Jeepers, the next few months are looking busy. I've just noticed that I'm out and about quite a bit, at quite a few mobile/dev/UX events:

• I was Highly Chuffed to make it onto the lottery allocation of tickets for UXCampLondon on 22 August. Hmm, need to have a think about that one. I will have a rucksack full of handouts and wooden mobiles though...
• ... as the next day I'm off to Agile2009 in Chicago, where Joh and I are running the "Mobile Mountain" workshop we've been prepping (and practicing) for the last few months;
• September 4th brings dConstruct to Brighton, which is taking more of a mobile/ubicomp slant this year. I'll be the guy at the front nodding vigorously and salivating;
• The next two days, we have BarCampBrighton, which - if I can wangle my way in - I'm really looking forward to - last years was fantastic, it's the perfect decompression from dConstruct;
• The following weekend I'll be at EcoMo09, a 24 hour dev camp focused around creating tools to help people minimise their environmental impact. The pressure's off though, instead of competing in the hack day I'll be sat smugly on the judging panel, in full Simon Cowell mode;
• OverTheAir returns on September 25th. I'll be running the "Mobile Mountains" UX workshop once more (by now well-oiled and tweaked after Agile2009);
• At Mobile Web and Apps (20-22 October), I'm very excited to be doing a talk titled "Capitalising on Popular Culture: The Interplay Between Apps and Society", which sounds fantastically interesting and will be utterly amazing once I've worked out what to say and written it all;
• A few of the FP crew, myself included, are heading up to the StackOverflow DevDay in London on 28th October.
• November spawns a monster - on 18th, I'll be at Mobile User Experience, taking part in a panel discussion discussing what sort of mobile services we'll see over the next 5 years;

Pop me an email if you'd like to catch up at any of these...

• Tom deMarco on software engineering - READ THIS.
• The Android Multitouch Conspiracy, or lack thereof.
• My Life Offline: "I felt not just happy, but firmly happy — solid, is the best way I can put it. I felt like I was in control of my life instead of the other way around, like its challenges just bounced off me as I kept doing what I wanted. Normally I feel buffeted by events, a thousand tiny distractions nagging at the back of my head at all times. Offline, I felt in control of my own destiny. I felt, yes, serene."
• Design in the Open, "a community of practice for design & user experience people in Open Source"
• Mozilla Design Challenge, Summer '09: "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?"
• The Pushbutton Web: "where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook"
• Ricardo Semler won't take control: "If you open up everything, including the company’s books and board meetings, you’ll find that the employees are honest, responsible people."
• Webkit has a new web inspector;
• Terrifying password "recovery" (read cracking) speeds;
• You can't move these days without tripping over a zippy Android UI demo...
• Stats on iPhones - interesting to see the breakdown of both hardware and software versions out there. I'm surprised we're not hearing more people point out the obvious: iPhone hasn't avoided fragmentation, just managed it... thus far;
• How 31 year olds consume media: "Will consider getting a Wii when Chucky Egg and Pong are available."
• What Jeff Bezos knows: "The only reason Amazon exists today in any form: we always put customers first. We always obsess over customers."
• Ive on Apple, I loved his comments about taking responsibility for execution of design: "design is about much more than the studio and the drawing board"

Joh and I ran a dry run for our Agile2009 workshop tonight, held at the mighty Skiff in the North Laine, Brighton... and after a frantic day of last-minute prep, I was quietly pleased with how it went.

The session opened with a few slides setting the scene about mobile. These definitely need some work - whilst I know the material quite well, I hadn't prepped them and it showed. I waffled somewhat, but fortunately at such a speed that it was over quickly for the audience, and we could get on with the meat of the workshop: exploring how an iterative design process can help address the kind of constraints that mobile inevitably entails handling.

We split into two groups - with 9 attendees this gave us teams of 4 and 5 respectively. Persona in hand and product concept in mind, one team headed upstairs and the other stayed downstairs, each spending 15 minutes designing a product with the aid of copious amounts of card, post-it notes, the ubiquitous Sharpies and some rather natty 1.5x sized replica mobile phones my dad and his girlfriend had put together for the session. After 15 minutes we halted the groups and swapped one member between them, to act as a test subject for a 5-minute usability test... after which the groups convened to show off their work, and the results of the test, in a short demo session.

Constraints were introduced, with each team having to transpose their product to a new device and form factor. Then rinse, repeat: another 15-minute design session followed by 10 minutes of demos, and a 10-minute run through to discuss learnings.

After the shaky start of my slides, I was pleasantly surprised by how things went: both teams managed to produce a useful design and test it within 25 minutes. One team definitely received worthwhile feedback from their test subject, the other got some but were less sure of its value. In any case, the notion that a group of people could go from zero to a coherent and in some way tested prototype in such a short space of time was both heart-warming and genuinely impressive... and I couldn't point at domain knowledge or mobile experience as being the cause of this success, with both Ribot and Mary (the participants with a background in mobile) located within one team, and no mobile experience in the other.

Learnings from the session displayed a comforting level of consistency between the two groups, too: both felt that moving to a smaller screen lent their design more focus, and that working within tighter constraints contributed to their creativity, rather than detracting from it. Time limits were clearly a problem (how could they not be?), and whilst one group found cross-platform consistency to be a tough trick to pull off, the other observed that their design changed less than they'd have anticipated in the move from iPhone to clamshell.

Both groups then consented to exchange beer for a pile of incredibly useful feedback, which we'll be using to further hone the session before running it in Chicago. And one comment which really chuffed me up was overhearing participants moot that firstly, this format might be an interesting way to open up a Hack Day type of event; and secondly, that he'd really like to see the product he'd worked on *actually get built*.

As always, thanks to Jon Markwell of Inuda and the Skiff for hosting, to Joh for gently stamping on some of my more ridiculous ideas and her rock-steady facilitation, and to everyone who came and participated :) There's a photo-set, yellow-hued thanks to my grotty HTC lens, here.

Update: slides from the warmup are here.

"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.