Author: Jason Porritt

Finding the Right Balance Between Planning & Building on Agile Projects

Finding and maintaining balance is a major theme of life—between work and leisure, time alone and time with others, eating healthy food and enjoying a treat.

Software projects also involve a lot of balancing. One big facet (highlighted by conversations around Agile vs. Waterfall) is the balance between spending time to build precise plans in advance vs. starting to build real software as soon as possible and leaning on feedback to work toward the best result. Read more on Finding the Right Balance Between Planning & Building on Agile Projects…

Holding Effective Attendee-Driven Meetings

The format of a meeting is shaped by the attendees, meeting goals, and type of work that needs to be done. A presentation to a Fortune 500 board of directors might have a detailed agenda and slide deck that’s been rehearsed and polished down to the precise number of minutes available, whereas a weekly check-in with your team might have a loose agenda and be open to extending the time if needed.

For certain types of meetings, we’ve found treating the meeting a bit more like a small unconference is highly effective. Read more on Holding Effective Attendee-Driven Meetings…

Early Career Advice: Optimize for Continued Learning

Five years into your career, you’ve already learned a lot. You’ve learned more about how you work best, what you enjoy, where you’re strong, and where you could use some growth. You’ve learned how to do your job, and you’re getting good at it (if you do say so yourself). You’re also probably starting to look at what the next five years will look like—what opportunities you have ahead of you or how you might use your skills in a different way. Read more on Early Career Advice: Optimize for Continued Learning…

5 Ways to Highlight the Value of Your Development Team

A lot of the awesome work developers do is not self-evident to project stakeholders. Customers, project managers, business analysts, and others may never see or hear about all of the big and little things you do behind the scenes that ultimately make their project a success. Read more on 5 Ways to Highlight the Value of Your Development Team…

Design Thinking and Atomic Project Leadership

IDEO sees design thinking as three lenses through which we can view design: desirability (human), viability (business), and feasibility (technical). Atomic’s project leadership roles (Design, Delivery, Development) share a significant alignment with these dimensions. That alignment strengthens our long-held belief that everyone on the team has a place in the design conversation.
Read more on Design Thinking and Atomic Project Leadership…

Introduce Human-Centered Design: Start Small and Start Today

Introducing Human-Centered Design doesn’t have to be complicated. It isn’t a monolithic process that has to be applied across an entire organization before it works. Human-Centered Design is a discipline, a way of thinking and framing context, that provides value incrementally throughout the lifecycle of product design, development, support, and beyond. You can start simple, wherever you are in a product lifecycle, and begin reaping value from it immediately. Read more on Introduce Human-Centered Design: Start Small and Start Today…

Four Lessons Learned while Troubleshooting CAN Bus Communication with my Subaru

I recently started a fun personal project involving two of my favorite things: cars and software. Modern cars come with plenty of software on board, controlling everything from engine behavior and stability to door locks and entertainment. The software already running on my Subaru does plenty of interesting things, but I’d really like to see more live information from its engine control unit (ECU). So I’ve taken the only logical next step: building a digital gauge. Read more on Four Lessons Learned while Troubleshooting CAN Bus Communication with my Subaru…

Six Ways to Tame Your IoT Project

IoT projects can be complicated. Compared to a mobile or web application, connected physical products frequently involve a wider breadth of software, hardware, and people. The complexity of building an IoT product can quickly become overwhelming if not properly managed. Here are a few things that can help tame the chaos of an IoT project. Read more on Six Ways to Tame Your IoT Project…