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I’ve just been appointed the CTO of a small company with less than 10 employees. Companies of this size typically don’t have the luxury of hiring a professional Project Manager, hence the role almost automatically goes to the CEO of the company, since he is the product owner – Which creates a problem for me, summarised in the ingress of this article. But as the CTO, I’m also responsible for all IT choices, including infrastructure choices, so let me go through all of my choices below – Since these have consequences for the process we must follow.

Cloudless first

Cloud systems such as Azure or AWS are amazing products, with a feature list covering everything you can imagine. However, they’re also ridiculously expensive, typically at least 10x as expensive as a simple VPS providing the same value from an application deployment point of view. At my last company we paid €5,000 per month for Azure, and probably something similar for our AWS account (Sigh, yes, we used both! Not my decision though!) – Let’s say €8,000 per month to make sure we’re within the boundaries and that I am not exaggerating. I told my developers back at that company that I could have ran the whole company on a handful of VPS servers from DigitalOcean paying no more than €200 per month in total. Nobody believed me until our CTO confirmed my numbers more or less by saying; « At my former company we ran a 300,000 EUROs daily profit FinTech company for some 200 EUROs worth of droplets from DigitalOcean. »

Source de l’article sur DZONE

I try not to get involved in arguments – but when a debate started in the Dev Interrupted Discord about if exceptional continuous improvement (CI) or continuous delivery CD) makes a group agile or not, I had to jump in. I’ve helped build many high-performing teams with agility, and I know that neither CI/CD nor Scrum makes an organization Agile.

It’s Not What You Do, It’s How You Respond

Probably my favorite way I’ve ever heard someone describe agility was that it’s about moving away from believing we can predict and plan everything to sensing reality and responding to it instead.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Productivity is a crowded space, with countless apps and services promising to make your life and business easier and more profitable. Of all the apps that make that promise, very few deliver, but we’ve found one that does: Taskade.

Flexible Planning With Taskade

Every problem is unique, and part of what defines us as creative professionals is the different ways we approach problems. What suits one person in one situation doesn’t suit another in another. This is where many planning apps fall down: they adopt one singular approach and expect users to fit around the app.

Taskade is different. Like the love-child of Trello, Notion, and Slack, Taskade uses a template approach to create a flexible planning system that you can use in whatever way you prefer.

When you open up Taskade, you’ll see some quick options: ‘blank,’ ‘weekly planner,’ ‘meeting agenda,’ and so forth. But there’s also a ‘more’ option that will give you access to the hundreds of templates Taskade supplies. There are dozens of template categories, and each category contains multiple templates that you can use to drive your planning process.

Whether you’re looking for a task list for launching on Product Hunt, a design system checklist, or a project scrum board, you’ll find the template ready and waiting for you.

If none of the predesigned options are right for the task at hand, Taskade gives you the option to create your own template from the basic building blocks of boards, actions, mind maps, charts, and lists.

Team Collaboration With Taskade

One of Taskade’s main strengths is its ability to work equally well for individuals and teams.

It makes sense when you’re evaluating a product that you do it on your own. But we encourage you to bring team members on board early in the trial because it’s when working with teams that Taskade really excels as a collaborative tool.

Once you’ve created a new planning project, you can invite your team, either by email or — if they’re already registered — by tagging them with their Taskade username.

You can assign tasks to individuals or multiple individuals (a much better option than the free-for-all you find in some to-do apps). You can also set deadlines for tasks so that everyone knows what the schedule is.

Team Chat on Taskade

Another area that Taskade excels for teams is the built-in real-time live chat. You can communicate with team members right in the project instead of jumping onto Slack or email.

For teams working remotely, or even just multi-tasking throughout the day, it’s a great way of ensuring that everyone has the information they need. As a result, mistakes are minimized, and best of all, there’s a written record that can be referred back to at any time.

Chat can be sent to the whole team, or direct messaged to an individual, so you don’t need to worry about filling up everyone’s notifications with messages that don’t apply to them.

Project Management With Taskade

If you’re working on a single project, then you probably know exactly where it is at all times. But for anyone working on multiple projects, it can be hard to keep track of everything. So Taskade has several different options for project managers.

The Mindmap section is one of the most useful parts of Taskade because it gives you a complete overview of everything in your project. You can see what has been completed and how much time it took — that way, you can assess how viable the timeline for your other tasks is.

Another great feature of Taskade is the activity feed. When one of your team makes a change to a project, it will pop up in your activity feed, and the next time you log in, you’ll see the status of your projects with a single glance.

Multi-Platform

One of our favorite aspects of Taskade is that it works equally well across different platforms. As well as the desktop web app, you’ll also find native apps in the iOS app store and the Android play store.

Syncing your account over different apps is awesome because ideas often occur at inconvenient times — on your commute, walking the dog. Even when you’re at your desk, it’s much handier to grab your phone and make notes than it is to switch to your browser and visit a site.

Easy Registration

If you’re feeling the pressure of a bulging inbox, or to-do lists on multiple post-its, then the last thing you need is another complex, confusing task to add to the pile.

Taskade is super-easy to get started with. Just click the ‘Sign up’ link in the top right of the site, and you’ll have three options: Sign up with Google, sign up with your email, or you can continue as a guest.

If you’re not sold yet, then continue as a guest — essentially a free trial — you can sign in properly later once your curiosity is satisfied.

Free to Use

Taskade is free to use on a limited basis. The free plan comes with 500Mb of storage and a maximum 25Mb file size. You can create individual tasks or whole projects, workflows, and custom templates and share tasks and projects with your team. That’s enough to help you make the most of Taskade for $0.

If you find that the generous free plan isn’t quite enough, paid plans start at just $5 per month. The paid plan gives you unlimited storage and bumps the maximum file size up to 250Mb. You have the same core features as the free plan; it’s just that they’re unlimited, which means you can do even more planning. In addition, the paid plan adds some handy extra features that are great time-savers, such as sorting tasks, creating repeat tasks, and bulk assigning tasks. Just look at how Taskade compares to similar tools.

Most professionals will get along with the free plan just fine, but $5 per month for unlimited storage is a great deal. On top of that, you have future premium features to look forward to, including a project revision history and a calendar view.

You can sign up to Taskade for free now, as a guest, with your email, or with Google.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of Taskade –]

Source

The post Collaborative Task Management with Taskade first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.


Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

For a few years now, remote software development has become quite the trend and favorite. Remote software development teams who constitute remote development are usually a team of designers, product engineers, scrum masters, developers, and product managers. All of them work individually over the project cumulatively, resulting in a product’s delivery. 

Generally, in outsourcing, the concerned remote software development company will have dedicated managers overseeing the projects. But post the outbreak of the dreaded pandemic, things are changing. Due to work from home, remote teams operate from different locations. For Business Owners, it is a tedious task to ensure the management of these teams. If you happen to be outsourcing your product development or hiring a remote team to design, develop, and deliver projects, here are a few coolest tips to help you manage them. 

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Developers who tried to build at least one product for an end-user know how many things are essential in a product: thoughtful UX, friendly UI, good performance and stability, security and data consistency, logging and maintenance, etc.
Multiply this to the number of platforms that you have to support. Add marketings and licensing, client support and bug reports, new feature requests, and competitive product pressure.

It’s hard to track everything in one head, and it is even harder to be perfect at every job. That’s why we work in teams. That’s why we use project management processes.

Source de l’article sur DZONE


The daily stand-up is broken. 

No wonder. It was invented almost 30 years ago and we’re still running it the exact same way.

When daily stand-up meetings started in the early 90s, the software development process looked very different. Git didn’t exist. Jira didn’t exist. Collaboration tools didn’t really exist. DevOps didn’t exist. Automation tools didn’t exist. Analytics tools didn’t exist.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

With an open-mind, anything is possible. Even Scrum.
Photo credit by Unsplash/Artem Beliaikin

As a Scrum Master, I know that encouraging the development team, product owner, and organization in the adoption of Scrum is anything but not easy. It takes time (a lot of it) and patience.

And during that long journey, it’s vitally important that the Scrum Master never stops improving. In fact, it’s this commitment to continuous learning that helps me perform my responsibilities and enables my team to maximize the values of Scrum.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Implementing an Agile methodology was a critical success factor for the solutions developed by our team and for continuous customer satisfaction increase — indicated by the increase in satisfaction surveys, as well as the resulting customer comments congratulating the products and us. We develop solutions for a particular and crowded niche in the aviation industry.

Before introducing how Agile was implemented in our team, let me describe how our work environment was to contextualize it. In many articles about this subject, the authors state that Agile is not a silver bullet. I will also agree that this is true if you don’t receive the support from upper management. In our case, the need to go Agile was identified by the team, and the whole implementation process was bottom-up. We were lucky to have support from the upper management.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

I used to internally cringe when people mentioned code review – where developers check each other’s work after it has been implemented and suggest improvements. The tests were in place, QA had signed off, the product owner was happy. Surely by definition code review was just the practice of looking for problems.

If that sums up how you feel about code review, then sorry — you’re going to hate this. Nowadays, I think peer review is one of the most powerful devices for projecting best practice in a product, a team, a company and beyond. Notice I call it peer review rather than code review. To me, there are some important differences. Code review is good – it raises standards and awareness of standards. But peer review is more powerful still.

Source de l’article sur DZONE


Rugby Approach

In their research paper titled ‘The New New Product Development Game’, Hirotaka and Ikujiro (both professors at the Harvard Business School) observed that the sequential approach to developing products is not best suited to the fast-paced competitive world. Instead, they recommended a rugby approach for enterprises to attain speed and flexibility to meet the ever-changing market requirements. The rugby approach refers to the Agile way (scrum) of working with practices like small batch sizes, incremental development, self-organizing teams, enhanced collaboration, cross-functional teams, and continuous learning. To put things in perspective, this research paper was launched way back in 1986! If the traditional approach was being questioned back then, it definitely needs to be relooked at now. Enterprises need to adopt agile practices to stay relevant in a market which has become extremely dynamic due to the proliferation of digital technologies. Agile practices enable enterprises to deliver solutions faster with better quality by considerably shortening the feedback loop.

Scaling Blues

Though most enterprises have realized the significance of Agile, most organizations, especially the large ones have been struggling to scale Agile at the enterprise level. This is substantiated by a recent survey through which it was found that the enterprises who had claimed to be Agile have admitted that they had adopted Agile practices only in certain pockets. Interestingly, smaller and nimbler companies have adopted the agile way of working and achieved considerable success in the market. These companies released products at a remarkable speed with high quality and reacted faster to the market needs. Take Tesla’s case (by no means a small company now!!), which launched electric cars with the auto-pilot option when the Toyotas and Bugattis of the world only had prototypes of electric cars. By the time they launched their own electric vehicles, Tesla had captured a huge pie of the market!! To the defense of these large enterprises, scaling Agile is easier said than done. These behemoths have many portfolios, with large applications requiring multiple teams, complex systems, diverse operating environments, and multiple vendors, making their Agile transformation journey a herculean task.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)