sheehan alam

Apr 05

Managing Distributed Agile Teams

I once had a consulting gig where I was one of many distributed developers on the team. We had weekly scrum meetings over Skype/WebEx from 4 different time zones. These meetings usually ended up taking at least an hour.

Scrum is all about being agile. Hour long meetings are not agile.

When you have a distributed team that is larger than 5 members it can become difficult to manage. The key is to meet with a team of developers in small blocks. Schedule a meeting with the API guys at 9:00AM then a meeting with the front-end team at 9:15AM and so on. There is no need in gathering people that aren’t required in the meeting to sit idle. Let’s get real, they’re going to be chatting on IM, reading the news, or brewing up a pot of coffee.

Your job as a manager is to make sure each team is executing. Execute on multiple threads, I say.

Mar 19

Quick iPad Review

New iPad (3rd generation).

Pros:

• Awesome screen. Better than your HDTV. Seriously.

Cons:

• Heavier than iPad 2
• Less battery life than iPad 2
• Slightly thicker than iPad 2

Upgrade if you have an iPad 1/any Android tablet/are a developer/are a fanboi.

Feb 20

Thoughts on Siri - 4 Months Later

When the iPhone 4S launched, Siri was the bee’s knee’s. I’ll admit, I was one of those customers who spent all night asking Siri asinine questions like how much wood can a woodchuck chuck if a would chuck could chuck would. Siri was the ultimate party trick. Then the novelty wore off and I stopped asking it stupid questions.

Here is how I use Siri now:

1. Setting reminders while I drive
2. Setting calendar appointments while I drive
3. Setting my alarm before I go to bed
4. Getting driving directions, while I drive

I don’t ask it for the weather, or stock prices because its faster for me to just launch those apps. Siri is great for complicated, multi-step tasks, especially when you need to be hands free.

Because I’m so dependent on Siri I pretty much need to have Reminders, iCal, Maps, and Clock or else my entire GTD workflow is done for.

This makes me wonder how much tighter integration will get once Mountain Lion is out and we get these iOS apps right on our Mac’s?

Siri is here to stay.

Feb 06

[video]

Dec 20

Advice on Hiring Developers

There have been numerous blogs, advice, and studies on how to hire developers for your startup. It’s the single most important role for founders, CEO’s and CTO’s of a software company. The 2011 trend seems to favor hiring:

• Hackers who can get shit done and willing to learn anything
• Coders who are also secretly designers
• Coders who can move up and down the stack (front-end to back-end)

During the interview people like to evaluate:

• Portfolio > Resume/Corporate Experience
• Puzzles/Engineering Challenges
• Familiarity with languages/tools/software engineering practices

This is all great, and very helpful in determining great candidates. However, in my opinion the single most valuable criteria to determine is how well a developer can debug. The majority of time spent writing software is actually fixing bugs.

I want to know:

• What is your debugging process? Do you use debugging tools?
• Do you write test cases? How many? When is it overkill?
• Do you prioritize bugs over features? When?
• How do you communicate defects to customers or product management?

Fortunately we are living through a time where there are great hackers among us. Everyone is more than capable for being a candidate at your company. As an executive, it is your job to find the best ones. The best developers are the ones who don’t introduce bugs into the codebase, and can help eliminate bugs that exist.

Dec 17

Managing Bugs and Defect Creep

We all learn in project management/engineering 101 that feature creep is the number one reason for why 99% of software projects are always delivered late. While this is true, and incredibly damaging to not only profits, but team morale, this is often attributed as the sole reason for why projects fail. 

Time to shed a bit of truth.

Defects hurt your product more than overcommitting to your customer. Prioritizing new features over existing bugs won’t make your app shinier. You can brush bugs under the carpet for a while, but its only a matter of time they come back out as your software gets larger. As new lines of code are added, new paths to revealing your bugs are exposed.

In theory everybody wants a 100% bug-free product, and it’s easy to say “fix that bug and then move on”, but fixing bugs has an engineering cost. Defects typically take longer to debug and don’t add any business value to the customer. It is a behind the scenes skunkworks operation that gets no recognition.

In a perfect world, we would rally the development team and assign all bugs for the current software iteration and have the QA team on-call to make sure the bugs get tested in every scenario, while product management pushes back new features to the next software iteration (this can be weeks).

Yeah right. The world isn’t linear. There is no right approach but I typically stick to a few rules:

• QA should log all bugs with reproduction steps and stacktraces in a defect backlog for the tech/product team to prioritize. It’s extremely important to include reproduction steps and a stacktrace as it will save debugging time, which is engineering time, which is costly time.

• Bugs that will impact the customer over 50% of the time are showstoppers and must be addressed immediately in the current software iteration. No new feature will help you gloss up your app when a showstopper bug is apparent. Fix that shit.

• One day of the week should be dedicated strictly to fixing bugs. This will stop bugs from piling up and keep the software integrity in tact.

• Celebrate being 100% defect free because it won’t be long until new bugs get introduced into your software. Enjoy being 100% bug free as a team. Development/QA/Product teams are polar opposites of each other. While we all work together, things can get rough during crunch time, and celebrating common success is a great team building activity.

Dec 09

Productivity Hack: Meetings

I’ve attended my fair share of meetings throughout my career. Code review meetings, feature planning meetings, scrum meetings, client meetings, urgent life-stopping bugs being reported meetings (to the customer the world must stop :). 

Meetings are highly disruptive. People are most productive when they’re in the zone and uninterrupted. Meetings disrupt this workflow, and going back to a productive state often requires more time, and in that time another meeting can get scheduled adding toxicity to the rest of your day.

I have a rule. I only schedule meetings from 8AM-12PM. This serves a few purposes:

1. Blocking all meetings together does not disrupt actual productivity.
2. The brain needs to wake up and get going before getting into the zone. A morning full of meetings, with jabbering clients/customers is a great remedy.
3. Eating lunch after a morning full of meetings prepares the body with the sustenance to get into the zone and get shit done.

Meetings are important. A killer project without communication is a recipe for failure. So here are some tech tips for scheduling meetings well.

• Always send out an invite. This eliminates e-mail/confirmation overhead. Asking your client if “we’re still on” is a waste of time when tools like Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook can automate that for you.
• Use a headset to take calls. This frees you to take notes on your computer. I like to use Google Docs or Evernote so my notes are stored in the cloud and accessible from any laptop or my iPhone.
• Send screenshots or videos beforehand if you are doing a demo. This might kill the element of surprise, but if you’re doing a demo over the phone, you’re either doing it wrong, or its not that important.

After meetings are over the rest of the day is yours. Use it wisely.

Oct 23

Why Files Won’t Matter

Files are going to be a thing of the past. Gone are the days of creating folders, shortcuts and managing your recycle bin (lolwut). Managing files is cumbersome. Most people are also notoriously bad at staying organized.

This is why Gmail doesn’t have folders for your inbox. If you want to find an e-mail just search for it. Let Google take care of it for you.

This is why the iTunes App Store manages all of your apps on your iPhone. So you don’t have to worry about installing and removing them.

As we move into the “post-pc” world dominated by our mobile phones and tablets we won’t be managing files anymore. We are going to be using our apps.

This is a huge shift in how we will use our computers. Instead of thinking about where your files are, you are going to think about which app you’re going to use.

This is because all of your files will be stored in the cloud. It doesn’t matter where they are. Your app will know and take care of it for you. This is seamless. This is bliss. This is exactly what iCloud is trying to achieve.

Oct 17

iPhone 4S Quick Review

I’ve only been able to use my iPhone 4S for a day, but I’ve been running iOS5 for a few months now. So here is the quick and dirty.

PROS

- It’s fast. You’ll notice the difference from the 4, and you’ll definitely notice the difference from Android

- Siri is not only fun to use, but very useful. Voice commands are nothing new (I had an HTC Wizard back in 2004 running Windows Mobile and it could do voice) but Siri actually gets things done. Tell it to write emails, texts, make appointments, solve derivatives you name it. Definitely a step up from your basic dictation. You talk to Siri like you’re having a conversation with a human being so its natural. 

- The camera is fast, and very high quality. Check out this pic. 1080P video is insane too.

 

- White is the new black.

CONS 

- While Siri is good, it still isn’t 100% accurate. 

- No new case design. To all the haters.

Is it worth it to upgrade? If you don’t see yourself using Siri too much and are already impressed by the iPhone 4 camera, hang tight, you still get iOS5 which feels brand new. If you have anything else, do it. 

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Jul 17

How to make mobile payments easier

(sweet phone bro.)

People have been talking about mobile payments for at least a decade (as noted by the 90’s phone in this post that has premo features like a monochrome screen and redial). Analysts like to quote a person is more likely to notice his phone is missing than his wallet, therefore, money would be better placed in the phone than in the wallet.

Fast forward to today and we are at a point where mobile payments can be made possible. 

1. We have highly interactive smartphones
2. We have well designed apps/marketplaces
3. We are pioneering near-field-communication technologies to make contact-less payments

So why aren’t we paying with our mobile phones? Because it’s still too difficult to make a payment with all of these great technologies. There is a lack of adoption on the merchant side and its too much of a paradigm shift for consumers to pull out a phone to make a payment.

However, App Stores are taking baby steps and transitioning us into a mobile friendly world. Apple and Amazon already have our credit card numbers when we sign up for their services. This makes purchasing books or music a 1-click buy. One click and no more. This is where innovative mobile payment technologies need to get inspiration.

Consumers pay with their credit cards because it’s easy. Swiping your card for a pair of $1,000  Gucci’s (FYI I don’t own anything Gucci) is too simple and too quick. So quick that you don’t even feel the sticker shock until 30 days later when you get your statement.

Mobile payment technologies need to be quick, 1-click.

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Jun 21

Speed vs. Responsiveness

Speed is everything on the internet. We love fast food, fast cars, and fast loading webpages (admit it, I know you do).

I’m about to squash the myth here that speed isn’t everything. At least not on mobile.

How many of you shopping for a phone see meaningless information like “1.5 Ghz SnapDragon dualcore processor” or “1GB L2 Cache?” Sounds fancy (it really is, but thats not the point). The bigger the number obviously the better, and the faster your phone will be right? Wrong.

Speed isn’t everything on mobile. It is responsiveness.

Responsiveness is that great feeling you get when you’re swiping through photos and it just snaps. 

Responsiveness is how quick Google Maps reloads while you’re doing a pinch to zoom.

Responsiveness is how fast you scroll when you flick your finger up on the screen. Like butter.

Responsiveness is the little sensory indicators you get like scrollbars bouncing back a bit once you’ve reached the end of a list.

You don’t get that with SnapDragon’s and caches. 

You get that because someone took the time to think about the little things that make using apps on your mobile just a little faster and a little more fun.

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Jun 13

iCloud, Apps and the Interactive Web

Apple announced iCloud last week. They aren’t changing the internet here, the technology is the same stuff Google has been doing for a few years now. What is changing is how we interact with the cloud.

Let’s look at the Google Scenario:

1. Open up your browser of choice
2. Go to http://docs.google.com
3. Login
4. Make some docs, and save it in a folder so you can access it later.

Pretty awesome. You can now log in from any web browser in the world and access your document. Hooray cloud.

Now lets look at the Apple Scenario:

1. Launch Pages
2. Make some docs and save it so you can access it later.

Even more awesome. iCloud will automatically take that document you saved and push it to your iPhone, iPad and your Mac. You don’t need to go find it in a folder. It will just be there the next time you open it up.

Lets think about this. iCloud gets rid of the entire concept of folders. It also allows the user to have a rich experience, because the quality of “apps” are much more robust and easier to use than a “web-app.” Some may argue, but all of these new innovations with HTML5 + JavaScript + <insert new buzz word> are simply technologies that try to re-create a desktop experience inside of the browser.

iCloud isn’t so much about moving your data into the cloud, than it is keeping your experience consistent across all of your devices. iCloud is about keeping your digital lifestyle in sync.

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Apr 27

The Unsubscribe User Experience

Unsubscribing is not fun. It sucks for the user because they are unhappy with a product/service and it sucks for a business because they have an unhappy customer. Talk about catch 22. The customer is always right so here is how you can make the process effortless:

1. Unsubscribing should take only 1-click. Don’t make them log into their account settings just so they can click an Unsubscribe button. That adds insult to injury.
2. Don’t follow up with an e-mail asking why they unsubscribed. The inbox is sacred and if a user is already banning your business from it by unsubscribing they sure as hell don’t want to give you feedback. 
3. Instead, measure your users behavior while they are on your site. Figure out what features they use most/least and plot a trend. Strip out features that aren’t being used, or customize a users experience to only show them what they use.
4. Once a customer is lost, they are gone for good, unless you can influence social intent. If a customer’s social network is using your product/service they are more likely to come back based on a referral. Take advantage of identifying where a user’s network is and foster it.

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Apr 22

3 Usability Tips for Login Screens

1. Don’t enable auto-complete for password fields. Having your 27 character password that contains at least two numbers, 3.5 capital letters and a llama, auto-corrected gets annoying very fast.
2. Use Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth. Nobody likes typing in that crazy long password. Chances are your users are already connected to Facebook and Twitter.
3. Don’t prompt for login until necessary. Why would someone give up their e-mail address and password just to try out your app? Face it, it’s probably not that great. Let them poke around and if they hit a premium feature they like, your user will sign-up in a heart beat.

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Apr 02

Thoughts on the Mobile Web

The iPhone is HOT. Android phones are flying off the shelves. Even Windows Mobile 7 is making a surprising run.

Businesses want apps on every platform, iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile 7.

This means they need to 3 types of developers:

1. An Objective-C developer for iPhone
2. A Java developer for Android
3. A .NET developer for Windows

or a rockstar ninja who can do all three.

Facebook recently announced the rollout of http://m.facebook.com to run on any device. This is amazing and gets the Facebook product into the hands of many with only 1 “web app”.

What’s the problem? The ever so hyped user experience.

The mobile web is still in its early days and very pre-mature. Sure we have javascript frameworks like jQuery Mobile and Sencha to make webpages “touch screen friendly” but lets face the facts, the experience sucks. It doesn’t compare to the quality of a home grown native app. Take for example drag & drop, or scrolling. If there is even a hint of flicker, or choppiness, its game over. The browser hasn’t advanced enough to deliver a rich user experience. Operating systems on the other hand, have. 

As the browser evolves, we’ll see what it can bring to the table, but this isn’t a new debate. Client side Java, Adobe Flash/AIR and Microsoft Silverlight have been developed well before the advent of mobile computing to make the browser experience better. They might not be great, but they were created to solve a problem.

Two words. User experience.

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