Tom Hume

Yesterday afternoon we invited the Trutap team down to Brighton, for a post-project retrospective. It's the first time we've done one of these with a client - normally we run them every fortnight with the whole FP team. On top of learning what we could from our largest Scrum project to date, we wanted to lift a bit more of the veil.

I won't go into the full details of how we ran the day; aside from anything else, the festivities afterwards have blurred much of my memory, but I do have a good set of notes regarding our learnings. As is traditional for us, we split these into things that went well, things that didn't go so well, and things we'd do next time. There was also an opportunity for us to call out individuals for particular appreciation, which I liked.

So, here's some of what we got out of it:

What went well

1. Porting has been extremely smooth this time around. Within 10 days of completing a reference version of the product, we've fully QAd and released the new Trutap for around 150 handsets, with more following as I write. Most of the credit for this rests with our fine development team, who've been leading us away from the industry-wide nightmare of maintaining hundreds of different versions of the product, and towards a rosy future of fewer SKUs. There's another post about this on its way, and I mentioned how we've done this in my Future of Mobile presentation. Suffice to say TT version 1 had more than 30 SKUs, all built from a single code-base but targeting different devices. TT version 2 has a single binary, and comes in 4 flavours for different screen sizes.

2. Shared documentation and tools, in particular the product backlog (all work remaining to do) and our bug tracking system, really helped. We were operating very transparently; I do wonder whether a less technically capable client would be as interested, but for those who want it, we'll do this again.

3. The relationship between the development teams at Trutap and FP was strong: we like each other and we got on well. 'Nuff said.

4. Weekly meetings were very useful, though we only started holding them a couple of months into the project.

5. Change was handled smoothly; we were able to accept change, addition of scope and iterate aspects of the product as necessary throughout.

6. We worked at a sustainable pace; we week before launch there was an eery calm at both Trutap and FP. Tthe product was there, the bug count was close to zero, and we hadn't had to work evenings and weekends to get to this stage. Compared to the period before previous launches I've known (even for Trutap), this was incredibly calm. I don't think our adoption of Scrum can take all the credit for this - the project involved a skilled team at FP and TT who'd worked together before, for one thing - but I certainly think it's helped.

What could have gone better

1. Wireframes were a poor means of specifying the product, requiring a lot of clerical maintenance and attention from both sides and offering an ambiguous level of detail: too much in some areas (e.g. screen layouts), too little in others (e.g. error states and flows).

2. We started the project haphazardly at both sides, and had to act to bring it back on track a couple of months in.

3. The design process had "too many cooks" and could have been more focused.

4. We should have spent more time explaining our approach, from both a project management and a technical perspective. We never actually sat down with Trutap and said "this is how we're going to work", instead keeping the details of our process to ourselves. With a large successful Scrum project under our belts and a bit more self-confidence, we'll do this next time. Equally, from a technical perspective we had a clear idea of how we broke down the work (into screens and UI components) which we could have shared earlier on.

5. Using version 1 of the product as a catch-all default was a mistake; where not otherwise specified, the product was to "work like version 1" which led to some scope being missed off planning at the FP end, and some confusion where new features didn't dovetail with old behaviour.

6. We had many means of communicating: Google docs, Basecamp, Fogbugz, a Jabber chat-room, email, face-to-face meetings, etc. This sometimes led to a lack of clarity and nervousness: when a chat-room had been set up but our dev team weren't available in it (because they were getting on with work!), the client worried. Next time around we should clarify communications methods: different tools seemed good for different jobs.

7. Early in the project, we weren't as good at making collective decisions as we were later on. A looming deadline always helps focus the mind ;) but we'd try to get this focus earlier on future projects.
   

Next time around...

1. We'll prototype more and wireframe less. We may invest time into tools to support this. Wireframes don't cut it.

2. We'll plan to iterate from the beginning, allowing contingency in timescales and commercials (in fact the latter was planned for, as it turned out ;))

3. We'll introduce any change at fortnightly sprint boundaries. A couple of times we had mid-sprint changes which led to the dev team at FP thrashing and progress slowing. Lesson learned: we should be more disciplined here.

4. Towards the end of the project, we had a day we called the "UI Sweep", where the TT product team sat with our developers and worked through final bits of polish. This made a difference to the product quality disproportionate to the amount of time spent. It's quite gruelling for the developers, and relies on good tools and practices that let you make changes there-and-then, but was ultimately very worthwhile. The idea of an on-site customer is classic XP.

5. We'll have weekly meetings from the beginning, with everyone engaged and involved.

6. We'll get everyone to the pub more often :)
   

And the role of honour: called out for particular thanks were Ali, Tobias, Luke and Rob @ Trutap of Trutap, and Thom, Doug and Serge at FP. Thanks again guys, we built something fantastic :)

None of this would've been possible without the able and entertaining facilitation provided, as ever, by Joh Hunt - cheers Joh :)

Jakob Nielsen has put out an interesting Alertbox post on Agile Development Projects and Usability. I was going to write a little about what I thought of his post, but then I found that Alastair Cockburn had managed to do a much better job of it than I could. Basically: all fantastic, bar the us-versus-them split that the article sets up by saying "Agile’s biggest threat to system quality stems from the fact that it’s a method proposed by programmers".

Google Voice Search is, frankly, amazing. Not because it works well. Most of my searches so far have been comically misinterpreted, though I note that (for research purposes only you understand) "Britney Spears" has a 100% success rate, even when I don't employ my appalling California accent.

No - to me, it's the sheer chutzpah of doing something like this, and the laser-like focus on reducing the time between deciding your wanting to know something, and Google giving it to you. I touched on this topic briefly in my talk on Monday at Future of Mobile, and Tim O'Reilly has a nice post about mobile being the lynchpin between humans and the cloud - spot on.

Can you imagine what sort of world we'll live in in 5 years time, when improvements in voice recognition (probably based around brute-force techniques rather than smart voice recognition algorithms - scale's just another tool to these guys) put an increasing percentage of our species' collective knowledge even closer? Beautiful.

At the Future of Mobile this last Monday we launched a new version of Trutap, one of the projects that's been keeping FP busy over the last 6 months. It's been a large project, involving 11 our our folks at various points through its lifecycle and a similar number of people at Trutap.

The brief was to rework and adapt the user interface of the original product, reusing the existing storage and communications components which we had developed in 2007 as part of version 1. Trutap wanted the new UI to support searching of their customer-base, increased emphasis on user profiles, and the addition of large numbers of third-party service providers. We wanted to push J2ME and our Cactus framework a little bit further, and experiment with a new approaches to addressing the problem of porting J2ME applications - but more on that another time.

The project started with a 1-month design effort, where we worked on some of the conceptual side of the UI (such as left-to-right navigation and a breadcrumb-trail like use of tabs) and started thinking about what components would be required to support this.

The former gave us the "big picture" which was bounced back and forth between FP and TT, iterating gently in the breeze. The latter allowed us to start making visible and worthwhile progress early. We started with a completely separate harness for UI components which let us develop and exercise them outside of the main MIDlet, testing them fully (even with edge conditions, e.g. "how does this contact look when their name is too long to show on-screen?"), before plugging them into our automated tests. As a side-effect, this enforced some good design principles: components are properly encapsulated, and we ended up reusing quite a few of them across the app.

This was the first large project which has started, run and finished since we adopted Scrum for project management at FP a year ago. It's been both a learning process, and confirmation (for us and our clients) that Scrum works "in the real world" on large complex projects... on the subject of which, if you were at my talk at the Werks a month or so back, you would have seen a diagram that looked something like this:

It's the burndown chart that we used internally to track the progress of this project. The blue bars above the X axis show the initial scope measured in estimated hours of work, whilst the red bars beneath the axis show scope added mid-project - and the black line shows the rough path of the original project plan. Each bar represents work remaining at the start of a two-week sprint. So you can see the project was originally scheduled as 12 weeks effort (sprints 17-22), the initial scope was completed in just under 14 weeks, and scope added - particularly towards the end as we iterated over the messaging section - added 6-8 weeks onto the overall timescales.

You can see that clearly some sprints went better than others (resulting in better progress); internally we tracked specific activities against these sprints, and it's no surprise that riskier activities (more technically complex ones, or those relying on third parties) tender to go slower than well-understood ones.

Only towards the end did we start sharing this chart with Trutap. I'd previously felt a bit self-conscious about filling status meetings with graphs and charts - it feels a bit geeky - but I learned a lesson here: I wished we'd done this earlier, they found it a really helpful way to represent and understand the progress we were making.

Most of the project proceeded on an incremental basis, as we gradually migrated sets of features over from the version 1 interface to the new look and feel. This proceeded section-by-section: signup and login first, then contact management, messaging, profile management, search, services, and so on. At the end of each iteration (i.e. once a fortnight), we released a version of the product to their QA team for formal testing, though we were conducting QA as part of our development too; I was pleased to hear that Trutap felt quality of releases had noticeably improved since the first version of the product last year. In the final sprints we were releasing more frequently: their QA staff had direct access to our build system and could pull off new binaries as and when they were ready.

We iterated a little on messaging, spending a sprint returning and reworking the interface once our customer had had a chance to see how the wireframes we'd all theorised about worked on a real phone; and in the final sprint of the project we had another run-through, with the Trutappers coming down to sit alongside our development team and get last-minute pre-launch changes made.

Design tended to be done "just-in-time"; sometimes we deliberately anticipated components that would be needed for the next sprints work and undertook design for them in the preceeding sprint (in a classic "design-one-sprint-ahead" model), but sometimes we were able to work a story or two ahead and keep design and development tasks in the same sprint.

I'm deliberately not writing much about lessons learned in this post; we're having a half-day retrospective with the FP and TT teams getting together next week. I'll follow up this meeting with a post here summarising the day; and there'll be another piece coming soon on our approach to porting, which I touched on at the Future of Mobile.

In the meantime: congratulations to everyone at Trutap and Future Platforms (past and present) who worked on this. I love launching :)

I really enjoyed Future of Mobile yesterday.

The day started a little sluggishly with a well-qualified panel discussing the future of mobile operating systems. I didn't feel I learned much here - revenues of the panelists businesses weren't particularly exciting, and aside from an interesting conversation around runtimes I didn't feel I learned a great deal.

For me, things really started to take off with the presentation from Doug Richard of Trutap (disclosure: they're a client of ours). Doug was talking about the rise of a middle class in the developing world that shares aspirations with the middle classes everywhere, and quietly pointed out our arrogance in assuming that it could be otherwise. I particularly liked his notion that Western operators would adopt defensive positions and hence take fewer risks (and be less innovative) than those coming out of India.

I didn't devote much attention to Matt Millar from Adobe, I'm afraid - sorry Matt, but I was doing last-minute panicking about my own presentation. I've not watched the video yet, but whilst I'd spent more time preparing than I ever have in the past (and felt the slides were reasonably polished), I made the mistake of over-planning what I was going to say. Normally I work from bullet points and just chat around them (something I'm comfortable doing) but after my hour-long overrun at the Werks talk a month or so back I tried to restrain myself by planning what I'd say in great depth. The upshot was I felt like I was working from a script, and had to keep checking where I was, staring at a screen instead of talking to the audience. Lesson learned there, but at least I managed to get my macaroons-as-analogy-for-porting slide out.

The bloggers panel was a really good format: 6 bloggers, 6 minutes each, mirroring blogging itself. Really nice to hear Vero Pepperell evangelise a human approach to communication - as an industry we ought to know that stuff, but I can't help feeling we need someone to gently beat it into us on occasion. Helen was righteous - nuff said.

A lunch, or non-lunch, followed. If there was a weak point to the day overall, I'd say it was the facilities. I heard plenty of people complain about a lack of wi-fi (though as a 3 USB dongle owner I managed OK), there was no lunch provided, and no coffee in one of the coffee breaks. Fortunately Kensington is full of restaurants and cafes, but it would've been nice to hang around in a throng during all these breaks. The auditorium itself was excellent - a lovely space, good sound, and power to most seats.

Rich Miner gave a great talk in the afternoon, filling in a bit more detail around Google and their plans, and drawing on his own history launching the Windows SPV Smartphone when he was at Orange. He gave a good if negative insight into the world of operators when he talked about product managers feeling threats from new product developments and derailing them.

Interesting also to hear about his take on mobile web apps - that they fail for reasons of network latency, lack of local storage, and access to device capabilities. Whilst you can see efforts in Android, PhoneGap and OMTP Bondi to address some of these, it's a little way from the "web apps as future of mobile" angle which I'd heard Google were adopting.

And similarly it was good to hear Rich quizzed on the topic of Android and fragmentation by David Wood (who's more qualified to talk about this than he?). Rather than espousing the rather bland "we don't think fragmentation is in the interests of the industry" line I've heard from Google before, Rich talked about the value of having a reference implementation by which to judge others; a conformance test being introduced for OEMs; and the use of challenging and popular reference apps to provide a "Lotus 1-2-3" style evaluation of an Android implementation.

Tomi Ahonen was hilarious and upbeat as usual - full of detailed and slightly threatening stats on the hold that mobile has on us, and case studies of fantastic things launched elsewhere (usually Asia). The Tohato "worlds worst war" was my favourite: purchasers of snack products fighting one another in vast virtual armies, wonderful.

And the day finished with another panel discussion: lots of disagreement from qualified folks who've been doing this stuff for years, including two of our clients. We had some kind words said about us by Carl from Trutap and Alfie of Moblog fame - thanks guys! - and it was particularly interesting to hear the pendulum of fashion swing back towards applications, away from the mobile web. I wonder how permanent this effect, which is surely down to the iPhone App Store, will be?

The evening party followed, carrying on the upbeat atmosphere :)

My slides from the day are online here. The lens-tastic Mr Ribot took video footage of the talk which you can see here, and I heard a rumour that the official footage from the event may go online some time too.

Thanks to Dominic and all the team at Carsonified for the hard work they put into the event - I know all too well from Sophie how much this takes, and they did a cracking job. And a particular yay to Mr Whatley, who stepped in as compere at the last minute and did an excellent job of keeping the audience engaged, even in those sleepy after-lunch slots ;)

It's a chat-show format! Tim Green hosts.

First up: Mike Short, VP R&D, O2.

TG: How's mobile going to be affected by an economic slowdown?
MS: Anyone in the room feel a slowdown? It's still a growth industry; there's a lot left to do wrt content and applications.

TG: Isn't a discretionary spend on content threatened?
MS: There's bound to be some belt-tightening, but people are going wireless over fixed. We're seeing 38% year-on-year growth. Public sector are starting to show an interest - unheard of a few years ago. Some areas (e.g. some aspects of content) might slow down, but overall growth.

MS: Operators don't want to do content themselves, they want partnerships. They've not been happy w/slow growth of WAP, iPhone has shown that usability stimulates growth.

TG: O2 are not supporting all Nokias because of conflicts (with Ovi?)
MS: Yes, but operator ranges are always limited. We can't stock them all.

Helen Keegan: What's your top tip for what'll be big in the coming year?
MS: More of the same. More mobile/web combinations as web players come into the market.

HK: How can we get web and mobile side of our industry playing together?
MS: Education helps. Events like this help. Trialling things with the customer in mind helps - some web ideas don't fit well.

David Wood, Symbian: Will we seem more of the same delivered more efficiently thanks to companies being more cost sensitive?
MS: Efficiency will come, but we'll start thinking of new ways to do things. How can mobile help in new application areas? e.g. NFC trials with TfL embedding Oyster into handsets.

Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic: Did the NFC trials involve O2 taking 35% revenues, or normal content revenues?
MS: Normal commercial arrangement for Oyster (i.e. no huge revenue share for operators). We won't see a revolution in the next 2-3 years, but rather an increased range of devices to increase utility.

James, Truphone: Your team did well to secure the iPhone. What's the one thing you learned from the iPhone user experience?
MS: The Store - there's a lot of lessons in there as strong as the usability angle; which is why we're setting up O2 Litmus.

Will, D2C: We've battled fragmentation for the last few years, but it's getting worse and there's a trend towards applications. How do you see this moving?
MS: Fragmentation isn't O2's responsibility, but if customers want something new we won't stop them. We have some influence, but they're asking for different things. We're interested in global, not UK-centric standards.

Next up, Russell Buckley from Admob.

RB: iPhone is becoming #1 device worldwide (out of 12m sold worldwide).

TG: What are the form factors for advertising?
RB: CPM graphical banners are UK/US only, much volume comes from outside. 30/70 in favour of graphical and iPhone banners.

TG: How do you see the vocabulary of advertising changing? Banners are form the Internet and a bit lame, after all.
RB: New media tend to borrow from older ones. Same is true of the mobile Internet: we've borrowed formats from digital and this has worked well, but the iPhone lets us do new formats to play to mobile for the first time (e.g. click-to-call, location-based).

TG: How realistic is it to take the iPhone formats and profilerate them across handsets?
RB: Other models (e.g. RIM Blackberry) let us play to strengths of mobile. We're transitioning from old WAP to iPhone type experience, but whether the iPhone is the winner is moot: it's given the rest of the industry a vision.

TB: What about brand-building? Is the Carling iPhone app an advert?
RB: The old model of interruptive advertising is starting to fade. The people having big success (e.g. Jaguar) are more concerned with the overall customer journey.

TB: How many of your advertisers are mobile content/handset companies?
RB: We spoke to them first, if we can't sell to ourselves who can we sell to? The US is more receptive to new adverts/formats, the car sector in particular have taken off.

TB: Where's the line between advertising and marketing?
RB: CRM is untapped and important. Don't cancel my credit card when I spend abroad: send me texts re transactions to save me hassle and make it my responsibility.

Andy Walker, Geomoder: Asks about LBS.
RB: We're prenatal about LBS. We've not cracked delivering messages yet - we've tried LBS alerts via text, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Mapping shows us the way but it's a huge logistical problem to get this into the heads of the sales force.

Scott Beaumont, Mippin: What can we do to bring better quality brands onto mobile?
RB: I'm global chair of the MMA. P&G want to talk to their "next billion" customers, not the mobile industry... Admob have a lot of inventory in this part of developing world.

James, mJelly.com: Much of your traffic is in India, Indonesia, etc... not that much value to advertisers though. What's going to happen?
RB: Our biggest market is the US; UK is in the top-5. 1.5bn in Indonesia leaves lots of potential: a few clicks will matter (sounds to me like the old "we just need 1% of the market" play to me tho). A click today in the UK/US is worth more than in Indonesia, but for brands wanting to talk to these customers for the first time it's got potential.

Half-time with the Mobile Industry Review team. Fairly harsh slagging to the G1: "it's really shit hardware, but Android is really amazing. The screen is crooked. Good points: browser is nice, stable."

Next: Madhuban from Irini (sp?).

TG:
M: Investors are looking beyond applications to investments in IP rights.

TG: If there's no liquidity in financial markets, can we expect money to flow (in mobile)?
M: Trade buyers are coming from the US, UAE and India.

TG: Are India and China looking to invest outside their home territories?
M: In markets like this you'll see some bargains. Mobile is high-growth and in overdrive. India and the UK have common themes: from an operator POV they're the most competitive markets, but in terms of ARPU they're the opposite: so in one you play a volume game, in the other value-add.

TG: Russell, you've had your share of VC money. How do you feel about the situation?
RB: You've seen the Sequioa "RIP" presentation. Investment now would have been on different terms to a few months back. Cost of doing a startup is much lower now than 10y ago, you can work on a shoestring and build value in the downturn so that when the market recovers you're well positioned.

TG: What companies are you looking at?
M: The fundamentals of investment haven't changed. Using mobile as a means to deliver a piece of technology is interesting; cites example of an Ecuadoran community using mobile without operators, or mobile used as card reader/scanner for couponing.

TG: Some of the technologies are disruptive - doesn't that make for a high risk investment?
M: Yes, good VCs can see opportunities before they become mainstream. Skype etc were disruptive investments.

And now, Bill Thompson, "a hairy man".

BT: I get to play with things and see how they might be useful. Mobile has been the most interesting area for the last 8-9 years. It's like a waterwheel: someone is always drowning, it certainly has it's downside.

BT: I have seen 1 videocall in the wild, in a bar in Barcelona. It reminded me of cable where the cable companies tried to get us to buy TV, when we wanted IP connectivity. All the talk of advertising etc., masks a reality: phones will become Just Another IP Device. Many of the models built around its affordances as a phone will stop being workable and new things become possible. People challenging the status quo of operators etc. will have a difficult time, but will prevail. We will change handsets and expect portability of UI. Portability will bring audience loyalty.

TG: What timeframe for this to be a mainstream consumer choice?
BT: Vested interests tend to decay. As technologies emerge, so do new possibility of making money. Incumbents either self-cannibalise (rare) or die. (He's talking about strategy tax I think). New entrants with nothing to preserve can offer something fantastic - e.g. a handset that clones the UI of your current phone?

TG: If the handset companies become clones and networks become pipes, who are the big forces?
BT: The OS developers (if they're lucky) or the applications and services. It's all IP in the long-term, all bits on a processor. Phones become commodities, but no-one has a "right" to make a profit.

TG: How can Vodafone reposition for this?
BT: Buy a foundry. Make chipsets. Be Qualcomm. Support the multiplicity of handsets in software as well as hardware.

BT: Binge drinking is a side-effect of mobile phones. My daughter will arrange to go out, but not to a venue - just-in-time socialising. Landlords need to offer cheap beer in happy hours to keep customers, hence binge drinking.

Dan Applequist, Vodafone: There's a lot of entrenched cynicism in the industry, that real people don't want these services, preferring hand-holding. What do you say to people who take that view?
BT: Good UI design is like a new sexual partner: revealing him/herself slowly. As you explore you discover new opportunities for pleasure, ideally at minimum cost. I'd like big, thrusting bandwidth.

DA: Where's the balance point between disruption and disrupting yourself out of business?
BT: In next 4-5 years we'll see failed disruptions ("peaked too early"), have their ideas picked up on, giving them an opportunity to build new businesses. The worst thing is that someone large (Google) sees your business as their marketing expense.

TG: What will move people in this direction? Most people still only want voice and text.
BT: Imagine Nokia 8600 running Android. You don't need to give people interfaces today, but you do need to give them platforms which support what they want - so when they want these services, they're there.

RB: Opportunity is for incumbents to be disruptive (e.g. O2).

David Wood, Symbian: On the question of UIs changing according to your mood. Have you seen what QT do?
BT: This is the way things will go - it's a question of how much functionality you reveal to the user and when?

James, Truphone: Network operators annoy me when they tell me what I can do - e.g. the Blackberry Storm with Wi-Fi taken out for Vodafone. I want a phone with everything open.

Too many links to write about and Netnewswire is creaking at the seams (well, not really - but navigating 400 tabs gets boring) so here they go - out into the wild.

First off, a load of design-related stories:

• Clive Grinyer: technology doesn't work and design basics>; I was fortunate enough to work with Clive when he was at Orange - a very smart chap;
• Building the UX dreamteam;
• Multi-touch in Safari
• Applying Turings ideas to search;
• Interactions Magazine, which is frankly fantastic;
• Information architecture for audio
• Swype, a new mechanism for text entry on phones
• When not to listen to your customers

Then a pile of development-related stuff I've never gotten around to commenting on:

• Writing testable code
• Circular Dependency in constructors and Dependency Injection
• Singletons are pathological liars
• Where have all the singletons gone?
• Sleeping != synchronisation
• Root cause of singletons
• GrailsCrowd a Groovy/Grails community site;
• Data driven traps
• Test first is fun
• Location-enabling web applications and using OpenCellID
• Yet more GeoWeb with Geode
• Checking code pre-submission
• Where to test?
• Packaging Flash Lite for S40
• Testing all the fucking time: "sometimes you’ll come to a point where you can’t TDD. At that point, I’ll offer some advice… you most likely don’t understand the problem as well as you think you do. What you may need to do is try it again from a different angle or maybe you need to think larger and stop scoping so small."
• How Flickr does queueing
• Lessons learned building an iPhone site
• James has noticed more Vodafone proxy nastiness - minify and downgrading images, something I think Orange has done for a while now too...
• Mocking out your environment

...mobile industry bits and bobs worth noting:

• Google CEO Schmidt: ‘We Can Make More Money In Mobile Than We Do On The Desktop’
• 8 million iPhones and counting!
• Nice Guardian article on the Flip
• The US overtakes Europe in 3G takeup
• Independent app store Phoload launches
• Nice piece from David Wood on Opera Mini and mobile web browsing;
• Google still dreams of mobile money-making; my favourite quote: "we've been waiting 13 years now for real mobile Internet monetization, and we're still not seeing where it's going to come from"
• ...and the big G is bundling barcode readers into Samsung devices
• iPhone vs Kindle!
• Mobile banking RSN
• Hutch are launching a handset business focused purely on social networking
• Will the Web 2.0 industry move to pro accounts?
• Opera's state of the mobile web
• Flickr and Geolocation - really interesting piece...

...and finally some related to project management:

• Planning Poker cards from Mountain Goat Software;
• Establishing a common baseline for story points - starting to do our estimation and planning with story points rather than ideal hours is on my TODO list for FP;
• On our project, we're always 90% done;
• How to launch software
• How I learned to love middle managers
• Doing the impossible
• David Wood asks who says design by committee is bad?
• The product managers' lament
• Lean startups vs lean companies

So, Trutap has launched a load more IM transports, putting the app well on the path to being the best connected mobile IM service in the world. Not that we can take much credit for this (beyond the front-end and MIDlet which we created) - the server team at TTHQ have done a stirling job here.

But we've been busy beavers nonetheless. All will be revealed in the coming weeks :)

There's so much news right now about mobile applications and stores, it feels like time to take stock.

When iPhone launched and I got my greedy mitts on a jailbroken Shiny from the US, one of the things I liked most about it was the dodgy "installer" app which the kind man who jailbroke it for me put there. At the time it definitely felt like the best experience I'd had of downloading and installing third-party mobile applications, and Apple have gone on to improve on it with their official Application Store.

Conventional wisdom had been that users don't download mobile apps, a generalisation which flies in the face of our experience; we know we've had well in excess of 750,000 downloads of apps incorporating our Cactus UI library to date, plus the installations we're unable to track ourselves. And our experience isn't unique. But there's definitely been some problems taking owners of conventional smartphones through the process of downloading and installing an application:

1. Text into a shortcode
2. Receive a WAP Push or text message
3. Find it, open it, click on the link
4. Ignore the warning that you might go online
5. Pray your mobile phone has correct connection settings
6. Go online, wondering how much this is costing you
7. Find out your phone isn't supported (whatever that means)
8. Wonder what all the fuss is about

So... application downloads to date have been by customers who are educated enough, driven enough or persistent enough to deal with this infernal procedure.

Just one more thing...

I love the mobile web. It's getting better every year as devices and networks improve, it's still got a long way to go, and it's the most cost-effective means of getting a mobile service launched.

But isn't it strange that Apple are getting massive success selling applications via a an application itself - that they're not selling and distributing iPhone apps via the web, either on the device or through iTunes? And it looks like Google are taking the same tack.

Isn't this a pretty strong endorsement of application as a route to online content, rather than the web? And isn't the success Apple has enjoyed with their application store testament to the fact that even in situations where the web might provide a perfectly serviceable experience (such as e-commerce), applications are a better route to take? Not that I'm suggesting we don't need to wait and see on this one, or that there won't be problems down the line as the quantity of content available via these stores increases.

I've been reading Jeff Pattons blog (or rather, re-reading). There's so much good stuff in here it hurts:

• On estimates: "Treat estimates given at the outset of a project as a budget for some possible solution, not as a bid for one specific solution."
• On changing your products UI more frequently: "What would a design and development process look like that encouraged frequent small change to user experience?"
• On agile product design and development: "This stuff is difficult. There isn’t an instruction manual to follow."
On getting design and dev working together: "If you want your product design and development to be effective, put someone on staff who's both a strong designer and technically capable of making design changes to the product directly."

I had the good fortune to meet Jeff at XP Day last year, wibbled at him and got some good advice. If I ever meet him again I'm going to drug him, abduct him, and keep him in a cage at FPHQ.

/me waves at Jeff.