ITauthor

I can't remember where I got this from (it's been sitting in my Pictures directory), so apologies for not crediting the source, but I wanted to share this perceptive view of software product development and delivery.

I've got to admit I'd always had a jaded opinion of the Agile software development methodology. From what I knew of it - no detailed requirements document, no functional specification, no prototyping, no design thoroughly first then build it - from all of this it seemed to me that Agile was something dreamed up by a software developer, for software developers, but a potential nightmare for testers, technical authors, marketing, sales and support. To me it seemed like Agile was a kind of a "let's just bash on and make it up as we go along" approach that left developers free to do whatever seemed best (or maybe just easiest), without being tied to anyone else's plan, or maybe any plan at all. And, as a technical author, how do you document something that's evolving from day to day according to the whim of developer? So that was where I was with Agile until the week before last. Not hostile to Agile, but definitely skeptical. Then, as part of the restructuring exercise that's underway at my work, I spent a week with MarketAcuity CEO and Agile guru Sam Bayer. I'm not entirely sure what Sam's mission was: whether he'd been tasked with introducing Agile product development to the company, or just talking us through the Agile methodology. He has a very laid-back, discursive approach, so it's hard to tell. It never felt like he was trying to teach us particularly, more like he was just talking with us about one way of doing things. We started with some basics of Agile product development. What's the point? Answer: it's about accelerating value to the customer. The 4 pillars of Agile:

• Customer The process is centred around the customer. It's not about producing some new, cool product because it's something we think would be interesting to work on, or because it's this year's big thing. It's about finding out what our customers and potential customers need and value and doing that for them.
• Demonstrations Show your customers the real production software (not a prototype or a smoke and mirrors job) on a regular basis and get their feedback.
• Iterative Build something, demo it, get feedback, build some more, and so on. Demonstrations could be a week or a month apart, but probably not more than a month apart, and always on a regular schedule. Don't go away and work on something for six months or a year only to find at the end of that time that it's not really what the customer wants, because they found it hard to explain, or you weren't listening, or they changed their minds/personnel, or the market or operational environment changed.
• Collaborative This isn't the waterfall approach. There's no leader passing down commands that must be obeyed. Within the company everyone's got a role and a job to do, but these aren't set in stone with high walls. The team have to work together according to their knowledge and abilities to get the job done. And, looking externally, you've got to collaborate with the customer and bring them into the process.

Another concept that, first off, I found puzzling was that, as well as accelerating value to the customer, Agile helps you to accelerate failure. Sounds bizarre, but what it means is that if you're producing the wrong thing, or you've made bad decisions, or misunderstood the market, you get to realise this much earlier. You don't work on a project for a year, then have a launch and suddenly get hit with the truth that potential customers don't really rate what you've done, and the stuff they really want is missing from what you produced. If you're really going nowhere with a project then it's much better to find out soon, cut your losses and get on with doing something profitable. All of this, and more, makes perfect sense to me. But it really wasn't until day 3 of the week that things really clicked with me. A lightbulb went on and suddenly I saw a way of doing this product management thing successfully. So now I sort of feel like a convert to Agile. It fits with my way of thinking. Don't overcomplicate things. Don't weigh yourself down with a ton of process and procedure rules. Do one thing at a time, bit by bit. Tell the truth. Don't pretend you always have all the answers. Talk to people. Get their opinions. Keep talking. Keep listening. Be prepared to change your mind.

I was intrigued to hear Dave Winer talking, in a recent TWIT podcast, about his FlickrFan program that get photos from Flickr and other Internet sources and shows them as your screensaver. Unfortunately this is Mac-only at the moment.

However, I found a similar program for PC:

http://www.codeplex.com/FlickrNetScreensaver

It's a little disconcerting not knowing whose photos are going to appear on your screensaver, but you can choose a tag (e.g. "nature") which lessens the scope for weirdness - like photos from someone's family holiday, or baby's Christening, showing up.

The site has been up and down, there and not there, recently. This is for a number of reasons but mainly because Sky cut off my internet connection which meant that - because my site was hosted from an old PC running Linux, sitting in a basement cubby hole in my house - my Web site disappeared.

At around the same time some of my domain names came up for renewal and when I was renewing itauthor.eu with Euro-Reg.com I decided, on the spur of the moment, to buy a hosting package and move everything onto their servers. You may have noticed that, at the time of writing at any rate, the URL for the site is .eu rather than the usual .com.

Things may change because I subsequently realised that Euro-Reg only allows me 500MB of space, which isn't enough to put everything up that was originally on my site (so you may notice some missing pics etc.). I think I might move everything over to Dreamhost, but for the time being it's working OK where it is and it means I can save a bit of electricity by turning off my Web server.

If you've visited before you may notice that the site runs a little faster than before - not a huge amount though, which is a little disappointing given that I got a tiny upload speed from Sky.

The downside of moving things to Euro-Reg is that I have no command line access and I have to move files via FTP. I'd forgotten how slow and arduous FTP is. I'd got so used to using WinSCP for putting stuff on my Web server. I'd kind of consigned FTP to history and thought I'd never use it again. Funny how things turn around.

However, the big gain from moving my Wordpress blog onto someone else's server is that - for reasons unknown - the "Next/Previous" links in Wordpress that had never appeared before now work just fine. I'd spent ages in Wordpress forums trying to get these links to show up, without success, so it's nice that the site is now much more accessible and you can get more than 5 search results now.

After a bit of a lay-off from reading blogs, I've been catching up with what Tom Johnson's been blogging about. One post that caught my attention was a screencast about Jing:

Jing is a cut-down version of Camtasia that provides a quick way to record a screen capture video and audio recording and then share it, for example on a blog. The real benefit of this is that, rather than writing out procedural steps you can quickly record a "here's how it's done" mini-demo and post it - e.g. onto SharePoint - for people in your team or organisation to view.

Makers TechSmith have a simple little animation that explains the benefits of Jing very nicely: