Tom Hume

"In Sprint 41, I invented the bun... I invented the bun, in Sprint 41..."

What we learned:

1. You need to be disciplined to get acceptance tests written before development starts on them;
2. You need many strategies for communicating with remote teams: not all of them will work in any given situation;
3. Retrospective actions need following up, or the whole exercise is of moot value;
4. The current UK heat-wave causes problems and opens up opportunities :)

Another write-up of one of our planning days; Glastonbury having abducted our facilitatrix, I was running the review and retrospective sessions. This is undoubtedly a good thing for me to have more practice doing, but I worry about my ability to remain objective when wearing MD and Scrum Master hats, and having some opinions about the Way Things Ought To Be.

Worryingly (scrum smell ahoy!) there was little in the way of production software to show off at the review. Both teams had been working on one project (predominately), and in both cases a couple of large features were nearly-done, but not done done done - mainly due to dependencies on a third party which we're having trouble sorting out in a speedy manner, though in the case of Tonberry they had everything done for one story bar the automated tests. I'm hopeful that this means at the end of Sprint 42 we'll be inundated with new features to show off - i.e. that over 2 2-week sprints we'll have averaged out a little.

Ali showed off some of the widget work he's been doing recently for a new client (more on that in due course, I hope), and we had a good clutch of gold cards: Doug's produced another mobile application for alcoholics ("wake me up when my train gets home"), Chris had been doing some investigations into persistent storage efficiency using our Cactus database components for J2ME, and Tariq had some work on an Android app.

I've been worried about following up actions agreed at retrospectives - or rather, my not following them up as diligently as I should've been: there's little point in regularly agreeing to do stuff if it never gets done. So I kicked off the retro with a review of actions from the last time, highlighting the ones we've done and not yet gotten around to. I get the sense the strike rate was slightly higher, but I need to concentrate more on this in upcoming sprints.

Then the retrospective proper. I returned to a fairly standard format: each team member calling out 4 memorable moments from the previous sprint and getting them up onto a timeline. This brings out areas of common opinion or feeling from the team - unsurprisingly, many of us were pretty worried when one of the guys was taken into hospital at short notice, but environmental concerns about office temperature in the current heatwave were also a common theme, as was the visit a few of us made to Berlin on Monday. Some bug-fixing on an oldish project provided a boost to a few of us; stories not being finished provided a more sombre end-note to the sprint.

Having reached and discussed a group consensus on the previous 2 weeks, we moved onto actions, with each team member voting for something we should do in the immediate future, something we shouldn't do, and something we just don't understand. We then grouped these, discussed them and came out with a few to follow up on this sprint:

• We're becoming one team; with much of our work over the next couple of months being on a particular large project, we're combining the two development teams into one and sharing stand-ups and planning. A particular hope of mine is that this will encourage a lot more pairing up - 6 people can form many more combination of pairs than 3 - leading to a bit of variety, and a quicker path to getting those new to the project up to speed with i.
• We'd slacked off on a practice everyone had agreed had value, and worked well for us: writing acceptance tests for a story at the start of its development, and involving developers, QA, designers and the Product Owner in this session. Efforts are accordingly being redoubled in this department.
• A hot working environment is unpleasant: Thom was tasked to look into possible coolants.
• The speed of communication with a remote customer was highlighted as an issue by the team. I'm quite proud of the quantity of work we've done in the past, working with teams in London, Denmark, Helsinki or China... and past post-project retrospectives have highlighted the value of shortening decision times, so we've lots of little tricks we can use to ease the pain here. Recently we'd hit some problems which they weren't helping with, so we opted to raise the issue with the customer.

Other things we discussed included ways to improve our test automation (with some interesting suggestions floating for ways to document and improve test coverage of the user-interface elements of MIDlets or other mobile apps), and the need (or otherwise) to re-estimate stories before planning. The latter ended up with quite a long-running and heated debate (of the type we try and avoid having normally in retrospectives). I'm not convinced we got to the end of it but it feels like concerns have at least been aired. I posted round a Mike Cohn blog entry on the topic afterwards, which summed up the way I felt, but much more eloquently than I could put it.

Other observations I'd have: sprint burndowns don't seem to be so handy for us. They don't often get referred to and in some cases haven't been updated too frequently. I'm not sure what to do here: I think our story sizing relative to team capacity might be a bit off, and perhaps a larger team will make a difference.

We're Googly as fuck nowadays - we don't tend to move without creating a spreadsheet or document about it, and seem to have settled on it as our standard means of electronic collaboration.

And finally, we're holding standups outside for this sprint - partly to deal with the heat, and partly to recognise that with a team of 8-10, finding a board we can cluster around and actually refer to is tough with our current office configuration...

So, it's that time again. We're exceptionally busy and have won a few new projects and clients in the last month or two - with no sign of business slowing. So we're on the look-out for staff again. We're after a few different souls:

• Developers, ideally with some commercial experience of mobile (J2ME, Android or iPhone), and familiarity with or experience working in an agile environment (if you read this blog you'll know we're a quite formal Scrum shop). You'll have a strong appreciation for the role user experience plays in the software development process. You'll obviously be excellent.
• Mid- to senior-level designers; we'd be open to considering someone without commercial mobile experience, but you'll definitely need a strong background in digital media and a genuine enthusiasm for mobile. We're after someone with a mix of visual and interaction skills - we think the line between the two is blurred, and we like it that way. You'll have to be willing to get your hands dirty and learn a little about how your designs are actually implemented. Strong communication skills will be vital.
• QA - and specifically, someone interested in QA as a career path in its own right, rather than seeing it as a stepping stone to a development job. Over the last couple of years we've developed a huge appreciation for thorough, pedantic, devious, downright cruel QA folks who can find obscure bugs with which to taunt our developers, all in the nicest possible way of course. Someone with experience of both manual and automated testing would be a bonus; double points if you've worked in an agile environment before.

For all roles, you'll be working from our offices in central Brighton, and be very comfortable working in a cross-disciplinary team. You can have a look at our site to get a feel for what we do if you like, though I'll warn you that it's horrendously out of date and gives only a vague feel for where we're headed... We offer good salaries and an opportunity to work on *huuuge* software products which touch the lives of literally millions of people, for a global client base. We like to travel - earlier this year most of the company spent 2 weeks camped out in Shenzhen, China, kicking off a project for Microsoft - but it's not in any way compulsory. We also make a point of allowing time for personal development and R&D, and do some reasonably off-the-wall projects: birdwatching, ghost hunting, and location-based gaming have all decorated our portfolio. Drop an email to recruitment@futureplatforms.com if you're interested, and we'll have a chat. Unless you're a recruitment agency of course, in which case stop reading right now and please avoid the temptation to get in touch, even if you're completely unlike all the other agencies and incredibly special in a way that you can't quite describe without sound like just another bloody recruitment agency. Honestly - every time I post a job advert and politely say "no agencies please" I'm assaulted by a tidal wave of dull phone calls from recruiters who seem to think that by ignoring me completely they'll somehow persuade me to pay them fees, and it's all gotten a bit boring.

So, it's been a week since I got back from Mobile 2.0 - and therefore highly remiss that I've not written about it yet.

I really enjoyed both the Developer Day and the main event. The former seemed to be focused around mobile web - with widgets in particular getting a lot of prominence. Whilst I'm not convinced that widgets are the future of all mobile apps, it's an area where - until recently - I've let myself lag behind a little, so I got a lot out of the sessions. And one quote from the very beginning has stuck with me - Dan Appelquist remarking that applications are nowadays being consumed more like songs than software.

The main event was pretty decent. On both days some panel discussions had a tendency to get a bit angels-on-pinheads - the one where 4 people debated publicly about who was most "open", each using a slightly different definition of the much overused word, didn't really hold my attention. But the off-track talks really shone for me - Tom Raftery berating the industry for its at best token gestures towards environmentalism, and Regine Beatty and Atau Tanaka one-upping each other with wonderful examples of mobile frivolity. And outside of these, Ted Morgan of Skyhook talking about their business (200m location searches a day, vs 300m or so Google searches per day!) and Priya Prakash's talk on Beyond Free (an evolution of the last few sessions I've seen her do) were particularly memorable.

The venues (Barcelona Activa and ESADE) were both excellent (modulo the temperature of rooms in the former, which got quite stuffy). Now I've experienced the double-whammy of rock-solid wi-fi and power at every seat, I suspect I'm going to be a little spoilt.

More than this though, on a personal level I got a lot out of the event. It seemed to have a perfect mix of 50% familiar faces and 50% new (and friendly) ones - I'm not a natural networker, but felt very comfortable at the event. And in particular it was great to finally meet Dom and Francois of the W3C and Mike Rowehl - all of whom I've known for a while, but only in a virtual sense. It's nice to have that corrected :)

I did a couple of sessions; one on Mobile User Experience for Developer Day, which was well attended but missed the mark a little, I felt. I emphasised how we run UX alongside development at FP over and above the specifics of mobile UX, and whilst my audience seemed happy to engage on this, I think I could've either been clearer in the title for the session, or put more emphasis on tactics than on process.

The "play" panel I sat on at the very end of the event was a different matter: really good fun, and an utter privilege to talk about location-based gaming, ghost hunting, shitting and sex, generative music and digital rights issues with Professor Tanaka, Gustav Soderstrom of Spotify, Akhil Monappa of Atlas Venture, and Michael Breidenbruecker - the lovable nutter behind Last.fm and RJDJ - all ably held together by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.

And again, on a personal note I had a very interesting chat with Ted Morgan at the post-event dinner, learning exactly what it's like to get into work one day and find a message from Steve Jobs on your voicemail :)

Thanks to Rudy, Dan, and all the organisers and behind-the-scenes folks who made it happen. I'm already looking forward to next year, though I think I might give myself an extra day in Barcelona to help recover from Sonar...

Mobile 2.0: Beyond Free, Panel

Moderator: Inma Martinez, Stradbroke

Harald Neidhardt, Smaato

Fee Beyer, Berlin

Ian Ginn, Amsterdam

Dr Lai Kok Fung, BuzzCity

Priya Prakash, Nokia

IM: It's hard to fund mobile-specific busines

IM: What digital goods are being sold for a decent price?

PP: It depends on context. What goods are being sold on ebay?

PP: There's a distinction between creating an application and a service. In the song analogy, it's like being a creative musician. Anyone know of any apps which are service-like?

IM: There's a company in Madrid who does betting on mobile goods. They auction cars, games consoles, by text message: you bid for the ident, lowest price.

IM: What are the services worth paying for?
FB: Infrastructure companies like Orbster ("infrastructure on the phone").

IM: Imagine your service complementing others, so the uptake of users is faster. What elements are worth paying for? PP stresses UI...
PP: It's not just about the UI, that's where we're going wrong. UI can be lipstick on a pig. It's the whole ecosystem, there's as much design in the business model as in the presentation layer.

FB: To push a service through the operator organisation is very different.

IM: So many people create nice applications, but not apps you'd want to pay for.

LKF: In some emerging markets, we saw mobile banking as strong.

Q (Andrew Scott, Rummble): You need to focus on product, not revenue.

Q: (Martin, Layar) How should we charge?

IG: It feels like a killer app. I'd make a 30m drama about it to get the story out.

LKF: Make it work on all phones.

PP: Think about the discovery - who's going to help me find it?

IG: Make it newsworthy. Save a life with it, get it on the news.

Q: I keep hearing talk about money. But I like the iPhone because people can make an app without having money, and release it to a community - for social capital. Why do we focus on financial game? Why can't we help make life better?

A: If you're talking about a venture funded business, VCs have a different model. Bootstrap, don't talk to a VC - unless you're making something beyond amazing or your team has already done it before, your valuation will be so low... VCs are banks. The app store today is a good model for small developers, or Salesforce etc (having a mobile implementation of a pre-existing platform online).

Mobile 2.0: Priya Prakash, Nokia: Beyond Free

Priya's slides are online here.

What's a designer doing talking about pricing? Unless there's a seamless and delightful user experience, nothing will sell. We know that people report higher priced wine as better.

Between Apple and Dixons, the last mile for delivering consumer technology is broken.

iPhone owners are a community, a club. iPhone purchasers are buying into a community.

The Wii community is proud of the injuries they've sustained - yet we consider this poor usability.

What is free? Time and attention are not free, nor are status and effort.

If you want users to upgrade from free to paid, you need to demonstrate the clear benefits they're missing in the free version, and design seamless calls to action to get them to convert. 37 signals are very clear on what their basic plan doesn't do.

Metrics are gold dust, they're a key tool for learning about your users.

If they've paid for it, users will return to an application more often.

If you want to monitise the user experience, you need a highly reactive business strategy.

Mobile 2.0: Regine Debatty on Mobile & Culture & Arts

Wants to cover how artists, designers and hackers use technology today. Ex-Latin and Greek teacher.

She shows off a series of art projects. I sit in my chair grinning ear to ear:

• Limor Fried, Wave Bubble, a portable piece of kit to jam nearby mobile signals.
• the portable cell phone booth.
• the privacy scarf
• Bikes Against Bush
• SMS Guerilla Projector, received praise form the Street Promotions guy at Warner Bros.
• Parasite, "an independant projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads"

Mobile 2.0 Europe: Context Panel

Moderator: Raimo van der Klein, SPRXMobile

Gregr Skibiski, Sense Networks

Tommy Ahers, Vodafone (ex-Zyb)

Felix Petersen, Nokia Berlin

Ted Morgan, SkyHook

Xavier Carrillo Costa, Digital Legends

XCC: we spend a lot of money simulating the real world. Now we're connecting with the real world, and it's changing the game paradigm.

TM: Have difficulty figuring out some behaviour. We see some locations which have huge numbers of lookups, but can't work out why. One of our heaviest location users on the iPhone is the RIM HQ.

FP: We have a successful mapping product. We realised a couple of years back that we didn't need to license traffic data, we could gather it ourselves from looking at behaviour of users with our product. Google built a product on the back of inferring meaning from links between pages; we can do the same with geographic links.

TA: Heading up location team at Vodafone now. When I promised to change Vodafone from the inside, I didn't realise how big it was :) Enabling location apps through the web framework.

GS: We get lots of data from carriers around location. 4-5% of people will use an app 15 times on the iPhone. So can we use combinations of location and other date to predict which apps people will use? There is a link between historical location usage and app usage - e.g. for directory applications, someone moving around a lot is more likely to use one.

Q: Where do you get the data to predict churn, age, sex?

GS: Direct from carriers. Usage of the data is tightly regulated, but for an internal purpose like churn measurement is allowed. External stuff like marketing has to be opt-in.

Q: The US is not very regulated when it comes to privacy. Can you give us examples of data extracted for LBS in Europe, compliant with DPA and Privacy laws?

A: (TA) Latitude. (FP) At Nokia we opted against doing a friend-finder product. The issue is tracking vs publishing; Latitude seems a little naive.

RVDK: Location updates are social behaviour - when people update their location manually, they're saying something.

FP: Manual location updates are more interesting and more relevant.

Q: How far can prediction go?

GS: We take a group of people, a year of behaviour, crunch the data, then work out if they e.g. like rap music, go out at night, and can see we've accurately predicted what they like.

FP: I have to make an effort to physically go somewhere - so it has a lot of meaning. Dopplr are doing interesting stuff with location and the social graph; I tried it and they predicted places I'd like with surprising accuracy, based on very little data.

TM: Most advertising is based on your home, which is where you spend very little time.

FP: But this doesn't matter. We used to derive intent from demographic data, now we can predict it from real behaviour.

XCC: In the console world we manually mine data.

Q: The location visualisation and predictions are fascinating. Can you say anything about apps that generated swarm behaviour?

GS: Talks about taxi visualisations; these bring a feedback loop which modify behaviour.

TM: We've not seen anyone build swarm behaviour, but don't have access to the data in realtime so it's hard.

Q: Context is more than location, it's about a network too.
FP: We've seen lots of interesting examples... we can derive more than location from the phone. We form social graphs every day by interacting, the explicit "we are friends" of Facebook is very raw. If we could mine your everyday life we could be more subtle.

Mobile 2.0 Europe: Ted Morgan, Skyhook

"We're the guys who put the dot on the map". Preinstalled on iPhone, iPod Touch. Number of LBS apps growing - now 3000 across devices, tho vast majority on iPhone.

Mainly travel/navigation apps, but social (not including FB, Myspace or Twitter, none of whom natively do LBS), lifestyle, fitness, are next categories.

Average user requests their location 6 times/day (more than typical number of calls/day): totally 200m requests a day via Skyhook (compare to US Google traffic of 5-600m searches/day).

Two examples: Trulia and Taxi Magic.

Trulia: house-finder showing where nearest open houses available for viewing are nearby (instead of showing all sales).

Taxi magic: one button ordering and paying for taxis.

Last Call: track your drinking, know when to call the cab, find the nearest lawyer.

Geocade: location-based leaderboards for multiplayer games - narrowing down leaderboard by people around you. Lovely.

License plate finder, where you get scored on how far away you are from the state in question, cute.

UFO finder: find sightings near you for the last 40 years.

Average price of location apps: Apple $3.60, Android $0.84, Blackberry $13.60, Ovi $3.18, Palm free.

Mobile 2.0: Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability

greenmonk.net

Drivers for sustainability: climate change (we're all fucked) and the business case (sustainable companies tend to outperform their competitors).

ICT could reduce 15% CO2 emissions globally: through 1bn PCs, 1.2bn landlines, 1.4bn internet users, 4bn mobile users. So mobile is the target for this stuff.

Handset manufacturers are doing sod all: they all have "a green phone".

Many carriers don't mention sustainability initiatives: O2 have a reasonable site, Telefonica and 3 don't.

What are developers doing? Clearstandards have an iPhone app to calculate carbon footprint. 3rdWhale, MobiMonster also get a mention - the latter reduces energy usage of phone. But nothing really significant.

What if:

• Manufacturers made phones to last 6y not 6m? 60% of a phones carbon footprint comes from manufacture. Rent phones, don't buy them.
• Phones were made from biodegradables?
• USB chargers were standard?
• Operators switched to e-billing?
• Operators shared networks?
• Developers used mobile platform to build apps which mae a difference?
• Grid computing client apps were made for mobiles?

I wonder... How does mobile compare to PC - are phones implicitly more energy-conservative? And what specifically can developers do?

Mobile 2.0: Panel Discussion on openness

Moderator: Matthaus Krzykowski, VentureBeat

David Wood, Symbian

Jacob Lehrbaum, Sun

Andreas Constantinou, VisionMobile

Pat Phelan, Cubic Telecom

Christian Sejersen, Mozilla

MK: What is openness to you at 8am on a Monday?
AC: There was a big splash around openness 2008/2007 when Android came along.
DW: It's a culture change, around getting trust from the community.
CS: Most communication takes place in the open - wiki, newsgroups and IRC.
PP: As a semi-MNO we've had to go in and build APIs. Carriers are quite closed in general.
JL: I came from a hardware background (where open was about systems), then into software (which had its own definition), then mobile, where open means "you can install an application on your phone".
AC: We have open application SDKs, communities. Android is open source, but can you influence its development. Governance models cover everything a source code license doesn't: can I influence the source code, who arbitrates between contributions, can I get nightly builds.
DW: Is Open just marketing? No, we're in the middle of a 2-year project to open the Symbian source - we wouldn't do this for marketing brownie points. There are companies that have done a good job with a tightly controlled stack, but over time we think that open standards win out. Look at Firefox, it's not downloaded because it's open source, but because it's a good product.

...

JL: There's a balance between giving people to ability to change anything they like, and keeping compatibility (particularly across devices).
PP: 50% openness is like being half pregnant

DW: Alongside any drive to openness is a drive to ensure the system isn't corrupted from within.

Q: I own mean. How do I get access to systems which have been closed for a long time?

DW: Symbian will open two new websites for participation from customers: not just developers, but gadget enthusiasts too, requesting features. And we want to lower the barrier for easier programming: Python, Flash.

Q: Isn't an open platform one that doesn't charge $1500 to get source access (Symbian)?

DW: It will be free ASAP, by June next year or maybe sooner. We can't open it up immediately because it currently contains entangled 3rd party software code.

Q: What do you think of operator-owned app stores? Are they not a walled garden?

JL: Many to date have been closed. If you're selling something you need to take responsibility for its quality - even if it's free. So there's a level of closedness you need as a vendor.

CS: There has to be a check in the app store for it to have credibility.

DW: OSS needs some help to avoid the problems Christian has highlighted - avoiding fragmentation.

Q: 10 years later we need to talk about openness and making money. Where have we gone wrong.

CS: We don't charge for products, we do rev share on search partnerships.

Q: How can open be safe?

AC: It's not about safety, it's about blame. Who pays the bill for fixing it? With Java, you ask the user to take on liability for installation by asking them regularly.

CS: Open source is one of the best vehicles for making secure products - it rules out security by obscurity.

Q: Who pays for the cost of policing the apps ecosystem?

JL: Carriers often feel responsible because they own the customer relationship. Anyone who the consumer feels they have a relationship with has to take on some of the responsibility.

PP: Apple have a competitive pricing model, and that includes the cost of their organisation to police it.