Rapid Growth TV created a video about Carl Erickson and Atomic Object. Check it out on the Rapid Growth Media site.

http://www.rapidgrowthmedia.com/features/rgtvatomicobject.aspx

Over the last 18 months, Atomic has made significant growth in our product development services. We now kickoff most projects with an initial discovery and design phase. In this phase we grow our understanding of the client's domain and their vision of the software they want to build. We create artifacts like financial models, personas, wireframes, visual mockups, prototypes and release plans. Eventually, we create a backlog of estimated stories that the development team can start implementing in the development phase.

A few developers at Atomic have shifted into a UX role. We've been growing the company's awareness of UX and product development practices. Last Thursday and Friday Atomic held an in-house UX workshop led by Lane Halley and Jeff Patton. The workshop exercises focused on a speculative development opportunity Atomic has been considering.

Thursday morning started by Lane and Jeff asking what we wanted to get out of the the workshop. They built a backlog of objectives for the workshop and included what we wanted to learn.

Once the schedule was set, we started by talking to the project's stakeholders about their general ideas for the project. Lane and Jeff gave a sample stakeholder interview with one of the stakeholders. We were taught some interview techniques and had the opportunity to practice interviewing with partners. We had some interview candidates lined up for the afternoon so we put together an outline of interview questions.

After Thursday's lunch we slimmed down to a smaller group. This group refined and organized the interview outlines. We conducted four interviews as pairs while the rest of the group observed. We had a retrospective after each interview where we compared notes and critiqued the interviewers.

On Friday the whole company came back together and the interviewers shared their notes. The notes were taken on cards. The cards were laid out and grouped together based on observational similarity. We constructed provisional personas (obviously real personas would require more research) from our notes. Each persona had a name, attributes, objectives and values. We broke out into teams and constructed context scenarios for each persona.

After Friday's lunch, Jeff had our product stakeholders define their high level business goals. We discussed what would constitute success. The discussion gave us insight into what kind of metrics the software may need to provide.

Then Jeff asked how we define a user story. This was a rich discussion that gave us insight into how much we have internalized user stories and how the simple definition of a story has changed over time

After our user story discussion, we extracted activities from our context scenarios. Jeff led us through an exercise where we created a story map. We organized our activities and derived stories from the activities. We looked to the project stakeholders for story validation. We then engaged the stakeholders in release planning using the story map. The exercise showed a great way to prioritize high level stories before fully defining the details required of a finer grained story to be entered into a development backlog.

The workshop ended with a retrospective where the entire company asked questions and shared thoughts.

I'm very excited to see Atomic continue to grow in our UX and product development practices. We've stayed at the forefront of agile development and management for some time. While there, we saw that our clients needed help in formalizing what their project was, who it was for and what business value it would provide. That need and our drive for excellence has pushed us forward to better help our clients. We are enjoying the ability to provide the necessary up front services that ensure we are developing successful products.

Mock Draft Central was just written up in the Wall Street Journal. That’s what happens when your technology beats out huge competitors like CBS Sports for two Fantasy Sports Trade Association annual awards. Congratulations to Jason and Jeff at Mock Draft Central for recognition of their work.

Mock Draft Central was Atomic’s first Flash project, and first speculative equity investment.

Just today someone told us he heard you can’t do real development in Ruby. Funny – the AGI Goldratt Institute paid us a whole bunch of money for nothing then. It must be that their brand new, multi-platform, JRuby-based desktop simulation app doesn’t exist. Pity.

Based on our search traffic, the posts by Shawn and Matt on desktop development in JRuby are our most popular:

• Desktop Application Development in JRuby
• Rolling a JRuby desktop application

Now that the AGI app we couldn’t name in those previous posts is done, we can talk much more about how we put it together. The most exciting point is that Ruby can be used successfully for large-scale desktop development.

UPDATE (February 4, 2009): Added demo movie goodness provided by AGI.

Read the rest of this entry

I’ve become a local history nerd. My first big project is now online—a comprehensive look at Atomic Object’s historic building and the surrounding neighborhood. It’s fascinating stuff. Though I admit I’m fairly well biased here.

UPDATE (January 7, 2009): The local history department of the Grand Rapids Public Library featured our history project on their blog.

It’s been a long time coming. Funny how real work can get in the way.

• Unity – Unit Test Framework for C
• CMock – Mock Object Generation Framework for C
• CException – Exception Handling in C

Unity and CMock began life as quick and dirty little tools Atomic Object used internally for our first client embedded projects. CException was born in our most recent X-Rite work. Our colleague at X-Rite, Mark Vander Voord, made significant contributions to all three – especially CException since he wrote the whole darn thing.

More client news:

The idea came to Rick DeVos while he listened to church leaders describe how they were going to use email to help people get involved in church activities.

“It seemed like a nightmare of useless emails filling up everyone’s mailboxes, and an administrative nightmare,” DeVos says. The more he thought about it, the more he realized there was no online tool to help organizations connect people in need with the people who could help.

So DeVos talked to Ben Gott and the two created TheCommon.org, an online site that helps people lend a helping hand.

Grand Rapids innovators develop online ‘helping hand’

Client news:

So far the 2-year-old firm based out of Franklin has three full-time employees and has raised more than $1.3 million in seed money from venture capital firms and angel investors.

CircleBuilder, which offers Yahoo Groups-like services to churches, is about to bring in another “big chunk of change” as it prepares to close another round of seed money investing. The firm hopes to open its site to the general public this summer and hire 15-20 people by the end of next year.

“I am trying to do all of my business in Michigan,” Brown says. “My lawyers, CPA and technology firm [that’s us! -ed.] are in Michigan. You have got to start something in this state because we’re too reliant on the auto industry.”

CircleBuilder paces its growth, looks to add 15-20 jobs in two years

I resisted the urge for a pun about meeting the "Atoms Family" or some cringe-inducing line.

We've had some new Atoms join the Molecule (Nate Lokers & Eric Hass). And, we decided it was time to update everybody's bios on our website. We get really positive feedback from customers and potential customers about our bios. The visibility into our company and culture via the bios seems to really connect well with the outside world. So much so that we give periodic attention to them and always feature them as a link on our website's front page.

So, feel free to poke around and meet the Atomic Object Molecule.

We continue to look for good people to hire. If you're interested, start the process.

UPDATED (Aug. 10, 2008): Links removed from Nate & Eric as they no longer work for us.

The Molecule needs more good Atoms. We’re looking for solid generalist developers and especially those with strong working knowledge of web programming.

Atomic Object people are more than technical wizards; they’re also proficient in writing, managing changing requirements, working directly with clients, and satisfying customers. They care about good code, create tools to make tasks easier, are skilled at problem solving, think testing is essential and not optional, and know how to learn the things they don’t know.

If you’re comfortable with anything from web to desktop to systems programming, have a good working knowledge of databases, already know several languages and enjoy learning new ones, and are handy with more than one operating system, then you might just be the kind of proficient generalist we’re looking for.

If you can analyze web applications down to the HTTP protocol, think in terms of interaction design, and roll your eyes when you see HTML listed as a programming language, you might be the kind of web-savvy developer in whom we’re interested. We look for depth in our developers – much more than only a resume dripping with a web-flavored alphabet soup of acronyms.

Poke around our site and this blog to learn about us.

» Start the Hiring process.

The Great Lakes IT Report posted the news.

From the press release love:

Said CircleBuilder co-founder and CEO Howard Brown: “We went through an extensive RFP process and chose Atomic Object because of its world-class Ruby-on-Rails and test driven / agile development experience. The AO team builds scalable, well tested software and Internet applications. It is an added bonus that Atomic Object is based in western Michigan.”

Said Atomic Object president Carl Erickson: “CircleBuilder is such an exciting project for us. Our team loves building the highest quality of software and the fact that CircleBuilder’s interactive Web service will help churches and faith-based organizations grow, prosper and better connect with their members is amazing.”

We just submitted a SkipJack payment gateway implementation for the ActiveMerchant project. ActiveMerchant is a Ruby library for dealing with credit cards, payment processing and shipping. It’s currently the most popular payment processing library for Ruby. SkipJack is a payment processing and financial services company.

Our SkipJack gateway is now available in the trunk of the ActiveMerchant repository.

Cody Fauser (ActiveMerchant maintainer) also announced Shopify’s support for the new SkipJack gateway.

The gateway supports all the standard features of all ActiveMerchant gateways: authorization, purchase, capture, void, credit and status operations. More details are available at the original submission post.

Rapid Growth is a very cool, weekly online magazine covering the development and transformation of Grand Rapids. They published a short article about us.

“GR software firm’s growth projections anything but atomic“

We started working with a really interesting new client recently, Realius. Realius is a new gaming site specializing in Fantasy Real Estate™. We’re their application development team.

Realius’ Fantasy Real Estate games use real-world data to drive the games. Realius has some big plans and cool ideas; it will be really interesting to see how things unfold. A significant update to their first game Price Me Now™ will be available soon. See their website and blog.

The very first post on the Realius blog explains just one of the intriguing values of their approach:

“I wished I could have played with my ideas to better understand the market before cutting the real check. As a result, we are designing Realius Fantasy Real Estate™ games to follow the homeowner life cycle so that we can have fun with real estate and learn in the process of playing games. The premise is – if you are good at Fantasy Real Estate™, you’ll be good at reality real estate.”

Realius’ games rely on real-world real estate data and listings. As time goes on and more games are developed, local search and geo-aware data will become more and more important. Wired magazine has a couple interesting articles on where local search has been and where it’s going: Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World & Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future.

Methods & Tools is a quarterly software development e-publication with a distribution list of 45,000. The summer edition of Methods & Tools is now available. It includes an article on our embedded development approach and tools (the PDF version can be found at the preceding link).