• Why do release planning? "A release plan helps a team avoid finishing a series of sprints and feeling that, while they always worked on the highest priority items, the collection of work completed does not add up to a satisfying whole."
• Built to Learn: "No marketing team. No engineering team. You need a problem team and a solution team."
• I'm really enjoying reading Steve Blank at the moment, particularly his war stories of understanding the customers and building the marketing department of a US startup in the early 80s.
• Large-scale software engineering and kanban, touching on branching-by-feature, something we're gradually leaning (ho ho) towards at FP...
• Matt Wynne on automated acceptance testing: "prioritising the tests with the highest chance of failure seems to be the key here: The reason write automated tests is because we want rapid reliable feedback about any mistakes we’ve made. Fail fast has long been a motto of XP teams, but perhaps we’ve forgotten how it can relate to our build."
• The Fog Creek Professional Ladder; I plotted us on this, and was pleasantly surprised to see we have - broadly, but not exactly, and certainly more by luck than judgement so far - achieved a similar mapping.
• The Pomorodo Technique for personal time management. I tried this today, and will be continuing it throughout the week to see if it makes any difference. Nike+ proved to me that monitoring my own behaviour modifies it (for the better, in that case). Let's see...
• We tried baseball, and it didn't work. Heh.
• Five whys. NEVER USE THIS IN PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS.

• The Guardian runs a piece of iPhone apps, sensibly pointing out that not everyone developing apps is a millionaire just yet.
• That said, apps seems to be selling faster than songs did: "It took Apple more than two years to sell 1 billion songs on iTunes, so it's going to hit 1 billion apps about three times faster."
• Lovely if frightening piece on the Register about the mobile as self-inflicted surveillance: "There are already two documented cases in Europe where not carrying a mobile phone was considered one of the grounds for arrest"
• The panopticon ain't all bad, depending on who's doing the watching;
• Some fairly obvious video chat patents for the iPhone;
• US mobile carriers want fewer OSs, film at 11, though why any carrier wants to get involved with supplying "a unified development environment" to provide cross-device consistency is beyond me. Developer support is probably the one thing operators have been worse at than being media companies (with a few exceptions I won't go into now, so everyone I know at operators thinks I'm talking about them).
• Sulake are doing a mobile virtual world, and about time too.
• Nokia have launched the Ovi store, though please god don't let them use "location sensing and social networks" to start recommending applications.
• Android went priced, and about time too. We've had surprisingly high download figures for some simple Android apps - hmm, I need to write a piece about that....

• Twitter on Scala: "the production issues that led them to consider Scala in the first place, what issues they ran into using Scala in production, and how Scala affected their programming style". Disclaimer: I know *nothing* about Scala, though it sounds like enforcement of functional programming (and its effect wrt concurrency) was the big win here...
• Google App Engine got Java - wooo! Very exciting, I've been playing with this over the weekend and the tools look decent (though, ahem, my first real GAE project won't bloody deploy). I think this'll make a big difference to how we build and host server-side products long-term...
• Mock objects for threading tests;

• 10 graphic design paradoxes - though I can't see anything here which only applies to graphic design, all good stuff
• dominant UI metaphors and how we might escape them: "It seems a bit fatalistic, but I can’t think of a way that the entire desktop metaphor can be overhauled without either everyone in the world switching over at once (which won’t happen), or becoming a “data island” like the Newton or Classic Mac OS.". I've just read Geeks Bearing Gifts by Ted Nelson, who's wonderfully annoyed at the universal adoption of UIs from Xerox PARC: more metaphors, now!
• Design considerations for touch UI

We're just putting together a newsletter for FP, and looking through it, I've realised I'm doing a bit of speaking over the next few months. So if you fancy catching up, I'll be:

• Doing a short skit on "Knocking Down Walls" at MobileDesign in London on 22nd April. Getting designers and developers working well together - particularly in an "Agile" environment - is a Really Big Deal to me. I'll be talking about a few of the things we've learned over the years.
• Then on 3rd and 4th June I'll be up at the Mobile Web Summit, also in London. My talk is titled "Mobile Media 2.0 - a 2 way channel, leveraging the benefits of enhanced communication with your audience", which I think is a very posh way of saying that I'll be talking about why mobile is good for conversations more than broadcasting stuff. Hopefully I'll manage to come out with some observations which aren't *quite* that obvious ;)
• Update: how could I forget? I'm not speaking there, but really looking forward to Geek'n'Rolla on April 21st. It'll be a good opportunity to take the pulse of the UK startup scene...

I'm also keeping my fingers crossed about a submission I've co-authored for a certain Large Agile conference, but more on that when I hear back from the organisers...