Multunus » Vaidy

Our new reading list

Vaidy — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:39:55 +0000

As mentioned in an earlier post, our team shares what they learn on a daily basis in our morning stand-ups. Considering our primary focus as a company is lean product development, we felt we could be more aligned with our goals if each of us read books [or blogs] on related subjects. Here’s the current list that we’ve come up with.

Web Analytics An Hour A Day

Rocket Surgery Made Easy

The Art of Lean Software Development

StartUpLessonsLearned.com

Mythical Man Month

Don’t make me think

User Stories Applied

Agile Estimating and Planning

Do you like this list? Or not? Have suggestions for more? Go ahead, talk to us in the comments below. We’d LOVE to hear from you.

Our Pragmatic Processes

Vaidy — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:02:22 +0000

One of the things we do is to create a culture of continuous improvement. To help ourselves stay on track and not lose sight of the forest for the trees, we do the following:

We do our standups a little different. We talk about what we learned yesterday than what we got done. Credit for this idea goes to HashRocket
Encourage our people to read awesome books [Pragmatic Programmer and Getting Real are our current favourites] and then share what they read in our standups. It only takes 30min [or less] to read enough to share something useful in the next day’s standup.
Encourage our people to be generalists rather than specialists. This approach has resulted in most of our people being polyglots.
We’ve woven UX improvement into our sprints. This results in software that’s balanced both in terms of user interaction and functionality.
Test Driven Development: We’re yet to get completely infected by this discipline. But we’re getting there.
Not interrupting each other: It takes 15min for people to regain their “flow” if they get interrupted. And if this happens many times in a day, we end up with a stressed out team at the end of each long day. So we prefer patience to instant gratification. [Tip: Campfire is a great tool in this regard. We prefer this to IM].

We’ll be blogging about some of the above topics in more detail in the coming weeks. Do drop a line in the comments section below, if you’d like to learn more about anything specifically.

Learnings from 2009

Vaidy — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:55:05 +0000

2009 was a year of many special events. We completed 2 years of operations last year. We moved to a new more spacious office. We created our first product. We discovered our niche [more on this in the coming weeks].

But those events are nothing more than punctuations in this journey we’ve embarked on. Its the learnings that we treasure and rely on, to propel us forward. So here’s my list:

Constraints enforce creativity. Last year was difficult for almost everybody and we were no exception. Client work diminished rapidly and soon our team of passionate, talented engineers were finally “available”, to do some creative work for ourselves. We were forced to innovate at this time. And we did. We came up with the idea of UserThoughts and got the first prototype out in less than 2 months.
Resilience pays. There are now clear signs that the worst is behind us and that 2010 will be a year of robust growth. But mid-last year, the situation was quite different. To look beyond the current and work towards a better future, requires faith and dedication. Last year has proven that our team is built with that kind of DNA.
Integrity pays. Its hard to do the right thing, every time. But I just took a look at our “ethics account book”, and so far, we’re quite profitable . We create value for our clients with a sincere intention that they should succeed in their respective businesses. And sooner or later, this gets noticed.
Passion results in new ideas. We’ve always been obsessed with user experience. So much so that, we’ve weaved a high level of focus on UX into our development cycles. Its probably not an accident then, that, our product seeks to solve problems in this very space.