links for 2007-01-12
January 12, 2007 | Comments-
'"We couldn't have done it without you," he said, with obvious sincerity. '
Lovely.
links for 2007-01-11
January 11, 2007 | Comments-
Humbling.
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Interesting looking tool that purports to turn blogs and flickrish stuff into books...
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Unit testing framework for J2ME platform
Agile Fun Night
January 11, 2007 | CommentsJoh very kindly ran an extra-curricular evening for all of us last night. Held at the Pitcher & Piano, "Agile Fun Night" (for thus it was billed) involved a round of drinks, followed by what I guess I have to describe as an hour-long exercise in teamwork, using techniques from agile project management methodologies.
(FWIW: we're not "an agile shop", but we've adopted a few techniques which could be called agile, and continue to look at others, evaluating them and using them where they make sense and work for us)
In a preamble to the exercise, Joh had us all draw 2 faces onto cards, then collaborate to draw a single face with one other person.
The exercise involved us splitting into a team of 2 customers (Sergio and Thom), another team of 4 developers (myself, Jack, Ribot and Neil), and one QA/timekeeper (Devi). By complete chance, this left all of us bar Thom in roles which approximate what we do within FP.
The project was to build a park - using plasticene, sellotape, card, pipe cleaners and marker pens.
First, the customers wrote up their requirements in the form of stories onto index cards, and prioritised these requirements for us. We then wrote out short estimates for each one (in minutes to build) and worked out how many we thought we could deliver in an initial 10-minute iteration. Seeing as there were 4 of us, we allowed 30 overall minutes of work - which seemed optimistic to Joh, I noted, but happily we seemed to deliver all these initial stories (though I wasn't happy with the construction quality of my slides).
A short burst of QA followed as Devi (QA/Timekeeping) read through a series of tests she'd written for the first iteration (which I think we passed, with the exception of 1), and we moved onto customer feedback and a bit of negotiation with them over new requirements, new priorities, and the next iteration.
Next time around went way smoother; the quality of construction was noticeably higher, we got in a few artistic flourishes (a bridge over the river), and over-delivered (adding an additional story which we hadn't committed to in that iteration, and a requirement which we'd noted the customers state but not write down, for water next to the rock garden).
A really interesting process, I want to do another one of these games in a little while to see how we approach it, once we're familiar with the format: designing an airport has been mentioned.
At the end of the evening we return to the faces we'd drawn, and examined how collaboration had occurred here (we'd each been issued with different colour pens so it was easy to see who'd done what). One group had divided the face in half, Solomon-style, and done half each, and two of us had worked on different elements within the same face. We voted on the best pair and best individual faces.
Stuff I noted:
- We all quickly fell into roles and behaviour that I see in our day-to-day work;
- Negotiation and conversations with the customer seemed way more important, even with stories written down onto cards;
- Within the team, we tended to divide tasks early then reconvene towards the end of an iteration. Mindful of our spec-ignoring behaviour at coding dojos past, I was quite anal about getting us to check the original stories on the cards;
- The best team face wasn't done by the author of the best individual face (and vice versa);
links for 2007-01-10
January 10, 2007 | Comments-
I don't know about you, but I haven't read or heard a single report using the manner of SH's death to excuse his crimes. Still, maybe if we shout "bad man" every time we say his name that makes everything OK.
iPhone thoughts
January 10, 2007 | CommentsJotting down my thoughts on the iPhone...
Feature-wise, it's about average. GSM only to begin with, a 2 megapixel camera (which'll look pretty tired for a device this expensive when it finally launches). Battery life looks poorish, and in practice will no doubt be worse than what's advertised. Was there any mention of the 2-batteries approach which was rumoured? Without it I think the device may be pretty flawed: the first time you drop off the network unable to make or take calls because you've been listening to music, I'm betting you'll go back to your iPod.
The UI looks pretty. Not sure how well the keyboard will work for tapping out texts, but if there's a predictive error correction thing going on in there (T9 for Qwerty) it may well be usable. It seems to have some nice haptic and accelerometer-driven innovations in the UI - shame Nintendo got there first really. I don't consider "running MacOS X" to be a feature in a handset, without more info to back it up. Will 3rd parties be able (and willing) to develop apps?
Nice to see widgets making it to the home screen of a mobile device - about time :) But that said I'm sceptical about mobile device demos (like others). I've seen too many 3G concept videos to be convinced that anything I haven't grasped in my own two paws and fiddled with is any good.
Some of the features look like they'll require close co-operation with the networks to roll out - e.g. random access voicemail and conference calling. It'll be quite humiliating for the big incumbent handset vendors if Apple manage to get this integration done before they do. I note that Apple have made no announcements for who they'll be working with outside the US.
I find the idea of the iPhone "service partners" pretty laughable. Everyone knows that Yahoo will do it behind the bike sheds for jelly babies these days, and Google drops its knickers for anyone. Doing a deal to give these guys placement on your device is nothing special, I'm afraid.
It seems expensive: $500 with a 2 year contract? I'm a heavy mobile user and I'd shy away from a 2-year contract, that's bound to be a disincentive to most (and obviously the great PAYG unwashed don't get to play at all). If that $500 translates to £500 (as it often seems to) then it's going to be classic Apple: a luxury item for whatever yuppies like me are called this millenia rather than a mass-market device. And whatever it's not available for another 6 months, or the end of the year if you're into 3G (which I'm betting a lot of the target audience will be).
According to MobHappy Jobs wants to take 1% of the handset market - reminds me of #11 on Guy Kawasaki's list of entrepreneur lies. Disclaimer: Steve Jobs is way smarter than me, and may even know this. He dresses better too. But according to El Reg we shipped 39.5m handsets in Western Europe in Q3 2005. Extrapolating crudely, that's 916m handsets for the year (assuming no growth or decline since then). So Steve needs to ship 9.16m handsets next year to get what he wants, which seems quite aggressive to me: it's just under half the number of iPods Apple predicted sales of in 2006.
As MEX puts it "this is a product for the user who instant messages sitting in front of the TV, Googles words while they are reading magazines and shares photos like gossip". i.e. not the current European mobile market, but maybe a better fit with that in the US.
I'm with Ive: it's "not too shabby" and all that, and my now-Pavlovian responses to any product Apple releases are telling me I want one, but I don't see this as meaningfully impacting on the mass market (other than giving a slight kicking to other handset vendors). As such it's more of a decent PDA than a phone, in my book.
I don't want to say the word Newton (a lovely device which didn't really sell). Whoops.