What Do Clients Need from Consultants? Options and a Recommendation

Consulting is an abstract term and open to interpretation. My interpretation is that, at its core, consulting is about listening, identifying options, identifying tradeoffs, and making a recommendation.

Writing Agile Stories, Part 4 – Decision-Making Guidelines

Deciding what (and how much) behavior you want is the hardest part of the entire story creation process. The reason for this is straightforward—if it were an obvious decision, you wouldn’t even have to consciously think about it. Your brain would make the decision for you unconsciously, and the story definition would simply flow out […]

Writing Agile Stories, Part 3 – Setting Good Story Goals

Creating a good user story in the backlog is challenging. As I described last week, the first step is writing stories that are small, meaningful, and focused on inputs/outputs. But that’s not enough. Even if you have experience writing Agile stories, have you been clearly articulating the goal of the story? Do you provide the […]

Writing Agile Stories, Part 2 – Making Stories Small & Meaningful

If you read my last post, you’ve managed to slice-and-dice your feature set into a set of skeleton stories for your backlog. Now it’s time to write each individual story. How do you do that? I have two guidelines.

Writing Agile Stories, Part 1 – Breaking a UI into a Set of Features/Stories

It’s time to begin the development phase of a project. The needs have been identified, and the workflow design is complete. Now it’s time to create the initial set of stories for your backlog. Where do you start? How do you write individual stories? How do you even decide what those stories should be? I’ll […]

There’s No Such Thing as a “Massive MVP.” Build Releases Instead!

The idea of a “massive MVP” is an oxymoron. How can a Minimum Viable Product end up taking a team of up to ten people a year and over a million dollars to build? And yet, I’ve seen a number of organizations—usually enterprise companies—building massive MVPs. Clearly, there’s confusion between how the term MVP is […]

A Docker Pipeline for Mirroring & Archiving a Website

I monitor a handful of websites with some critical information on them. I also have a Synology NAS. Here’s how I created a pipeline for mirroring and archiving these key sites onto my NAS.

A Spreadsheet for Breaking Down & Tracking Big Goals

Defining and achieving goals is hard. In this post, I’ll describe a tactic to quantify your goal, demonstrate a tool to track it, and review the positive impact that this tactic will have.

Software Exposes People Problems that You Can’t Ignore

Software, and computers in general, are excellent at enforcing process. But process is often in direct conflict with people. So what happens when a new software system is thrust upon people? Frustration, revolt, and other negative consequences—a net loss for all involved. In this post, I’ll explore how we can utilize software to both advance […]

Exploding Breadcrumbs Make Life Easier for Your Future Self

We can all agree that bringing old projects back to life is never easy. So when you’re archiving a project, think of your future self and leave some exploding breadcrumbs.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Matt Fletcher

Author: Matt Fletcher