Tom Hume

Joh and I ran a dry run for our Agile2009 workshop tonight, held at the mighty Skiff in the North Laine, Brighton... and after a frantic day of last-minute prep, I was quietly pleased with how it went.

The session opened with a few slides setting the scene about mobile. These definitely need some work - whilst I know the material quite well, I hadn't prepped them and it showed. I waffled somewhat, but fortunately at such a speed that it was over quickly for the audience, and we could get on with the meat of the workshop: exploring how an iterative design process can help address the kind of constraints that mobile inevitably entails handling.

We split into two groups - with 9 attendees this gave us teams of 4 and 5 respectively. Persona in hand and product concept in mind, one team headed upstairs and the other stayed downstairs, each spending 15 minutes designing a product with the aid of copious amounts of card, post-it notes, the ubiquitous Sharpies and some rather natty 1.5x sized replica mobile phones my dad and his girlfriend had put together for the session. After 15 minutes we halted the groups and swapped one member between them, to act as a test subject for a 5-minute usability test... after which the groups convened to show off their work, and the results of the test, in a short demo session.

Constraints were introduced, with each team having to transpose their product to a new device and form factor. Then rinse, repeat: another 15-minute design session followed by 10 minutes of demos, and a 10-minute run through to discuss learnings.

After the shaky start of my slides, I was pleasantly surprised by how things went: both teams managed to produce a useful design and test it within 25 minutes. One team definitely received worthwhile feedback from their test subject, the other got some but were less sure of its value. In any case, the notion that a group of people could go from zero to a coherent and in some way tested prototype in such a short space of time was both heart-warming and genuinely impressive... and I couldn't point at domain knowledge or mobile experience as being the cause of this success, with both Ribot and Mary (the participants with a background in mobile) located within one team, and no mobile experience in the other.

Learnings from the session displayed a comforting level of consistency between the two groups, too: both felt that moving to a smaller screen lent their design more focus, and that working within tighter constraints contributed to their creativity, rather than detracting from it. Time limits were clearly a problem (how could they not be?), and whilst one group found cross-platform consistency to be a tough trick to pull off, the other observed that their design changed less than they'd have anticipated in the move from iPhone to clamshell.

Both groups then consented to exchange beer for a pile of incredibly useful feedback, which we'll be using to further hone the session before running it in Chicago. And one comment which really chuffed me up was overhearing participants moot that firstly, this format might be an interesting way to open up a Hack Day type of event; and secondly, that he'd really like to see the product he'd worked on *actually get built*.

As always, thanks to Jon Markwell of Inuda and the Skiff for hosting, to Joh for gently stamping on some of my more ridiculous ideas and her rock-steady facilitation, and to everyone who came and participated :) There's a photo-set, yellow-hued thanks to my grotty HTC lens, here.

Update: slides from the warmup are here.

So, it's that time again. We're exceptionally busy and have won a few new projects and clients in the last month or two - with no sign of business slowing. So we're on the look-out for staff again. We're after a few different souls:

• Developers, ideally with some commercial experience of mobile (J2ME, Android or iPhone), and familiarity with or experience working in an agile environment (if you read this blog you'll know we're a quite formal Scrum shop). You'll have a strong appreciation for the role user experience plays in the software development process. You'll obviously be excellent.
• Mid- to senior-level designers; we'd be open to considering someone without commercial mobile experience, but you'll definitely need a strong background in digital media and a genuine enthusiasm for mobile. We're after someone with a mix of visual and interaction skills - we think the line between the two is blurred, and we like it that way. You'll have to be willing to get your hands dirty and learn a little about how your designs are actually implemented. Strong communication skills will be vital.
• QA - and specifically, someone interested in QA as a career path in its own right, rather than seeing it as a stepping stone to a development job. Over the last couple of years we've developed a huge appreciation for thorough, pedantic, devious, downright cruel QA folks who can find obscure bugs with which to taunt our developers, all in the nicest possible way of course. Someone with experience of both manual and automated testing would be a bonus; double points if you've worked in an agile environment before.

For all roles, you'll be working from our offices in central Brighton, and be very comfortable working in a cross-disciplinary team. You can have a look at our site to get a feel for what we do if you like, though I'll warn you that it's horrendously out of date and gives only a vague feel for where we're headed... We offer good salaries and an opportunity to work on *huuuge* software products which touch the lives of literally millions of people, for a global client base. We like to travel - earlier this year most of the company spent 2 weeks camped out in Shenzhen, China, kicking off a project for Microsoft - but it's not in any way compulsory. We also make a point of allowing time for personal development and R&D, and do some reasonably off-the-wall projects: birdwatching, ghost hunting, and location-based gaming have all decorated our portfolio. Drop an email to recruitment@futureplatforms.com if you're interested, and we'll have a chat. Unless you're a recruitment agency of course, in which case stop reading right now and please avoid the temptation to get in touch, even if you're completely unlike all the other agencies and incredibly special in a way that you can't quite describe without sound like just another bloody recruitment agency. Honestly - every time I post a job advert and politely say "no agencies please" I'm assaulted by a tidal wave of dull phone calls from recruiters who seem to think that by ignoring me completely they'll somehow persuade me to pay them fees, and it's all gotten a bit boring.

ScrumFest is coming to Brighton! 8th and 9th July, at The Werks in Hove. Well worth checking out if you're interested in this sort of thing, also take a look at the WelfareCSM workshops Tobias Mayer is running just beforehand, with the dual aims of introducing Scrum to organisations beyond the software world, and getting training to folks who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it. Lovely.

I forgot to post about BOGFest - Brighton Outdoor Gaming Festival, the inaugural event of which was held last weekend in Brunswick Square - curated by Richard Vahrman of Locomatrix fame.

There was a programme of events running all afternoon; after a diary clash with a 5th birthday party, I managed to make it along at 4, missing Tai Chi Twister and Clock the Doc but arriving just in time to kick off some games of Fruit Farmer, one of the Locomatrix formats.

It was really interesting seeing Real People playing Fruit Farmer. We cheated completely, of course, and presented each player with a phone and GPS unit that had been preconfigured with the application installed - in real life they'd have to do this themselves, which we know to be a bit of a barrier (though the geocaching crowd seem to use applications on occasion, so it's not completely out of the question).

We had 6 pairs of players run off for a game. All bar one of the pairs managed to locate themselves quickly and orient themselves against the on-screen map - working out what direction they had to run in to do anything useful. A few players noted that their position was a little laggy, and we were slightly embarrassed to find out that the game layout we'd chosen for the day was slightly too large for the playing area - meaning that players would've had to climb onto the roofs of local buildings to collect a few of the larger pieces of fruit. Memo to self: next time, check map first.

But that said, players seemed to enjoy the game - particularly some of our younger participants:

Also throughout the day we had some treasure hunts running, a scavenger hunt at the end of the day, and Tristan brought along his Hunt the Wumpus QR-code game - he's written a great post on how it went for him, which you can find here.

Time constraints meant that I never got to show off ArchaeoloGPS, the game I've been doodling with recently. Perhaps next year... :)

Update: quite a few of the posts I write relating to our work at FP are lengthy. I'm going to try summarising them up top, to highlight points of interest and help you decide if the whole thing's worth reading.

What we learned:

1. Retrospectives work better off-site, when you have a projector handy for demos;
2. Two small teams work better than one large team;
3. QA involvement has been "bursty", leading to lots of pressure at the end of sprints;
4. Flat burndown charts could be a serious warning - some thought required!

Today was our first review and planning day with the new two-team Future Platforms, and to give ourselves a bit more space to stretch out, we tried holding the morning session at The Skiff - a coworking space run by the Inuda folks a couple of streets away from our offices.

The facilities there were excellent. As well as more space we had walls to stick postits onto with (and lots of visibility, room to walk around, etc.), a projector, and beanbags galore. All of this - plus being in an unusual space away from the usual workplace - made a big difference.

The review went well, with our two teams (Anjuna and Tonberry) demonstrating projects they've been working on for Microsoft and the BBC respectively. Compared to the limited visibility you get by passing a couple of handsets around a room, having 5 foot tall on-screen demos felt like heaven... and the demonstrations themselves seemed to "flow" a little more than in previous reviews. If only I could talk a little more about their content; as usual, NDAs have my lips sewn shut. Unusually, our design team weren't presenting their work this time around - much of it has involved supporting the development teams (and was therefore visible in the dev team demos), and South by Southwest had taken its toll on our design resource over the last fortnight....

I was really looking forward to the retrospective, and wasn't disappointed. The near-unanimous view from both teams was that splitting the company into two had been a success. Each team felt more focussed on their respective projects, had been less affected by context switching, and found stand-ups both quicker and more useful. Even better, we could see measurable and significant improvement in the productivity of the company split into two teams (vs all being in one team).

One issue which was surfaced by 4 different people was that of planning and testing time. We have a persistent experience where testing effort bunches up towards the end of sprints - so that at the start of each fortnight there's sometimes not enough for our dedicated testers to do, and at the end of the fortnights too much.

My own tendency is to attack this problem by trying to spread the load of testing more evenly throughout the sprint (encouraging units of work - user stories in our case - to be taken through development and testing to done before starting on others) and having other team members help out with some of the testing work when there's too much (whilst some of it demands the eager eye and magic software-breaking fingers of a good QA specialist, I feel there are areas where the rest of us can usefully pitch in). We had a fairly lively debate on this one, and didn't reach a useful conclusion. In particular I had hoped to bring in some of the limiting-in-phases techniques Karl Scotland covered in his recent Kanban presentation (also held at the Skiff), but we didn't reach consensus on adopting this - so I'll give it another go next time around.

Burndown charts also stimulated a bit of conversation. I'd experienced a worrying few days with Anjuna mid-sprint, when progress on getting stories to completion was minimal even as the team frantically worked on a core section of the product... and I'd found myself noting a problem but stuck on what to usefully do about it. In the end the team pulled through and delivered, but I'm left feeling slightly worried; we've had sprints in the (thankfully distant) past where a flat-lined burndown continued right to the end, thanks to my ignoring the signs. Putting a positive spin on it, the worst that we'll ever do is experience a single unproductive fortnight, but even that would feel like a huge opportunity wasted. More thought required.

Finally, on design; last sprint we opted out of planning it formally, this time around we're officially embedding the design team with Anjuna, where they can crack on with pushing that particular product forward together (and without distractions from other projects).

A solid day; we saw the juicy fruits of our work, had some productive discussions on how to get better, persuaded a sizable chunk of the company to come out for gyoza etc, planned in two teams' worth of work for a fortnight, and still managed to finish dead on 6pm. Considering that a year ago planning days were regularly overrunning and leaving us all half-dead, with a smaller team, it's great to see how we're improving. On that particular point, it's amazing what benefit an hour or so of working up a sprint backlog for each team the day before planning can deliver...

Thanks as usual to Joh for her facilitation of the retrospective, and to the Skiffers for hosting us!

Two of the most wonderful people walking the earth were married yesterday. Steve is one of my oldest friends, one of the crowd I fell in with during teenage years (mis)spent exploring the dingier indie/alternative nightclubs of Brighton. We've subsequently worked together (he joined Good Technology at it's first operations guy), lived together, and we train together at Airenjuku Brighton - where he and Yvonne met.
I was proud to stand at his side on the day and assist as his best man.

The wedding was appropriate and gorgeous, with the ceremony held in the Red Room of Brighton Pavilion, on Valentine's day. A tour of the pavilion followed, then a fantastic meal provided by Due South, and a knees-up at Circus Circus with a crowd of familiar faces, and some old friends I've not has a chance to catch up with in years.

At the end of the night, as the last few revellers prepared to stagger away, Yvonne did a reading - a riff on The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. I liked it so much I stole her notes, so I could write it up here:

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your hearts longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what grade you are at aikido. I want to know if you feel a sense of pleasant exhilaration even though you're pouring with sweat and it's nearly the end of class.

I was to know if you can get up after a night of watching The Wire and still practice chi gong in the lounge before you go to work.

It doesn't interest me that you use Microsoft Windows. I want to know that you can use Linux, Debian and open source DSB (and other derivatives of UNIX). And that you can fix our home computer when all broadband connections fail. As well as the computer at my sisters, my mum, your grandfather, your dad and all our family and friends.

I want to know that you can eat half of the bar of chocolate that's in the kitchen, and leave the other half for me when I get home from work, even though I scoffed the whole lot last week.

It doesn't interest me if the joke that you are telling is funny. I want to know that you can laugh at your own jokes even when those around you look blank and confused.

I want to know that you can groove on the dance floor and that you truly like the shapes that you throw in the light of the disco ball.

Perfect. Joh (Steve's sister - oh Brighton, you are an incestuous little city) has posted the reading she gave at the service too.

I've just gotten back from a wonderful little event at Sussex University, called Enterprising Engineers.

It's organised the luxuriantly bearded Jonathan Markwell of Inuda, who seems to have mastered the dual skills of fitting 36 hours into the working day and either attending or organising every digital media event in town. The format was good fun: nibbles and booze followed by a 3-person panel taking turns to talk for 10-20 minutes, and taking questions from the audience.

Tonight it was myself, Dan from Angry Amoeba, and Glenn from Madgex - all talking about products.

Dan held forth on his philosophies towards startups, how it's affected his working life, and finished with a demonstration of his product, Tails (a beautifully simple-looking bug tracking system).

Glenn followed up with a roundhouse presentation to the face, giving the back-story to Backnetwork, a product Madgex built to connect folks at events which is nowadays languishing without further development, but nonetheless earning its keep as a tool for bartering in exchange for sponsorship.

And then I wibbled somewhat - for my Macbook decided to crash, preventing me from showing the Ghost Detector video that should have introduced my skit. I rambled on about our experiences launching Ghosty in the US, then Flirtomatic and Twitchr: the unifying theme being the complexity and engineering problems which can be lurk behind even the inane, the lewd, or the playful.

So, Joh and I did our talk last night at The Werks - attempting to summarise experiences from the last year at Future Platforms, since we formally adopted Scrum for all our development processes.

I managed to get delayed slightly in London, and managed to arrive at Hove station a mere 3 minutes before we were due to start: oh the irony of arriving late when you're giving a talk about delivering products on time. But fortunately things were slightly behind schedule already and no-one seemed to notice.

The talk itself went OK; it was a rerun of, and expansion upon, a half-hour piece I pulled together for Barcamp Brighton a month or so back... and the Barcamp talk itself was a follow-on from one Joh and I gave at SkillSwap last year, summarising our experiences a week into Scrum. So I was pretty familiar with the material, although I made a point of adding in lots of (sanitised and anonymised) data from real projects we've been running.

There's far too much to go into here, and if you've been reading this site you'll have read quite a bit of it already. Plus I have to save *something* to say to people I meet in real life. But if you attended, you might find these annotated slides handy - I've taken the ones we showed on the night and added in a few notes here and there which might jog your memory on the points I was making as I went through them. Beware, for as a wise man says: if the slides make sense without my being there, there's no point in my presenting them; and if they don't make sense without me, you won't get much value from them. Caveat emptor :)

I was given an hour to do this skit, and with questions we ended up using just shy of two hours, which is the longest I think I've ever spoken publicly. With that warning in mind, if you'd like to chat about this sort of thing or find out more, do give me a shout: tom dot hume at future platforms dot com

Thanks to James McCarthy and Rosie Sherry for organising everything, to Joh for gamely keeping me on the straight and narrow once more, and everyone who came along for making it so much fun :)

So, Barcamp Brighton 3: absolutely fantastic. I'll scratch down a few thoughts before they evaporate:

• Really annoyed I missed Paul Silver talk on social networks and death: he brought it up at Tuttle last week and it sounded really great;
• Saw 2 talks on Selenium: I am going to be force-feeding this to our QAs until they burst;
• The last afternoon was appropriate New Age, given that we were in Brighton. Sunday closed for me with a yoga session with Jenny, meditation and GTD with Michael Rose, then a retrospective on the whole of Barcamp ably facilitated by Joh;
• The highlight was Rebecca talking on typography and design, which seemed to be the best-attended of the whole event (necessitating a mid-point shift in venue) and generated some really good debate afterwards. No Tantek, there is no repository of mobile typography. Yes Tantek, mobile fragmentation really *is* that bad.
• I also really enjoyed James' skit on Derrida and XKCD (so much that I forgot my promise of a good kicking if he ever mentioned Big D again), and the session which combined Thai OCR, DNA sequencing and minority African languages... but ended up being a database optimisation back-and-forth with the audience :)
• We decamped to a dark corner for the warts and all of Scrum - my talk on the last year at FP, which I may be repeating locally in the near future...

The only low point for me was the university food - but hey, out of everything that had to be organised and put together to bring an event of this scale to fruition, that's quite properly a long way down the list.

Already looking forward to the next one :)

dConstruct 2008: Joshua Porter, Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design

Web design is now about psychology; web designers need to learn about it to create decent experiences.

"Bandwagon effect": people often do and believe things because many other people do and believe things.

Heuristics: rules of thumb which prevent us from needing to gather all information required to make a judgement. Sometimes these don't work all that well - this is cognitive bias. e.g. "Not Invented Here", prediction biases which lead to underestimates of time to work.

Seminal paper on this is "Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974)"

Talks about a few biases:

1. Representation Bias.
2. Loss Aversion.
3. Ownership Bias.

These sometimes combine: in the sign-up problem, loss avertsion and ownership bias overvalue what they use by a factor of 3. Because of ownership and prediction biases, software manufacturers overvalue their products by about 3x - so there's a combined 9x dissonance between what they want to charge and what users want to pay.

Demonstrates Freshbooks, which emphasises number of users through a worldwide map showing them (encouraging bandwagon effect).

Q: isn't this evil?
A: It's more about business ethics.

(Sounds like a "guns don't kill people, people do" type argument).

See also Duncan's talk at XPDay last year. Alan Cooper also touched on this at Agile2008.