Late last week, our dear friend Pauline Nelson passed away after a battle with cancer. Pauline was not just my client, she was my friend and a mentor to me for nearly 10 years.

Back in 2001, while a music major in college, I started doing some freelance work on the web. Pauline, an independent jeweler in the Los Angeles area, became my first client. Not only was she my first client, but she stayed with me for 9 more years until her passing last week. [click to continue…]

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How to analyze a usability study

January 29, 2010
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Most of the value you gain from a usability testing session comes from the analysis after the session is complete. I have been involved in a few sessions recently where no formal analysis has been conducted. I believe this is a mistake.
Traditionally, the analysis portion of a usability session takes quite a long [...]

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Technical Stories in Agile Software Development

January 13, 2010
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I just read this interesting post on technical stories by Jack Milunsky.  In the article he addresses the question of “Should technical stories appear on the product backlog for a Scrum project?”  For billable client projects, a related question exists of “Are technical stores billable to the client?”
The answer to both of these questions is [...]

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Who’s Attending Codemash 2010?

January 11, 2010
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The Codemash Conference is not just about great content, but it’s about great people.  Last year I met some great new friends and even did a fair amount of business with them.
I’ll be podcasting, blogging and networking all week.  If you are around, make sure to hunt me down.
Are you attending?
If you are attending, post [...]

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Design Last Design

January 6, 2010
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Agility comes from your ability to rapidly gather feedback about the software you are building, and to react quickly. This is especially true during your initial build phase.
Interface First Design
I’ve always been a supporter of Interface First Design. To your customer, the interface is the product. The customers needs are all defined [...]

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Workflow – Minimally Marketable Features

January 5, 2010
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As I described in the overview of Our New Development Process, the MMF (Minimally Marketable Feature) workflow is the customer facing portion of our development process.  Our changes in this area have had the biggest impact upon our clients, and have met a positive response.  It has allowed us to isolate our clients from the [...]

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New Years Resolutions are for Lazy People

January 4, 2010
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New Years Resolutions are not agile.
With the new year upon us, it’s that time to make our resolutions. But, why do we wait to do this at the beginning of the year? If change is needed, make the change now.
I came to realize the problem with this a month ago (beginning of [...]

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Our New Development Process

December 23, 2009
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In Agile Development for Tiny Teams, I presented an overview of our original development and project management process. I highlighted a number of challenges we encountered by using it. Thanks to Jon Stahl, Josh and I were exposed to the application of Kanban to the software development process. I was convinced that [...]

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Codemash Presentations That You Won’t Want To Miss

December 22, 2009
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The Codemash Conference is coming up again this year in just a few weeks.  It is always my favorite conference of the year, bringing together a diverse crowd of developers to learn practices from each others industries.
I have compiled a list of talks that I know you’ll enjoy.  Some of these I’ve heard previously, and [...]

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