Video: How Steve Jobs’s Early Vision For Apple Inspired A Decade Of Innovation

Some mistakes will be made along the way… and thats good because some decisions are being made

A great article and some super videos from the past. I recommend you take 40 minutes to watch and digest this article.

Agile China 2011 Wrap Up

September 3, 2011

This has been a brilliant week in Beijing, so much cool stuff going on in this small town (only 20 million folks…). I was fortunate enough to visit some awesome local companies while here for Agile China 2011:

  • Yottaa, a SaaS service that specialises in website performance and optimisation.
  • Sina, think Twitter, CNN, Blogger, Yahoo and more all rolled into one. Over 200  million registered users!
  • LeTV, a Chinese version of Apple TV / iTunes. Over 200 million viewers every day!
  • XBOsoft, providing testing and quality assistance to global software companies.
While at the conference I met some local teams, many of which are still grappling with how to start an agile transformation. Plenty of CMMI / Waterfall teams here in Beijing from the conversations I have had. Very encouraging to see so many eager folks at the conference though!
My recommendation: get to Beijing, see what is going on in China, when agile takes off here it is going to be HUGE.

I wanted to kick off this recommended reading with two articles by Ash Maurya, a founder who follows and blogs lean startup principals.

How We Build Features – Ash Maurya, July 2011

Ash explains the customer validation and development process that is followed at USERcycle. I reckon this is a really great starter guide for new lean startups that want to follow the steps of a successful startup. Be sure to look at GreenHopper and the Rapid Board for your kanban board! The other article by Ash that you should look at is The Achilles Heel of Customer Development. All I can say is that analytics rock!

 

The Secret Guild of Silicon Valley – Michael E. Driscoll, August 2011

Following on from the lean startup getting started guides by Ash above in this article Michael reminds folks that there are a group that keep things humming behind the scenes. Know who he is talking about? I reckon we’re lucky to have a number of these guys at Atlassian. I wonder how successful Australian startups are at getting these people on board though.

Why Software Is Eating The World – Marc Andreessen, August 2011

If you haven’t read this then stop what you are doing now and go read it. A great treatise on the current state of the software development world and what we can expect to see in the future.

The End of Agile – Andy Hunt, August 2011

The following caught my attention in this article when talking about the foundation of agile and how some of the new buzz around agile misses the point.

We’re still uncovering, still discovering. And you should be, too. What works well for me won’t necessarily work well for you; what works well for you now won’t necessarily work well for you next time.

I was surprised to hear prescriptive practices being employed, and expected, in some ‘agile’ shops – ‘tell us how to do it, we want the best practices’. That to me speaks volumes. You are unlikely to succeed with an agile transformation if you are taking an approach like that, so stop now.

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar – July 2011

Worth the long read for a state of play in software development today. I was surprised at how many folks are/have adopted DevOps practices and are following the movement. Then again, there is a big DevOps community in Sydney.

Got something to share? Let me know.