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Your Work is Starstuff(joelcalifa.com)

5 years ago from Joel Califa, Senior Product Designer at GitHub

  • Oskar LevinsonOskar Levinson, 5 years ago

    Great write-up Joel!

    I recently joined a company that practices Scrum and agile development, and it has changed how I look at software design/development. I almost exclusively work on features in parallel with our developers, and they all go live. We work in tiny increments, which means we will release each of those increments and see what happens. Did it have the effect we'd hoped? If not, we evaluate why and either kill the feature or make it better. If yes, we keep improving on this feature until it is no longer worth the effort. This means that we never have months of work that goes untested on the assumption that it will solve the problem we have.

    I'm thinking about writing a piece on working in a cross-functional agile team as a designer, I think a lot of us are still struggling with the waterfall methods that burden our industry.

    0 points
    • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, 5 years ago

      Unfortunately agile design/development is harder to do than most project managers realize. In my experience it often turns into a bunch of small waterfalls rather than designers and developers truly working in parallel. How does your company avoid that pitfall?

      Also to what level of detail do you spec out a feature before designing/developing it? I found we were over-speccing features and project managers were expecting designs to be pixel-perfect reflections of that spec to be handed to developers, rather than an evolving document.

      2 points
    • Joel CalifaJoel Califa, 5 years ago

      You should definitely write that!

      For what it's worth, when you're working on bigger leaps, it's not always straightforward to break them into small, shippable (and testable) chunks.

      That said, it's definitely better to validate things early on, and not having done that on this specific project was a failure that we've learned from :)

      0 points