Some ideas on the best of use of time in sprint zero of an agile project.
- Understand your context
- Identify risks
- Understand the business process
- Get testing infrastructure
- Understand quality attributes
- Get to know the people
- Prepare an initial product backlog
- Build a walking skeleton/spike
- Build a learning backlog
Good advice on print styles from Rachel. The browser support situation is frustrating; I suspect it’s because the people working on browsers would rather get stuck in on shinier stuff.
Everything old is new again—sometimes the age-old technique of using a 1x1 pixel image to log requests is still the only way to get certain metrics.
While tracking pixels are far from a new idea, there are creative ways in which we can use them to collect data useful to developers. Once the data is gathered, we can begin to make much more informed decisions about how we work.
A wonderful short story from Matt. I can see this one staying with me.
I had a chat with Toby Osbourn over Skype. He’s writing a book all about print stylesheets so that’s we talked about.
A nice little use of print (and screen) styles from Bastian—compose letters in a web browser.
Instead of messing around in Word, Pages or even Indesign, you can write your letters in the browser, export them as HTML or PDF (via Apple Preview).
A wonderfully thoughtful piece from Robin, ranging from the printing technologies of the 15th century right up to the latest web technologies. It’s got all my favourite things in there: typography, digital preservation, and service workers. Marvellous!
Cennydd enumerates what design sprints are good for:
And also what they’re not so good for:
Lovely prints!
The Robot Life Survey is an alternative-history from design company After the flood, where mechanical intelligence is discovered by man, noted and painted for posterity and science.
This is a rather lovely idea—a disc with eight rings, each marked with the position of a planet, the arrangement of which corresponds to a specific date.
Clever! By exploiting the redirect pattern that most social networks use for logging in, and assuming that site’s favicon isn’t stored in a CDN, it’s possible to figure out whether someone is logged into that site.
Rachel takes a look back at twenty years of building on the web. Her conclusion: we’ve internalised constraints that are no longer relevant, and that’s holding us back from exploring new design possibilities:
Somehow the tables have turned. As the web moves on, as we get CSS that gives us the ability to implement designs impossible a few years ago, the web looks more and more like something we could have build with rudimentary CSS for layout. We’ve settled on our constraints and we are staying there, defined by not being print.
If you’re intrigued by the kind of design sprints I wrote about recently, here’s a handy collection of resources to get you going.
- Pre-sprint
- Understand: Gather existing knowledge, expose assumptions and unknowns
- Diverge: Illuminating all possible paths
- Converge: Choose the right path
- Prototype: Quickly build the right path
- Test & Learn: Test the right path
Myself and Batesy spent last week in Ipswich doing an intense design sprint with Suffolk Libraries. Leon has written up process from his perspective as the client—I’ll try to get a case study up on the Clearleft website soon.
This is really great write-up; it captures the sense of organised chaos:
I can’t recommend this kind of research sprint enough. We got a report, detailed technical validation of an idea, mock ups and a plan for how to proceed, while getting staff and stakeholders involved in the project — all in the space of 5 days.
Really interesting to see how Jason, Lyza, and co. are handling the process side of responsive design by using Agile sprints. This is how we’re doing it at Clearleft too.
There’s a really good point in here about starting with small-screen sketching:
For most of the sprint, we focus on small screens. We’re often asked how things will work on wider screens early in a sprint, but we try to resist thinking about that yet.
If you’ve managed to organize your life to fit inside a New York City apartment, you’re not going to have any trouble adjusting to a big house in the suburbs. The same is true of responsive designs.
If you nail the small screen design, the larger sizes will be easy by comparison.
Jon writes about the difficulty of maintaining an overall design vision when you’re working to an agile methodology, slicing up work into sprints.
This pairs nicely with Mark’s recent podcast episode: On Agile.
This was a fun way to spend the day—getting my hands dirty with ink and type.
Now you can get a 7” x 10” print of the cast of Ariel’s fantastic spaceprob.es site.
I think this would look quite fetching in the Clearleft office.
Print out the plans, fold and glue/sellotape the paper together, and you’ve got yourself the best sci-fi robots in recent cinema history.
A nice profile of BERG’s Little Printer. That Matt Webb is a smart cookie. He is also a very thoughtful cookie.