Author Archive for alon

Alon at Web 2.0 in SF May 5 on “Blurring the Lines”

Published by alon on April 28, 2010 in Speaking. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I’m excited about our panel next Wed at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Blurring the Lines: From Human Centered Design to Customer Driven Development. We’re planning to share real world practices that help multi-disciplinary teams collaborate on creating great products.

We’ve got a good range of perspective and experience to draw from. Maria Giudice from Hot Studio is our user-centered designer, Rob Spiro from Aardvark is our user-centered product entrepreneur, Darren David from Stimulant is our multi-touch and NUI innovator, and I am our Agile software developer.

This event seems to have really caught on to the growing energy in the entrepreneurial community around strategies and techniques for creating products that people really want. Eric Ries is giving the keynote on Tuesday just one year after his first big conference presentation at Web 2.0 2009 and Steve Blank is giving the keynote Thursday. Both of these guys and the growing community around them have been inspiration to me and our work at Carbon Five over the last year for the answers they provide about how software development serves the goal of creating successful businesses and products.

Play at Work for Museums and the Web in Denver, April 17

Published by alon on April 13, 2010 in Agile. 1 Comment

Dana Mitroff from SFMOMA and I are running a session April 17 at Museums and the Web in Denver, CO called Play at Work: Applying Agile Methods to Museum Web Site Development.

Our goal is to give attendees a taste of some of the novel activities we use to encourage collaboration, communication and fun while engaged in the messy business of creating web software. The session is intended to be interactive – we want attendees to try some of this out with us – which should be interesting given that the conference organizers chose to put us in the Grand Ballroom, the same room used for the conference keynotes. “Gather around, everyone!”

Resources

Here are some follow up resources for attendees who are intrigued and want to learn more.

Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/presentations/52-effective-user-stories-for-agile-requirements
This series of slides by Mike Cohn is a good introduction to user stories as a means of capturing project requirements. We often use this presentation to introduce folks new to agile to the ins and outs of user stories.

Agile Estimating and Planning
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/books/1-agile-estimating-and-planning
This book by Mike Cohn is an excellent guide to the planning side of agile software development and what you do with those user stories.

Art of Agile
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Agile-Development-James-Shore/dp/0596527675
This book by James Shore covers the breadth of agile practices, both in planning and development, and includes many activities like those we cover in this session for helping your team collaborate and communicate effectively and efficiency.

Tasty Cupcakes
http://blog.tastycupcakes.com
Tasty Cupcakes is collection of games and activities designed to help illustrate the value and effectiveness of different agile practices. Rather than being specific techniques used in running an agile project, they are more targeted at teaching agile practices and values with short illustrative games.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development
http://agilemanifesto.org
This is a historic document (2001) in the Agile software movement where a group of folks advocating new values and practices in software development came together to recognize their shared goals and values.

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Story Mapper is Release Planning for Pivotal Tracker

Published by alon on March 25, 2010 in Agile. 6 Comments Tags: , , , .

We’re proud to announce the release of Story Mapper, a project we have been working on at Carbon Five to support an Agile project planning technique called story mapping.

We use Pivotal Tracker to manage our feature backlog and the day-to-day activities of tracking a feature from estimation through delivery and acceptance. However, we find it easy to lose the big picture in the detail-oriented view Tracker provides.

Story Mapper uses your project data from Tracker to provide a higher level view geared toward release and milestone planning. This view is based on Jeff Patton’s story mapping techniques and provides the ability to see how the different components of your project will evolve across successive milestone.

Story Mapper Screenshot

All you need in order to use Story Mapper is a Tracker project with a backlog of stories and a subset of labels that represent user activities or components of your system. If you have a large project and have not been using labels in this way, you may have some work to do in Story Mapper before you have a story map that makes sense.

Try it out, let us know what you think, and tell us how to make it better. Comment here so others can see your thoughts or by contacting us directly.

Ada Freezes Monsters with Snowballs (and Canvas)

Published by alon on March 15, 2010 in JavaScript / AJAX. 0 Comments Tags: .

Alex sent me an email Saturday morning with this really cute Canvas game he wrote with his daughter Ada. His timing was really great since I am on a panel at SXSW Tuesday called Is Canvas the End of Flash? He explains it all below…

I was telling Ada how video games are made one night, and she ask me if I could make a game. I said yes, we could make one together, and she bugged me all night to get started. I told her to start by designing a game on paper. She drew something that looks surprisingly like pacman (given that she’s never played the game), but she told me the dots were snowballs and that you could throw them at the monsters and use them to build walls. I started programming it as an SPA using canvas. She came up with all the rules, with some suggestions from me.

It may be that I’ve just been doing a lot of JS lately, but building a game like this in JavaScript felt really comfortable and extremely rapid. I had a basic version working with about 200 lines of code, but the details have tripled that. I went through a couple of major refactors, neither of which were troublesome in textmate.

The game is completely un-optimized, but it runs fast enough on my macbook. I know lots of ways to speed it up if I had to. It’s a little rough in a lot of areas, but it’s getting close enough to present.

Play Snowballs

Play Snowballs

Instructions

Load in Firefox or Safari. The arrow keys move your character, the spacebar launches snowballs (which you have to collect). Hit a monster 5 times to freeze it, then touch it to collect it.

Alon on Flash and Canvas at SXSW

Published by alon on March 1, 2010 in Speaking. 0 Comments

SXSW

I’m looking forward to participating in a panel Is Canvas the End of Flash? this month at SXSW on the role the new HTML Canvas element is playing in web development and how it compares to Flash. Much of the perspective I have for this panel comes from my long history working with Flash and from our recent work with Canvas for Isilon Systems on InsightIQ.

The panel has been organized by Greg Veen of SmallBatch, Inc., creators of TypeKit and includes Chet Haas from the Adobe Flex team, Nathan Germick from social gaming start up Wonderhill and Ben Galbraith from Palm and Mozilla, also lead of the ambitious Bespin project.

Come check us out if you’re going to be in Austin.

Also check out some of the presentations by friends of Carbon Five at SXSW:

From Dinosaurs to Digital: A Museum Convergence Success Story from Maria Giudice of Hot Studio on her work with Jonathon Denholtz of the California Academy of Sciences.

Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends a panel on social search organized by Brynn Evans that includes CEO Max Ventilla from our recently acquired client Aardvark.

Beyond the Desktop: Embracing New Interaction Paradigms a panel on interactions that go beyond keyboard+mouse includes Nathan Moody of Stimulant, masters of the multitouch Microsoft Surface and NUI design.

DNA Direct Acquired by Medco Health Solutions

Published by alon on February 19, 2010 in Clients. 0 Comments

Medco Health Solutions and Carbon Five client DNA Direct announced earlier this month that DNA Direct has been acquired by Medco. Congratulations to everyone on the DNA Direct team on this new opportunity to extend their genomic medicine and health care services to an exponentially greater audience.

Among other initiatives, Carbon Five worked with DNA Direct to roll out their first release of, as founder and CEO Ryan Phelan describes it, “the first genetic guidance program for a top five health plan with Humana, facilitating prior authorization and providing clinical services to ensure appropriate testing with lower out of pocket costs from the right lab.”

Google Acquires Aardvark

Published by alon on February 12, 2010 in Clients. 0 Comments

Google announced today that they have acquired our client Aardvark. Congratulations to the very talented team at Aardvark on this next big step toward bringing their social search service to a global audience.

Aarvark has more details on the acquisition. You can also read more about the work did helping the Aardvark bootstrap their team and product development.

Recipe for Simple Agile Retrospectives

Published by alon on December 17, 2009 in Agile. 0 Comments

After my talk at the Commonwealth Club last week our good friend Darren from Stimulant followed up with me to get a summary of the simple agile retrospective technique I described.

I thought I’d just send him to Google but a search for agile retrospective returned descriptions that seemed too heavy weight for the small, skilled, agile-literate teams we employ at Carbon Five.

There is certainly a lot of valuable information and insight out there I and definitely suggest doing some reading to understand the fundamentals and options for running retrospectives. However, since we want to do retrospectives often, we need a practice that doesn’t take much time or effort.

Here’s a recipe we are using these days. You can do this in 30 minutes. I actually did this with our architect for a home renovation project I am working on. Great things came out of it. I think it might have blown their minds.

Setup

Get alll team members in a room with a few stickies each.

You’re here to talk about an iteration, project, or other unit… with the goal of improving the next time around.

Thoughts: 5-10 min

Smiley face on stickies with good things from the last iteration.
Frowny face with concerns, risks, fears,…
You don’t have to be exhaustive, use the time you allocate.

Cluster: 5-10 min

Create two teams.
Give the smiles to one and the frowns to the other.
Group the stickies into related clusters.

Discuss: 20 min

Identify the primary smiley clusters.
Confirm that you will continue to see these benefits, can you increase them?

Identify the primary frowny clusters and list the themes on a whiteboard.
Vote to discuss – each team member has 4 votes – put dots next to
the issues you want to discuss.
Discuss the top 3 issues – identify SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria) steps to address them.

Rinse, wash, repeat. Don’t feel you have to talk about everything. You are trying to focus on top issues. Once you address those, the next most important issues will surface for discussion.

We do this every other week with our internal team and monthly including our clients.

If you have other recipes for simple reflection, I’d love to hear them.

Fail Early and Often at the Commonwealth Club Wed Dec 9

Published by alon on December 7, 2009 in Agile. 0 Comments

Please join us for an Evening Program at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco for my presentation on techniques for creating a culture of learning, quality and collaboration in your organization. I will be sharing insights including failures and lessons learned from Carbon Five’s almost 10 years of creating web-based products.

Light reception to follow. We hope you can hang out after for a glass of wine and to catch up before the holidays.

http://tickets.commonwealthclub.org/auto_choose_ga.asp?area=2&shcode=1501

Fail Early and Often: Innovative Practices for Online Development
Alon Salant, Principal, Carbon Five

Organizations today increasingly struggle to create compelling software products, web sites and social media while working with the daunting details of limited time and resources. Learn new ways of working and delivering early value with simple and easy-to-apply processes from a pioneering software development firm. Discover how agile techniques and tools have helped to sculpt new strategies and sustainable practices, leading to more success, faster turn-around and reduced expenses.

Location:
Commonwealth Club Office
585 Market Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105

Telephone Reservations: (415) 597-6700

Time: 5:30 p.m. networking, 6 p.m. program, reception to follow
Cost: $8 members, $15 non-members, $7 students (with valid ID)

This is an open invitation. Please share with others.

Aardvark for iPhone on the App Store

Published by alon on September 17, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

We’re excited to see that the Aardvark iPhone app is now available on the app store. Since handing off an earlier version of the app to their internal team we’ve been waiting with baited breath for its release.

It has been very well received with TechCrunch claiming it the best way to use Aardvark and 4 1/2 stars from over 100 ratings in just a couple days.

Working on this project with the Aardvark team was great. We love their intensely user-driven approach for designing and validating features through iterative development. We also pioneered our own best practices for test driven development to the iPhone platform, something that seems to be rare in the iPhone development community.