Nicholas Muldoon

It has been a while since my last Recommended Reading due in large part to the two conferences in June – Atlassian Summit and Agile Australia. There is another great conference coming up early in August – Agile 2011. Apologies if I am quiet until I return from Salt Lake City in mid-August.

F*ck the process, embrace the team! – Ricki Sickenger, July 2011

In this article Ricki argues against all of the agile mumbo jumbo and puts it plainly – if you have a great team you will deliver. Hard to argue. We chop and change things in the GreenHopper team all the time. We do this to get a feel for what our customers are trying, experiencing, succeeding and failing at.

We do this as we build a tool for agile teams. “Oh no!” I hear you scream, “isn’t that what Ricki is arguing against?”. Well yes, and no. The team switches from long sprints to short sprints to kanban. We add estimation and drop estimation. We are constantly changing and adapting to see how different approaches impact the team and how our tool may assist the various approaches that our customers take. We do not want to force people into a certain worldview or approach, we do want to support teams while they focus on the individuals and interactions that will ensure they get stuff done.

The one constant throughout all of this is the GreenHopper team. They are awesome. They get stuff done. Embrace the team!

Inside Google+ – How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social – Steven Levy, June 2011

An interesting read. There have been many thousands of words written about Google since Schmidt moved aside earlier this year. This article points speaks volumes about a more mature Google with reinvigorated founders and a top notch product management team. Seems like Google is up to something big and gearing up for the next ten years. I am keen to see how Google+ plays out over the next 12 months.

Shop Centricity – A Case Study – Steve Mardenfeld, July 2011

I love how the crew at Etsy share so much about their motivation, infrastructure, learnings and development. Code as Craft is one you need to add to your Reeder. Atlassian has something similar which is also a great read.

Analytics is more than just building dashboards and graphs — it’s asking thoughtful, insightful questions and harnessing a wide-array of tools to answer them. Whether it’s large-scale distributed tools like Cascading and Hadoop or more traditional ones like R and Matlab, it doesn’t matter, as long the job gets done. At Etsy, we not only believe in keeping our data around, but we believe in harnessing it — to gather insight, to learn from our mistakes, and to grow.

What articles have you read and enjoyed lately? Please let me know via email or twitter.

A few articles to provide some insight into how others ‘do it’ and spur discussion within your team:

Quora : What key benefits did Twitter and Facebook uncover in crowdsourcing their translations?

While specific to Twitter and Facebook this Q&A on Quora includes further information on Atlassian Translations. Great insight is provided by Matt and Laura at Twitter as well. I have to admit, looking at the front-end experience of the Twitter Translation Centre leaves me wanting – wanting more for Atlassian Translations. We’ll need to get our act together and move back to the front-end after this stint on integration with the products.

Continuous Deployment is no Holy Grail – Jim Bird, May 2011

The other side to the continuous deployment argument which was made by John Wedgwood in my last post. In this article Jim points out the difficult aspects of continuous deployment. While I don’t yet have the evidence to back up this assertion I believe that many of the concerns Jim has can be overcome by automated testing – at least that is what I have heard second-hand from customers. More investigation on my part necessary.

Revenue, Personified – Cindy Alvarez, April 2011

Yes, another article from Cindy. I like her writing style and she selects great subjects to write about! In this article Cindy suggests questions you should be asking, as a product manager, about where your revenue comes from.

Midnight deploys are for idiots – Benjamin Pollack, March 2011

“Weekend deployments are for chumps.” A good read on why you should deploy mid-week. Better yet, deploy small pieces of work throughout the day to your customers so that you can quickly roll forward (not back) when any issues arise. I know a few people this has bitten.

Tracking slow requests with Dogslow – Erik van Zijst, May 2011

Very cool from a technical perspective. I love the analysis here. Erik digs into why Bitbucket was running slow by building an automated tool. This just reinforces the devops and continuous deployment culture that is developing within Atlassian – we want to know what is going on, we want it to be automated, and we want to smash any bugs on the head once and for all. On another note, my colleague Alex is picking up TDD and seems to be warming to it (after initial hesitation) which is awesome!

How to Scale a Development Team – Adam Wiggins, April 2011

Adam talks about the growth of the engineering team within Heroku, a PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider. My take away, if you are a startup you want to ensure you don’t get killed by indigestion.

Following on from my post in early May I thought I would share some articles that caught my attention this past week:

Continuous Deployment, Getting started is easier than you think – John Wedgwood, April 2011
An introduction to continuous deployment that is tailored towards startups. Any team can take the steps detailed in this article and move their own environment forward – focus on the high value items and continually inspect and adapt based on what you see.

Splitting User Stories – George Dinwiddie, May 2011
George provides a useful guide to assist with splitting user stories. More recently I have been trying to follow his suggestion of looking at the acceptance tests as individual stories. That approach seems to resonate with the engineers in the @GreenHopperTeam.

Flying Blind – Marty Cagan, May 2011
Marty’s book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard is a favourite of mine – I’ve lent it out a few times now and someone has yet to return it! In this article Marty focuses on the importance of user activity data in making product decisions. I’m struggling with the first step of this at present as none of the products I am responsible for (GreenHopper, Atlassian Translations, JIRA Wallboards) provides sufficient information to make informed decisions.

Do you want to recommend an article? Reach me on Twitter @njm.