We have an almost continual dialogue on how to improve the quality of the software that we’re involved in delivering. One of the conscious decisions that we’ve made is that we don’t make use of a dedicated QA or test role.
Digital service delivery
Running a Retrospective
A few weeks ago, Fareed wrote about his favourite retrospectives. I wanted to follow up on this and outline what I’d consider essentials for a good retrospective.
Picking the right Product Owner
For a lot of our customers working with Made is their first exposure to Agile. As part of any project, we’ll ask them to nominate a Product Owner to work closely with us throughout. Picking the right person for the job can make or break the project – so how do you make sure you choose correctly?
A Guide To Blue-Green Deployments & Going Live Every Day
One of the riskiest parts of software delivery is the production deployment.
Building a Product in a Day
A couple of weeks ago we had our first ever Made Hackathon day, where we built a product—based on an existing idea—from scratch, and had it launched by 5pm. It was great fun, and very rewarding for the whole team.
Practical Checkout Flow Enhancements
At Made we pride ourselves on crafting websites that deliver a great aesthetic, and a rich user experience.
Stream Everything
‘Streams’ and ‘pipes’ have been an essential part of *nix systems since the 1970s, when Doug McIlroy introduced them into the first version of Unix. The story goes that he threatened to leave the project if they weren’t implemented, he felt so strongly that they were a cornerstone of an effective modular operating system, and key to interoperability. They facilitate the Unix philosophies of ‘do one thing and one thing well’ and ‘write programs that speak to other programs.’ A small Unix program like ‘cat’, which concatenates the contents of one or more files and prints out the buffer, is able to communicate with other programs through piping. You could ‘cat’ a file containing a list of words, pipe that to a sorting program, and then finally to a text file. You could write this complex operation more simply than you could explain it.
Our Favourite Retrospective Ideas
Ah, the sprint retrospective. When I first joined Made and found out about retrospectives (I’d never had one before), I couldn’t conceive of the idea that there would be any value in such a thing! So you’re telling me, I said, that we get together and do group exercises? Not about the work that we’re about to do, but work we’ve already done? I assumed that it must be a whine-fest about tasks we found tricky, or rationalising out loud about why something took so long to do. I was wrong.
Challenges in Contracting Agile Software Projects
As a business that exclusively delivers software using agile methodologies, one of the most common challenges we face is contracting projects.
Getting things ‘Done Done’
One of the areas we focus on is how to ensure user stories are ‘done done’.
