The easiest way to save money and time building software products is to only build things that are absolutely essential. More features and frameworks means more code to write, more code to test and more code to go wrong. The… Read More
Developing HTML Forms
Developing useful and professional HTML forms requires a lot more work than simple examples might suggest. There are a whole range of problems such as handling initial data, client-side validation, server-side validation, optimistic concurrency and performing the final action. This… Read More
Communicating to Stakeholders, Tell Stories Not Data
Communicating technical information is a challenge for anyone and especially to a non-technical audience. When the people being addressed may have a mix of backgrounds and focusing on outcomes or consequences and not abstract figures or engineering details, crafting the right message… Read More
Ideas on How to Split User Stories
Breaking large user stories (or work items in layman’s terms) down into several smaller ones hugely improves delivery predictability. There are several reasons for this including the fact that smaller items with fewer moving parts are simply easier to estimate… Read More
The Importance of Psychological Safety in Software Teams
Psychological safety may not be something you’ve thought much about but if you’ve sat through a long team meeting where your boss talks and everyone else just listens you may have experienced it. If people feel it’s either a waste… Read More
Firebreak – An NHS Enterprise Innovation Initiative
Innovation in any organisation is easy to talk about but a lot harder to do. Finding ways for worth while ideas to rise above the day today storm of delivery and fire fighting in a way that realises real value… Read More
Agile Telemetry, Doing Data Driven Product Development like a Formula 1 Team
Building a software product requires thousands of design decisions to be made and making those decisions quickly will significantly reduce the time to market. Getting things shipped quickly can significantly reduce commercial risks through gaining early feedback. But making these… Read More
TDD or Test Driven Development Explained
TDD or Test Driven Development is something that’s easy to talk about but harder to do and a lot harder to do well and get value from. Done with good judgement TDD can help produce excellent quality code that is… Read More
Better Listening is Important for Better Software Solutions
Listening is a skill we generally don’t give a second thought to but, improving listening ability is possible with careful attention and work. Listening is an important skill for all product developers for collecting feedback and gaining insight into how people… Read More
Conway’s Law Explored and Explained
Conway’s Law was observed by Met Conway and made famous in Fred Brooks’ 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. It states – “Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation’s communication structure”. … Read More