I’ve just spend a lovely weekend at FrOSCon, the “Free and Open Source Software Conference”, in Bonn. One of the talks I attended was “Projektstatus: Nachrichten vom anderen Stern” (“Project status: Messages from a different star”) about communication. I wish I could have listened to this, when I started out as a Scrum master. It… Continue reading Four-sides model & the relationship layer

On Sunday, August 26th (2012), I’ll talk about “Agile & Lean” at the FrOSCon in St. Augustin, near Bonn. I’ve got 45 minutes to give the audience a brief orientation. Ambitious, I know. I’ll base the “slides” (I’m gonna use Prezi) on the following map: There’s still a number of details I’ll add, if I… Continue reading Land of Lean & Agile

Following up on my ode to whiteboards, here’s some very practical advice for people researching what flipchart to buy: Don’t buy one of the 3-legged ones like shown in the image on the left. Maybe it’s just me, but I keep falling over the front legs. Especially when I’m writing while still trying to keep… Continue reading Get the wheeled flipchart

Two months ago I started a new job. I left nice old colleagues and got nice new colleagues. The companies are the same size. No big diff there. But there is a very visible difference in the respective offices: Old workplace: 200 square metres of whiteboard surface + glass walls – all of them covered… Continue reading Visualize it! – An ode to whiteboards

While researching for my brief history of Agile & Lean, I read the following in the Wikipedia entry for “User Story”: User stories generally follow the following template: “As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>” but the shorter version is commonly used as well: “As a <role>, I want <goal/desire>” I was truly… Continue reading “so that” is the most important part of a user story

Some of you may know that my husband Tobias is a web developer. And not just any web developer but one with a passion for web performance optimization (WPO). WPO is about loading and showing a web page as fast as possible as this has proven to increase time on site, number of clicks and… Continue reading Optimizing Retr-O-Mat’s Web Performance

In “My Favourite Usability Books” I recommended a German article about writing well. One commenter asked for English resources and I decided to translate it (with consent of the author Susanne “Su-Shee” Schmidt). Not everything is applicable in English though. The mindset is different (e.g. complicated and convoluted sentences are often considered “good” German, especially… Continue reading To write like Stevens one day

A while back Udo Pracht tweeted: I’m totally pissed by those coaches who are “solving” my problems (w/o permission!) when I thought I was just having a chat with them. I guess that for people who spend a great deal of their time thinking about how to make things better, such as coaches and system… Continue reading Do you want advice?

<Sing title to the melody of the batman theme song> In the company I just left we had a weekly bugslot to stay on top of defects: 2 hours every week during which all developers fixed bugs at the same time. It’s not a perfect solution but solved a number of pressing problems: Discouragingly high… Continue reading Na na na na na na na na Bug Slot!

People sometimes ask me what book to read to get started with usability. My recommendation depends on your background and focus: IF (you like your knowledge applied and theory light) -> IF (mostly for web, interested in guerilla usability tests) -> Don’t make me think by Steve Krug IF (you’re a developer and want people… Continue reading My Favourite Usability Books