Agile Development

I recently attended a Society for Technical Communications meeting where Kathryn Poe and Matt Stringfellow spoke about Agile Development. Kathryn and her Matt did a great job explaining how Agile development can impact those of us a the end of the waterfall, this is what I took away from their informational speech: 

Agile Development allows us writers, and software documentation specialists to have roleswithin product development- especially in the realm of software development, rather than below or after development roles. 

Documenting, writing Q.A. and developing basic marketing slicks or website text after a product is completed puts us in a bind. We are the last straw to getting a product to market, and as such in this role we are under the waterfall of the product deadline. If the development team falls short of meeting a deadline, whose time are they eating up? Most likely the person who’s job is put into the perspective of “just checking a checkbox”, or whose job is last on the to-do-list. The product documentation ends up being done in 2 weeks, for a product that took 2 years to develop- not cool!

I learned from a recent DFW-STC meeting, that Agile development allows the writers, documentation specialists, Q,A. people, and marketers alike to over come the waterfall effect that always seems to happen in a development schedule. 

The key, it seems to overcoming such an obstacle, is to document, while the product is being developed, by breaking up the development cycle into chunks. By developing one feature at a time until it is finished (feature has been bug tested, wired up with the GUI, documented, Q.A.’d - finished) you can come out from under the development schedule and join it. Developing in this manner is supposed to help keep the team afloat as well, by encouraging the meeting of shorter more concise deadlines, as opposed to only thinking about the end- that huge looming deadline 2 years in the future, (or however long) that the entire product is supposed to be configured. 

This type of development it seems, also causes less re-working, and re-configuring of features, because once a feature is finished it takes a lot more work to re-open it, and start over. It is much more work, and it makes a feature that was only supposed to get 2 weeks of development time, eat up 4. 

All in all, I think Agile is a pretty good option, if you have a development team large enough to work on one feature at a time, and still meet the end product deadline. I’m not sure what happens when you work in a very small development environment.

If you are interested in learning more about Agile Development please check out Agile Alliance the Agile Community Website or the book The Art of Agile Development.

Flash in CS4

Over the past couple of days, I have been soaking up everything I can about the new Adobe CS4 suite. So far I am pretty impressed. 

The new Adobe Flash impressed me a lot. My company has been teetering around the idea of incorporating some awesome flash into our website, but we simply lack the flash manpower/expertise to spend months building a couple of mediocre videos.

Flash for CS4 allows you to eliminate many of the unnecessary steps to animate a symbol image. You used to have to “tween” a symbol image, which required many laborious steps. With the new version of Flash, you simply drag your image in the direction you want it to move, and the motion guides are created for you. Phenomenal!

It sounds like this new version of Flash, will help us to create more stunning video than we had anticipated, and in less time! Fantastic!

Please check out the video on Flash Motion Tweening from Layers Magazine.

Google Chrome

Surely by now you have heard of the new browser- Google Chrome, and if you haven’t it is about time you try it out. I would not make it your preferred browser yet, because although Google boasts that it was able to perform rigorous testing on Chrome before it’s release, it is not without its share of new application bugs. 

The Google browser is definitely trademarked by its Google rather minimalist styling, but does seem to hold some advantages when you look at the technology that is powering it. There is a great comic strip describing the technology Google implemented for Chrome, and why it is supposed to be superior to other, current web browsers. 

Check it out, and see for yourself how you feel about Google’s latest advance to take over the internet industry.

Have you heard of Thermo??

Adobe Thermo, a new product built for designers to work in conjunction with another Adobe product, Flex, is slated to come out this Fall. Thermo is supposed to give designers the ability to create Rich Internet Application UI’s, from a designer perspective, without having knowledge of code. Thermo’s purpose is to allow a designer to apply motion and effects to their artwork to give the developers a better idea of what a specific item is supposed to do.

The hype around Thermo is undeniable, but will it live up to its expectations? One of the biggest concerns about Thermo is its ability to produce clean, useful code. If the code is messy and ill formated, how useful will this be to the development process really?

I guess we will not know a definitive answer to this question until the release of Thermo, slated for later on this year. I will be at the top of the list of those downloading their free trial- until then, we will wait patiently!

Check out a video on the Ajaxian Blog.

Silverback for Usability Testing

While I was perusing Garret Dimon’s blog I came across his article about a new product- Silverback, for usability testing. 

I went to the website and downloaded the free 30 day trial, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was as simple to use as Garrett had described. Silverback allows you to capture screen activity quickly and easily, while using your isight camera to capture the users reactions. There are no fancy edit features or unnecessary bells and whistles, but what you do get is an easy setup- turn it on and hit “new project” and you are ready to go, and a super sleek user interface.

Silverback has been developed specifically for Mac users, which holds its own drawbacks, but all in all, I give Silverback a big high five!

Late Bloomer

Social Media is obviously not a new invention, but I am just now catching up with this trend. 

Sorry to be such a late bloomer!