Over the years a lot has been done to enhance the control and efficiency of application development processes. From Agile development to change management solutions based on ISO and ITIL standards, the progress has been remarkable. However, like everything else, this, too, has a downside. They say that every cloud has a silver lining, but in the world of technology, this silver lining is likely to affect the functionality of the cloud. The increase in the use of Agile development has aggravated the pressure IT organizations face in deploying new applications.
Each new enterprise application brings in several diverse application components spread across numerous environments, including application servers, desktops, Web servers, mobile devices, databases, etc. Also, most large organizations have different departments handling each of these functions, and the potential product users are often not in control of the timelines. Besides, since security and compliance requirements put a lot of burden on the IT teams, companies adopt a "better safe than sorry" approach and discourage employees from easily getting new applications or their versions. For the product vendor, the total cost of support is directly proportional to the number of older versions out there in the field.
A confession: when someone emails to a large technical list a "simple" question, I’ve sometimes in the past felt a sense of "How can you not know this? Everyone knows this! We solved this in 2004!" But of course, everyone can’t possibly know even "the basics"; there’s no such thing as "herd knowledge" among software developers. There’s no "All Developers Everywhere" mailing list (thankfully), and there’s no monthly "Developer’s Journal" which new grads are forced to pore through until they’re fully caught up (again, for the best I expect).
There’s also no getting around the fact that 2004 is starting to feel like a very long time ago — we’re closer to 2030 than 2004 even now, and people born in 2004 will be starting Comp Sci degrees all too soon.
A community is only as strong as its contributors. Whether you’re at the top when it comes to user engagement, or you’re at the bottom struggling to excite your users to participate, here are 13 tips to help you improve engagement and foster a mentality of sharing.
1. Create Exclusivity
Who doesn’t like being rewarded for their work? (obviously a rhetorical question!) Everyone likes to be rewarded for their work, and your community is no different. To successfully run a community your members need to be engaged, sharing, and collaborating. To encourage participation, create exclusivity for your best users. Options to do so could be sending them a swag pack, creating a beta preview of your upcoming software release, sending them conference tickets, or inviting them to your headquarters. The opportunities are endless, so be creative.
User experience design (UXD or UX) is a process of using a product to improve user satisfaction. It can be done by improving the usability of a product or making it more accessible to them easily, and sometimes it involves making the product pleasurable to a user by helping create an interactive link between a user and the product.
The main goal of implementing and developing user experience is to help solve an end users’ problem and this ties the success of the process to communicating the design to both the developers and the stakeholders.
Every organization and business needs a good project management tool to make work more efficient and collaboration more effective.
According to research by Capterra, project management software is the most needed software by nearly half of the U.S.
A project’s success stems from a number of things. Among others, it includes sensible planning, professionalism of the team members and individual productivity levels.
Nevertheless, there are certain aspects to almost every project that take more time than planned. This leads to missed deadlines and incomplete task scopes. Do you remember the last time your project met the deadlines? In this article, we are going to discuss three central problems with project time.
It’s been a while since my last reader question post. It’s hard to feel too bad, though. I was combining a cross-country relocation with a two-week vacation. So I suppose the internet just had to do without my wisdom for a few weeks.
But I’m back in the saddle, so that changes today.
Feedback is a vital part of any project manager’s skillset. Not just giving it, but also receiving it. Let’s talk about its role, why it’s so valuable and how to get better at providing it.
The Benefits of Feedback
For a start, providing feedback—when done regularly—keeps everyone on track. That’s beneficial for anyone involved in the project.
Scrum and Kanban are undoubtedly the practical guides to doing agile. The popularity they have garnered over the last few decades has been overwhelming. Many agile practitioners prefer Scrum, Kanban and even newer methodologies like "Scrum-Ban"; the debate continues on which one you should choose. Let us try to unravel the key similarities and differences and their relevance in today’s software realm.
A Brief History of Scrum and Kanban
Have you seen a storekeeper stocking his supermarket shelf? When he observes that the shelf is near empty, he refills goods from the warehouse. The storekeeper never had a huge stock in his warehouse; he simply replenishes them when they near depletion. In effect, inventory levels are decided based on consumption pattern. In 1950s, engineers at Toyota were inspired by this model and adopted this in their factory floors. This practice smoothened their inventory levels and eliminated waste significantly. This system later came to be known as Kanban. Kanban simply enforces a strict work-in-progress limit and provides a visual understanding of progress of task.
