.

• 37 Ways to Design the Comments Form. Well, some forms are really ugly, but some are very nice.
• Mike Cohn launched new web site www.userstories.com: “The site is specifically aimed at soliciting reviews and ratings of the various product backlog / agile project management tools”. Post small TargetProcess review if you have own opinion ;)
• One more interesting tool for ideas management.
• How small iterations may be problematic for your project. Amazing article from Alistair.
• Paul Graham wrote an article about Startup and a Bad Economy. Really, why investors sell when the market is bad? They should sell when market is good :)
• Interesting comparison of Twitter and Yammer. “In any case, the economic crisis might leave growth-oriented companies like Twitter with little choice but to start focusing on the bottom line [revenue].”