• Nice video interview with Mike Cohn, including some lovely advice on how to start getting your Scrum on. I'd thoroughly concur - try it and do it strictly for a reasonable period of time before you start to adapt it;
• I'm sure I'll have posted this before, but it's worth repeating - Jeff Patton's 12 best practices for UX in an agile environment;
• Google Bets On Big 5 - old news as this dates back to last month, but I'm reviewing it after watching the Google IO Keynote video. Very interesting indeed, but I'd take issue with their presenting this technology as "all there" - a few experiments on Firefox, Safari and Chrome on the mac seem to show that some bits are present and correct on each, others lacking. Still, very exciting stuff whatever...
• Wave. Wow, double-wow for the demo of live translation at the end.
• A study on the effectiveness of using personas in product design. Really nice to have some evidence for this stuff, though the study involved giving participants pre-prepared personas. My take would be that personas are a useful tool when based on research, but as a catalysed form of assumptions about a target audience, they can be dangerous.
• Another study, on how price affects perception.
• Interesting presentation on digital inclusion in the UK, and preconceptions we may have. "It's a case of social equity: 93% of people under 70 who have a degree are online".

For several completely unrelated reasons, I've spent a lot of time looking at and thinking about maps this week.

• GeoNames, a database of places (as used by Dopplr)
• Vodafone have a cute map, Twitter-driven (obviously) of who's going on holiday where, this summer;
• A mind-expanding article on augmenting photographic data, courtesy of pitch/yaw/roll, GPS and OpenStreetmap;
• First person UIs - who'da thunk that a simple compass opens up so many possibilities? I note that whilst JSR179 has included compass support in the location APIs, compasses were the bit that most implementations of the standard failed to include for a long time...
• The Google static maps API - handy when you're targeting platforms that don't let you do all the usual Googly JavaScript stuff;

We had our planning day for sprint 40 last Wednesday, including a retrospective on the previous sprint.

What we learned:

1. If you take data from third parties, be sure to budget time to sorting out problems with it;
2. Keeping a team shielding from interruptions might be harder than you think;
3. Be disciplined about discussing implementation of user stories at the last appropriate moment - it's worth it;

Joh ran a quite nice format where we split into our three teams (Anjuna and Tonberry, our two production teams, plus Mocha - everyone else). Revisiting the objectives from the previous sprint, we'd had three things we wanted to do:

1. Don't overplan (we've done this quite a lot in the past);
2. Ensure no interruptions come to the team other than through the myself, the Scrum Master (the previous two sprints, Tonberry had been fielding all sorts of stuff coming from a range of people, and I'd not been shielding them from this adequately);
3. Propose an approach for automated testing; we do this at a UI level for MIDlets (as well as elsewhere) but it's sometimes seemed quite burdensome for the team;

On the "not overplanning", there was general agreement that we'd not repeated our previous errors. On the automated testing, we'd failed to do anything, though one of the folks with stronger feelings on this was on holiday, so I wasn't too fussed about this - I want to include him in any conversation.

But on the interruptions, we had a worrying difference of opinion. Management folks (including myself) had felt this sprint much better in this regard - we knew there were 2 urgent pieces of work which had come in mid-sprint (a client being messed about by another partner who needed us to do some urgent work to route around issues caused by said partner, and some urgent bugs in a previously released piece of software), but the team felt there was way more than this - and had (as we asked) kept a list of these items.

In a way, I found it more worrying to discovery my view of what was happening was out of sync, than to have seen problems and been aware of them. So this time around we're keeping a *muuuuch* closer eye on things. The team are alerting me instantly when an interruption occurs, and keeping a record of the impact of it: there's a difference between someone popping in to say "hi, how's it going", and someone slyly asking if you could just do a bit of analytics for them on the side...

Elsewhere, we had agreement across teams that we need to return to a practice we established 6 months ago, then dropped: meeting to discuss specifics of a story just before work on it begins. This one seems to already have paid off - a quick chat about a trivial detail on Friday morning unearthed some fairly serious issues, just in time.

Third-party dependencies were, as ever, another issue: in particular, getting hold of data or graphical assets in a form that's suitable for use. A difficult one, this - if we're working for a non-technical client then it's not fair to expect them to understand, say, the issues around character set choices when exporting CSV files from Excel. But equally in these situations, we need to allocate time and effort to managing problems which might arise.

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've put the slides from my talk at Mobile Web Summit 2.0 online - they're here, if you're after them.

My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element". That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of "social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity - and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude. Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake and loyalty.

We had fun in the panel session afterwards too, where I got to trot out a theory I've been nurturing around mobile advertising: on the web, the aim of advertising has been to drive users to useful web services, where they can get something useful done. On mobile, applications are a more appropriate destination for advertising.

Why? Mobile web sites tend to be more limited. There are a few really "sticky" ones (itsMy and Flirtomatic, I'm looking at you), but most destinations for mobile advertising are ad-supporting microsites with little long-term value for a visitor. As such, applications are a more natural and worthwhile destination for mobile advertising: give your prospective customers something genuinely useful they can carry with themselves and see value from again and again, rather than expecting them to return to a microsite.

If you're sceptical, I'd encourage you to look at iPhone app store statistics - the average free app is being run 80 times. This might not mean it's a great place to run advertising, but I'll wager that's roughly 80 times more traffic than most mobile microsites get...