Web UI prototyping

I guess we all agree to the fact that developers are not very good UI designers, atleast I am not. 5 pixel here, 10 pixel there is not my cup of tea. So we have UI analysts, designers, usability experts to bother about them. But how helpful is your UI prototype if developers can't even use it. I hear some people use photoshop for prototyping. Now whats wrong with this picture.

Let me guess,

• we don't know what color code you are using?
• no html code to start with?
• fonts, borders other style sheet properties are up for interpretations
• and any more...

if you as a designer don't get the feeling of how it works in html or how long it going to take, how good that could be for the project?

I think its very important to see that developers get a cleanly built static html page to start with. So that they can plug-in their dynamic parts to it.

Ever wondered how virtualization works

I am planning to run windows on my mac book pro, so I recently brought parallels which I heard is really amazing and resource hog. Anyways and the end of the installation I realized that I need to have Windows XP or Vista installer to install on top of parallels. Urrrrg... what I was thinking?

Check out this video. Its really cool

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=163022

Ritual vs Standups

As an agile team we are terribly affectionate about lots of things and Standups is one amongst them. We do it everyday religiously and discuss our last day’s activity, plan for today and hurdles one needs to over come.

I feel like ritual when I attend the meeting every morning. I could feel very subtle differences between this type Standups and Status meeting. The bigger and better benefit of it is to have a shared commitment across the team and to get a positive feeling. If some pair is having a problem it becomes teams problem and the whole team should try to solve it.
Unfortunately umpteen times it remains as status meeting. I believe we should be proactive enough to say NO to such meetings because if it is just about status we have card wall.

I am working on how to make my team more insightful and proactive about standups rather than just one morning ritual.

Conway's Law

Have you ever wondered why big organizations end up developing software having multiple sub-modules/layers which doesn't interact very well with each other. Hummmm... sounds like a project you are working on! according to Conway's law

Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

The reality is, it doesn't matter what methodology you are using to develop your software, without communication and organizational overhead, its a ship sailing nowhere.