User Agile Development

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 23:58:00 +0200

Summary of notes/highlights of the book (by Nir Eyal)

What's an habit from a technological point of view

A habit is at work when users feel a tad bored and instantly open Twitter. They feel a pang of loneliness and before rational thought occurs, they are scrolling through their Facebook feeds. A question comes to mind and before searching their brains, they query Google. The first-to-mind solution wins.

Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.

Customer development

Part of the Hooked model navigates around other techniques as Lean-Startup or Customer Development, Gamification. In that way, we found messages like the following:

Finding customers’ internal triggers requires learning more about people than what they can tell you in a survey, though. It requires digging deeper to understand how your users feel.
You want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side.
User narratives with clear description of users—their desires, emotions, the context with which they use the product—is paramount to building the right solution
Other tools to considerate are usability studies, and empathy maps

Variable reward

On of the most interesting concepts appearing on the book is the power of the variable reward, in that way for example:

Experiences with finite variability become less engaging because they eventually become predictable. The hard-to-predict behaviour of other people that keeps the game interesting
User-generated content to provide visitors with a never-ending stream, variable reward systems must satisfy users’ needs while leaving them wanting to reengage.

User Investment

Another interesting concept to get users motivated is the user investment. During the investment phase, asking users to do a bit of work comes after users have received variable rewards, not before.

The big idea behind the investment phase is to leverage the user’s understanding that the service will get better with use, like a good friendship, the more effort people put in, the more both parties benefit.

The tiny bit of effort associated with providing more user data created a powerful hook to bring people back to the service.

Investing time and effort into learning to use a product is a form of investment and stored value. Once a user has acquired a skill, using the service becomes easier and moves them to the right on the ability axis of the Fogg Behavior Model

I recommend that you progressively stage the investment you want from users into small chunks of work, starting with small, easy tasks and building up to harder tasks during successive cycles through the Hook Model.

The more users invest in a product through tiny bits of work, the more valuable the product becomes in their lives and the less they question its use.

Building effective hooks

What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger)
What brings users to your service? (External trigger)
What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action)
Are users fulfilled by the reward yet left wanting more? (Variable reward)
What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

Healthy hooks

When you create something that you would use, that you believe makes the user’s life better, you are facilitating a healthy habit

Whether getting users to exercise more, creating a habit of journaling, or improving back posture, these companies are run by authentic entrepreneurs who desperately want their products to exist, products that stem from a desire to satisfy their own needs

Habit Testing

What to do if you already have a service and want to test your hooks? Or create a new ones? In that way the model is very "common-sense" model, following an iterative process like lean-startup for example

Step 1: Identify “Who are the product’s habitual users?” Remember, the more frequently your product is used, the more likely it is to form a user habit. How often “should” one use your product? Once you know how often users should use your product, dig into the numbers to identify how many and which type of users meet this threshold. As a best practice, use cohort analysis to measure changes in user behaviour through future product iterations.
Step 2: Codify Let’s say that you’ve identified a few users who meet the criteria of habitual users. Yet how many such users are enough? My rule of thumb is 5 percent. Though your rate of active users will need to be much higher to sustain your business, this is a good initial benchmark
Step 3: Modify This may include an update to the registration funnel, content changes, feature removal, or increased emphasis on an existing feature.

Discovering Habit-forming Opportunities

The Habit Testing process requires the product designer to have an existing product to test. Where, though, might you look to find potentially habit-forming experiences ripe for new technological solutions?

Creating a product the designer uses and believes materially improves people’s lives increases the odds of delivering something people want.

Paul Graham advises entrepreneurs to leave the sexy-sounding business ideas behind and instead build for their own needs: “Instead of asking ‘what problem should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?’”

KPI

Some KPIs mentioned in the book:

CLTV - Customer lifetime value: the amount of money made from a customer before that person switches to a competitor
Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user, and it can have a massive impact.

Hope you enjoy.

If you are interested I strongly recommend the book

Best,

Entrepreneur's books and references

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Thu, 25 Dec 2014 21:51:00 +0100

I shared this content maybe 20 times this year... So, I felt maybe is relevant enough to be included here. At least, the next time I'd need to share it, I will be able to just send the link.

:-)

The most part of the courses, books or videos I'll recommend in the following notes require to have a pen and paper close to you. I recommend you write down all your insights during each video and each chapter.

Content addressed for...

I suppose the most part of the content recommended here could be relevant for anyone who want to explore the startup literature or is ready to start their own company. But, to be honest, te most part of the comments are addressed to Software Engineer or Computer Science people like me.

Are you ready?

Usually engineers think the product is just software, we think software is the solution for all the problems, at least problems we want to solve.

Sometimes is just for play with new technology, because is cool ... but a business, a product, is more than that, the software is just part of the solution. Sorry guys, I know as engineer that our narcissism tends to push us to believe we're the center... but there's a life "out of the building"

So for example:

Which are the optimal distribution channel for our product? (SEM, SEO, IT partners, Advice partners...?)
And for the promotion?
Which are the optimal sectors or customer segments we should address?
Which is the price for our product or service? (Usually price is a hard question to answer)

And many others:

Which pains we gonna solve?
Which is our value proposition?
Why us and no the competitors?
How we'll generate entry barriers?
We'll escale easily the business?
...

One of the farthest parts from the technology is the Customer Development. In that way, there are some worldwide references, but personally the important one is Steve Blank

He has some books, one of the most popular was probably The Four Steps to the Epiphany where he presented a way to interact with the challenge to create your own business. Steve's blogs is also an endless source of entrepreneur information.

One of the most important concepts proposed by Steve is GOOB (Get Out Of the Building) is the philosophy of start as soon as possible to validate your hypothesis interacting with real users and real customers.

To be perfectly honest, I didn't read T4Steps4Epiphany, but everybody who talks with me about it, express the same feeling ... "it's hard, it's too hard!!" In that way, Brant Cooper write an executive book, a perfect summary in my opinion, for newbies the Entrepreneurs Guide for Customer Development.

He defines clearly the phases the product should achieve, from the initial customer discovery, to the final grow and scale.

At the same time Eric Ries published The Lean Startup Method, another step by step strategy to build your own business. You could find another interesting contents from Eric Ries Editions (Like Lean UX)

In fact, Ash Maurya, merge Lean UX, Bootstrapping and Customer Development concepts in his Running Lean book.

The main difference between the Model Business Canvas (Steve Blank) and Lean Model Canvas, based on Ash explanation, is the status of the business your are creating. The Lean Model Canvas push you to solve questions for business in earlier stages.

But in general both methods push you in create a backlog of hypothesis validation, in order to discover and refine your business, and reduce the treatments.

Was a pleasure to participate a few years ago in a Running Lean workshop made by Ash in Barcelona.

Other books:

The Startup Owner's Manual - Steve Blank and Bob Dorf
Value Proposition Design - Alex Osterwalder
Business Model Generation - Alex Osterwalder
Hooked - Nir Eyal
Switch - Heath Chip
More references in my GoodRead's account

Quickest methods

I'd recommend you to start with Steve Blank's udacity training. https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ep245/l-48726358

The videos will help you to complete a Model Bussiness Canvas and also to have a clear overview of the different knowledge areas do you need to explore.

I also consider very interesting Justin Wilcox's videos (Founder Institute's founder) at youtube, related to the Customer Development or Customer Discovery lifecycle.

Who interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud7_OBEsPew
How find people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeTiGc4pFK4
What answer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNwX0-KJfeo
Work results: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRTUCot-lpw

Well, I hope this content help you.

Anyway, as I mention in my personal blog, I love to help other entrepreneur... the last years was part of my achievements to help at least 2 o 3 entrepreneurs in their business model definition. So, if you want some help please just let me know.

And, if you have some additional interesting references, please let me know. Is always great to know

Regards,

In search of a model

noreply@blogger.com (Roberto) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 13:24:00 +0200

In the last few months, in this blog, we had touched on various ideas attempting to land the concepts behind context aware applications and various reasons that might make the notion a fundamental construct of the way we relate to technology.

So far we had looked at Joseph Pine value chain, and ideas around what constitutes an authentic experience. Before, in a very interesting play, Ivan took the notions presented in “The Age of Context” and merged them with Thomas Wendt point of view, and speculated with mobiles being at the centre of the equation.

After having had quite a few conversations on the topic of Context Aware Apps, and circling back to this idea, I would like to take it a step further and propose it as the basis of a model simple but powerful model for the concept. Lets look back at the diagram proposed by Ivan (slightly reviewed and translated):

As implied by Thomas Wendt , with the following quote:

"We have thus moved beyond the theorization of our mobile devices as a type of prosthetic to our bodies — an extension of ourselves out into the material world — but instead have to conceive of our devices as absolutely integral to the very foundations of embodied space in the digital age.” (Jason Farman).

Is is not difficult to see how this statement, almost a prophetic claim - although taken a "bit out of context," since the original quote referred to the relation of maps and LBS. Regardless, it is clear in Ivan's evolution of the original idea that now, by combining a Mobile experience with the forces introduced in “The Age of Context,” we can start thinking about an initial model of what a context aware app might constitute.

As my colleague Robert Palmer put it, in this model the App is "the Agent” that by running in the user’s mobile device, connects him to to a particular context permitting the creation of new level of UX never seen before, a new level of customisation of a service. UX practitioners often talk in terms of journeys to illustrate how and idea goes beyond a static mock. Similarly, I propose we look at one to illustrate how this model works.

Lets take the Banking industry as an example where a user happens to use a Banks mobile App as the main way to interact In the Age of Context, the day the user needs a loan the experience might be as follows:

After seeing in my social feed that some of the user's friends are changing cars and realises that it might be time to change it as well.

Curious, the client goes to the bank’s App on the way home from work to see if there is any info in the topic.
From the app he might be taken to the Banks website and maybe asked a few eligibility questions.
The journey stops at that point, but it should be possible for the user to go on in his desktop or tablet at home.

Thanks to the bank eligibility questions already answered it is possible to do a pre-analysis and potentially be ready to provide the user with a response.

If in the near future, the client decides to go to the bank, and at the door the App detects a beacon and lets the bank know that the user is walking in.

With those critical inputs, the experience at the the bank, has the potential to be fully customised and tailored to the client.
Happy and impressed by the efficiency of the service, the user completes the cycle back at the emotional side of the model: likely going out of his way to share the experience, potentially sparking new journeys for others in the client's sphere of influence.

Under this model and by leveraging the various existing system and customising the experience to the client, this digital Bank is strongly signalling the client that the they care, and have created an authentic digital experience for their clients.

As a closing thought, Metcalfe’s law states that the value of your network goes up proportional to the square of the number of connected nodes of the system (n²). This is exactly what this model promotes: a mechanism to extract more value from existing infrastructure.

What do you think about this simple model? Is is it too simple?

I would be happy to hear your thoughts and reactions, please share them.

The Google Now effect

noreply@blogger.com (Roberto) — Thu, 3 Jul 2014 10:38:00 +0200

Already 10 years ago Joseph Pine came on stage at Ted and explained to the world the really interesting insight: experiences, or the experience economy as he put it, was the new reference model for Economic Value creation.

The reasoning goes that over the last couple of centuries and in particular the last few decades, through customisation, we moved from a commodities based economy to a goods based economy, to a service, and now, to a experience based economy. This would help explain the success of brands like Disney, Starbucks, Apple, etc.

Slide from Joseph Pine's original talk (2004)

More recently, in an interview and related talk, he introduces the concept of authenticity ( or perceived authenticity ) as the ultimate expression of service to a customer and the perfect mechanism to brand-loyalty creation.

In other words, what we have is the idea of promoting economic engagement delivered through the customisation of services, to create a memorable or authentic experience that results in brand loyalty.

If you think this is a mouthful, it is more obvious than what you might be thinking and can be explained easily by thinking of the efforts of brands like Starbuks, where the will make extensive use of natural material throughout their shops, or coffee beans intentionally left around for you to touch and remind you of how "authentic" they are.

In the digital space, things get a bit more fuzzy, or do they? Recalling your first encounter with google now in action might actually be the best way to having had your last Digital Authentic experience. If you haven't had that experience, I will attempt to explain it in the next paragraph and will likely fail, in which case I will resort to the famous explanation for what porn is: you will know it when you see it!*

In Android, ever since version 4.3 (if memory serves me well) an ever present part of the OS, Google Now, regularly delivers messages (in the form of notifications) based on the different things you do in the google ecosystem: searches that denote interests, emails you receive with appointments, or travel reservations, etc.

Google Now notifications, at the time I thought, served mainly two purposes: to further the reach of google services and, as a consequence, to move customers away from other services (or Apps) and into the Google ecosystem. My thinking now is that Google through Now, is achieving a lot more than just moving people their way. Google is delivering in the promise of a customise service and creating a memorable experience through the use of the information they already have... the information that YOU (as a user) know they have and want them to put to good use. Right?

Good use you say? Yes, good use: that being the key (IMO) as to why are we so willing to accept what not so long ago we would have seen as an overreach and a threat to our privacy. After all, deep inside we know that this level of service is impossible without someone connecting the dots, without someone doing the math.

This "Google Now Effect" is a perfect example of what I would call a Digital Authentic Experience.

* Justice Stewart was stuck on how to describe pornography, and his clerk said to him, “Mr. Justice, you will know it when you see it.”

Bank Processing

noreply@blogger.com (Roberto) — Tue, 1 Jul 2014 03:07:00 +0200

My last project has been at a bank, helping to put together a tablet solution for Android and iOS. It is really a cool project that is on its way to became a pleasurable experience for many users of that bank.

During my time, I had plenty of discussions about the wonders of context base tech, and the potential to build amazing experiences based on Context, in addition I had plenty of time to reflect on the many challenges that the industry is facing at large as they come face to face with a Digital future (a software driven world).

So, as part of processing my engagement I wanted to spell out a few of the challenges that most industries (Banking in particular) are facing.

Digital baby!

Recently I heard an interview from Russ Roberts to Marc Andreessen* and one of the pearls that Marc dropped (and that is so obvious that it almost hurts to think I did not come to the realization myself) is that, with the invention of the Smartphone, in the next few years for the first time virtually every person in the planet is going to have a "personal computer" and to be online. Then he goes on unraveling this seemingly obvious fact, and the implications that it has when combined with the Development culture: the potential reinvention of pretty much every business.

Ironically one of the example he talks about is of a Digital Bank that could operate completely from mobiles (no branches), no legacy assets, no legacy systems.

Legacy baby!

Not so long ago, admiringly, I thought of Banks as the last bastions of technologies past. Like a British Museum, banks collect platforms, systems, and technology and keep them running for decades beyond their prime. This forces them to build layers and layers of complexity to get new services up and running while protecting the integrity of the data, the security level, etc.

Unfortunately, this amazing achievement, comes both a high economic cost and makes them terribly vulnerable in this Digital world where any banking solution ends up being a work of art that needs "careful curation," severely limiting the pace of internal innovation, and limiting their vision (is difficult to see the forest past the trees).

Challenge in the vision

One thing I've come to realise with age is that people/organisations need to be ready to hear and ready to see to be able to share in a vision. Like in the tale of the blind man touching the elephant, it takes touching the whole to have the full understanding of what the elephant is.

Unfortunately, great change is fast approaching with a future ripe for innovation in the Banking world, a future where from our many connected devices, we will be able to to we will be able to transact, consult, and interact with our Bank easily and freely.

That world is going to happen and my questions for all banks out there is: Are you getting ready for a context driven digital world? You already have the means and assets!

Information baby!

Businesses don't trade on anything but information! Yes of course they will occasionally sell you a widget, but admit it, most of the time that you interact with a business is not to get the your hand on the widget, it is about the information it surrounds the widget. So, the easier a business makes it for you to get to be convince and to get that widget in your hands: the happier you will be and the bigger the margin for them.

Banks are no different, and would go as far as to say that the bulk of what anyone wants from a Bank is information. Ironically, this is perhaps the most challenging thing for a bank: to quickly provide relevant information.

The truth though, is that siloed in the bank is likely an incredible amount of information that should allow them creating amazing experiences. For whatever is worth: you have my permission to help me reach my life goals as quickly and efficiently as possible: Please provide me with an amazing empowering contextually aware banking experience!

*(EconTalk, Russ' podcast is an amazing source of thoughts and ideas. Thanks Russ!!)

Roberto C. Serrano - the introduction!

noreply@blogger.com (Roberto) — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 20:28:00 +0100

Hello World!

A while back I got an invitation from Ivan to start blogging in his house, so, honoured by the offer and compelled by years promising myself that this would be the year I would start blogging, I decided to dive in and blog away.

So, lets start at the beginning, first: who am I?

My name is Roberto C. Serrano and I am a passionate technologist that, ever since I was 11, dedicated countless hours to indulge my mind in these curious machines called computer. For me, it all started with my collection of micro-hobby magazines dedicated to the infamous Sinclair spectrum, and for years to come I chased the illusive dream of "understanding everything what made the machine ticked".

Overtime, understanding everything, gave way to understanding PCs (DR-DOS anyone?), then understanding programming, then understanding mobile development and software processes, and finally and what made me cross journeys with Ivan: Context aware computing.

In a short sentence: my passion is to understand what's at the heart of technology.

What is my background? You may ask next...

I started my humble professional journey at the Academia Nuria de Gava (Barcelona) after completing an FP diploma in Computers and Management (Informática y gestión) and quickly went into Multimedia development (remember those pesky CD-Roms?) I developed with some colleagues quite a few for Grupo Z, while teaching people the trade. Eventually we formalised our relationship in Inter. Actividad, a cool Engineering boutique with a focus on providing development services to designers and agencies. We were hot for a while, but it did not take time for our main client in Grupo Z to realised that they would be better off moving the talent in-house, and personally left me a bit disenchanted and ready for the next challenge: to get a more comprehensive education.

So, young but already married to a beautiful American woman, around the 2K, we decided to fulfil this higher calling in the US of A, and we left to settled in Chicago. Funny enough an inflating bubble (.com boom anyone?) meant that our goal was delayed 4 years more. During that time, I did my share of Web App development, until I got caught in he eternal cycle of maintaining a poorly design web app (by me), fact that clearly illustrated the need to go back to school!

So by 2005 I was full in with a declared CS major in the Engineering program at the University of Illinois, in school while in the process of discovering what takes to become a good developer, I fell in love with all things open-source and dedicated countless hours to learn, Java, OOP, C++, Software Engineering, etc... but spent almost as many hours advocating (and founding the Flourish Conference) - for all of those in the know, I was the guy in the penguin suite! Thanks to the opportunity I spent countless hours expanding my personal network and honing-in my people's skills. More importantly though, I started developing a taste at guessing where tech is heading. This thirst, with time has become an interest in understanding the intimate and transformative nature that technology has on all of us.

By 2008, I had already played a little bit with the Android SDK (remember that white blackberry looking thing they had for the emulator?). Little did I know that for years to come Android was going to be the center of my professional life (even today at my present post @ Accenture).

Well, remember the network I develop along with Flourish? Upon graduating Motorola came knocking at my door and offer me a role as a Developer Advocate as part of their Linux-Java platform... the platform that would soon after become the central team behind the Motorola Droid. The role was short-lived, since I ended up having my first born just after the first year at Motorola, and ended up moving close to family (darn European customs!).

The last 5 years brought about founding a couple Android communities around Barcelona and working in various roles as an Android Developer and more recently as a Project manager. Over the last year, the call to understand the transformative nature of tech., has become a passion for what I personally think will likely be a comparable shift to what mobile started 6 years ago with the iPhone: context aware technologies.

As you've been introduced so well by Ivan, here, here and especially here, Context (and Intent), bound in the actions and activities we conduct daily and potentially unlocked through our smart-phones (and other channels) have a transformative power that no other tech has had in at least since the introduction of the iPhone, emergence of Android, and the smart-phone taking over our lives.

So what can you expect from me?

From time to time, I hope to offer an additional voice and perspective to this fine Blog initiated by Ivan with a particular focus on Mobile, Agile, and Context related tech, especially the latter.

So here! This is a quick history of me for those interested in getting to know me. Leave a note if you want me to expand on anything.

In the meantime: may love, creativity, and peace always be with you!

@Google #vulnerability ... I'm just highly astonished #fail #disappointed

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 23:42:00 +0100

I'm still surprised after what happened to me this afternoon.

I received an e-mail from Google Play about a purchase (Some Game Credits) At first I though it was just a spam/pishing e-mail looking to get my credentials.

Later on I entered to my google play account and ... surprise!! I had a charge from a Japanese company ... I looked to cancel the order, but system fails as you can check on the next screenshot.

I navigated through the different options at Google Play, and then I saw an extrange device related to my account. That scared me, someone had stole my Google credential.

I took another screenshot of the thief's device location, as you can see the thief was located at China.

I was still looking the way to request the order cancellation or a money refund when I received a second order.

I was in shock and I forgot completely remove my card information and update my password... after that I didn't receive more orders.

To be honest, the Google Customer Care gave me a fast answer and also a fast solution, they refunded me the money and cancelled both orders.

But, maybe you should update a bit the automatic response:

"Debido a las circunstancias especiales de la compra, estaremos encantados de hacer una excepción única a nuestra política de reembolsos y realizarte un reembolso por valor de 4.762 ¥."

Come on, an unique exception? WTF!!!

But Google, At this time I need to ask you something, why always when I arrived to a new portal and saw this, I used the right button?

The reason is because I trusted you. But today, one Chinesse guy was able not just to make two orders of crappy game credits, he also was able to read my e-mail, my contacts information, acces to my analytics, change my password, and so on. In fact, he linked the device to my account a week ago!!!!

So, an "unique exception" is not enough. What I want and I need to know is, if I follow the usually highly security policies to generate and maintain my password. Then...

¿How a guy at China could stole my password?
¿How someone at China could pay with Google Wallet without any extra protection?
¿What else shall I do to guarantee the security of my account?
¿How I will trust you again? ¿And why?

Facebook, that have "just" my social activity, no credit card, no personal e-mail ... they have context security rules, if I try to access to my account in a non-usual location they will force my to follow some extra security restrictions.

But what about you Google? Are you kidding me? You know how much time I need to arrive at my home, to arrive to the office at the morning on Google Now ... but you don't know that I'm not able to be at the same time at China and at Barcelona ...

COME ON!!!

Let me dream - @Airbnb

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sun, 9 Mar 2014 00:06:00 +0100

Introduction

Well,

after some weeks of being completely focused on the MWC event, I'm ready to write this new #LetMeDream post. As I wrote in the first one, dedicated to the future FCB stadium. The choice for this one is the Vacation rental portal Airbnb, one of my favorite products.

I know that will be difficult to identify opportunities or ways to improve that application, to be honest not only the web, also the mobile solution, are offering great customer experiences.

I will follow the same structure of the previous post:

Requirements - Some evolution the ecosystem should achieve to allow us to provide this value proposition to the customers
The customer's Journey - Based on my experience of airbnb I identified:

Trip choice
Arrival date
During the trip
Leaving date

So, let's try it!!

Requirements

One of the common smartphone/mobile customer behavior when we're traveling is disconnect from our device. The reason is clear, usually we don't have data connectivity, and the roaming rates are very expensive.

During the last MWC we listened some ideas about how the market will work it out, the churn rate of the operators are crazy high (in some cases around 40-50%) So, they must provide new services trying to retain and increase the customers loyalty.

In that way T-Mobile, as they shared in the "Mobile Retail" conference, is providing a free data roaming service for their customers in some cities. I don't know if we could considerate a direct co-relation from this service to the reduction of their churn rate, but they reduced the churn rate from around 40% to around 20%!! A great KPI!!

They are working together also with mastercard and syniverse to provide services for travelers (secure payments), because travelers are one of the best customer segments!! When we're traveling we want and need to make lots of purchases... and would be very confortable paying using the mobile, don't worry about cash, don't worry about the local currency cash...

When the market is ready, when the travelers will have free roaming service, products like airbnb will be able to create new revenue streams, because of course us, the airbnb customers, want/need use the application when we arrive to the destination.

In fact, not only airbnb, also services like foursquare, yelp, opentable... will have opportunities to create new revenue streams to connect their users' databases with worldwide merchants.

Value proposition

I evaluated the possibilities based on the traveler's journey:

Trip choice
Arrival date
During the trip
Leaving date

And always according the next three value proposition principles:

Save money
Relevant information
Productivity (Save time)

And also based on the self-determination principles / Intrinsic motivation (Gamification):

Automony
Competence
Relatedness

Maybe some of the ideas I will share are also implemented by airbnb, I'm not able to evaluate deeply the application and I'm pretty sure they are working hard to bring us new features and a better service.

Trip choice

Based on my personal experience, airbnb provide a great experience to identify the best venues in a city, with very cool pictures of the houses or rooms, hosts' ratings and reviews from the previous guests. Also a very helpful map view and so on.

But, to be honest, I also use airbnb to decide where to travel, not only to choice the flat or house, also to choice the city, the destination. With Marian, we collect information about the flight prices, the hotels/house rent, the car rent rates... and then we make a decision.

So, is very interesting when I'm using flights services and they recommend me other places for the same dates that could interest me. Based of course in contextual information:

Example: I'm thinking to visit Berlín, but maybe in the dates I'm looking for, is also usual visit Amsterdam. In fact they could aggregate the interest from the airbnb users and provide a kind of up-selling or cross-selling process to recommend me other destinations (The people also search/visit...). That feature could help us to save time and money, and of course it provides us relevant information to help us to make the best choice
Another information relevant for me, is identify the best neighborhoods for us, based on our interests or our search/book history. For example photography, historic buildings, well communicated... For other people could be parties, bars, museums or whatever. They are providing now neighborhoods' guides for example but could be great have it integrated with the search engine

Another clear opportunity is provide a consistent omnichannel experience. The last months I looked for a place in Berlin, but when I opened the mobile application it remains always uncontextualized ... a proposal of Berlin venues was what I expected, or maybe the last visited places in the website...

They are working quite well with push notifications, for example when the host answers a request and so force, but maybe could make some other steps to integrate the statistics/analytics of the different channels to provide that consistency.

Another information relevant to help users to save money is neighborhood's average ratio, could help you to decide the neighborhood that fits your budget, or to identify if the house/flat you're evaluating is aligned with the average around. Maybe could be uncomfortable for the hosts and thats one important reason to hide this information to the guests, I don't know.

The arrival date

The easy service they could provide you when you arrive to the destination city, is a way to meet the host, maybe they don't need to provide this feature, maybe just a glympse integration could be enough. Glympse also provides connected-car integrated services

But also based on the arrival expected time (the application may ask you that relevant information... for example in some way in the host contact form) the application could provide tips for you:

Will be available the public transportation?
That's a very common question you need solve when you're planning a trip. So, if you bring me help in that way, if you bring me relevant information and help me to save time... I'll be glad to use the airbnb application to solve my issues

Maybe you will arrive too early/late for bus or trains... could be an opportunity for airbnb for create a Taxi marketplace, or to receive a CPA or CPL commission to drive the users to another TaxiApp service? Also for rent car companies (although that's something you usually solve during the trip preparing process)
Will be available someplace for breakfast/dinner?

That's another common question, specially for people like us who loves eat :-) , I hate to arrive to the destination and need to wait until the next day to eat something. In Barcelona you could find somewhere at any time, but in other places people go out for a meal sooner. So, could be nice, if you bring me relevant information and the application helps me to take care of that. Yes I know, you usually identify those troubles when you evaluate the cities guides. So, maybe is a weak idea.

During the trip

During the trip is maybe the part of the traveler's journey where airbnb could create some new revenue streams. They have some interesting contextual information about us:

Our general condition: We're travelers
Vacation period: They know how many days we will be there, if we will stay during the week, during the weekend
Location: Neighborhood where we have the rented house/room (cheaper, expensive, residential, students...)
Interests: If we expressed the kind of place we're looking for (photography, historic buildings, parties, well communicated...) they could also classify us as a customer segment
Weather: The weather is a context information affects directly to the travellers

The traveler needs services and wants to spends not only their time, also their money during the trip. Restaurants, bars, clubs, souvenirs stores, supermarkets, fashion and luxury stores, taxi drivers, theatres, museums... could be interested to offer their services to the airbnb users.

Maybe the best (or cheaper) way to test that kind of services is integrate the mobile application with foursquare API (or similar POI's database- Point of interest). Evaluating which services have more user engagement, and then try to create a specific marketplace for merchants.

Like fousquare is working in their Mobile Building Relationship service.

In my opinion the clear advantage for airbnb against competitors is the context we are providing to him. Again, he knows we're travelers, and he can classify us depending on our interests, the kind of venue we've rented, the neighborhood we've rented...

In general, as many services airbnb will to provide us, as much relevant information they will be able to explore from us to identify new opportunities.

Time to leave

Like sang "The doors" sometime ago... This is the end, all of us are very sad because is time to return home... but we still need some help. Specially if we arrive to the city using a flight or a train.

In that way, again we could offer some relevant information to the user: the bus/trains/subways timetables and location. And of course, also information about private transports

Maybe they could also aggregate some external service to give us information about our flight's expected departure time. There are a delay?

In some cases, we could also use the application to say goodbye to the host and alert him about the availability of the house/flat.

And maybe airbnb could evaluate if in that part of the traveler journey is the best one to aks for referrals, maybe during the train/bus trip to the airport, maybe in the waiting time at the airport.

Summary

If finally the telco operators agree to serve roaming data for free, the friction that the current costs supose for the travellers will bring to all of us lots of opportunities to bring to them new products and services on the field.

Lets see what the future provides to us.

Regards,

#MWC14 #opentrendsmwc Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:05:00 +0100

Well, after three days of MWC i have some feelings. The first one: I'm very tired, my legs are completely exhausted. On the other hand I'm very happy, as I answered to the GSMA interviewer today, one word to summarize the MWC is networking... we meet very interesting people and i hope keep in touch with the most part of them.

Finally, to be honest, I feel very proud of the effort we made the last months by all the team. Not only the original team (Marina, Eva, Ian, Eusebi, Xavi, Juanjo, Jordi, Carlos, Roberto) of course also the development and stand team (Yolanda, Toni, Vicenç, Eduard, Albert, Dani ...)

Very Good Job!!

We spent the last three days receiving visitors, listening their needs and pains and trying to provide them our point of view, and how they could adopt the context solutions, how they could adopt big data, sensoring (nfc, ble), omnichannel, lbs and mobile to obtain gains. And the most important, WHY adopt them!

We've strong experience providing to our customers (financial industry, automotive industry, utilities industry, retail industry and goverment) strategic advisory to define the right next step without losing the global picture of the future.

All the opentrends team expect that all of you considerate relevant our insights.

PD: I'm also happy to meet Loki Ng, the co-founder of one of my favorite mobile development applications OneSky as I explained to you in my old post "Mobile Development Survivor Kit"

Let me summarize some yesterday conferences notes.

Loyalty and Retention #mwc14loy

@JossRefern from LinkedIn talk us about the mobile strategy of the company, and the principle to keep it simple simple. They have a multi-APP strategy focus on the different customers segments or users of the platform (head hunters, professionals, etc)
@JossRefern also share with us him thoughts about the smartphone and mobile adoption, right now at the early majority level of penetration (Diffussion of innovation)
@JossRefern also enforce the idea that every device MUST have an specific strategy and scoope. At opentrends we share this though with all of our customers when we help them to define the mobile strategy according for example to this Forrester information
@JossRefern share with us the CCC strategy

Consistency
Clearly
CHOICE

@NaubyJacob from BELL talk us about the behavior browser solutions, according to identify behavioral patterns and target better to customers
@FabioSisinni from Groupon, give us some interesting insights, and how they transform their product from a daily deal e-mail based, to a thousands deals based on mobile and context
@FabioSisinni 50% of groupon's transactions globally are mobile
@FabioSisinni is NOT a channel, is a completelly new way to interact with the customer because bring to us the CONTEXT of the customer
@FabioSisinni you should design an HABIT not just a mobile experience (I remebered some guidelines from gamification in that point) Fabio talks about the 3R cycle (REMINDER + ROUTINE + REWARD) In that point he explained us about the next sample:

Reminder: E-mail or push notification
Discovery: Fresh & relevant offer
Action: Simple & Fun purchase
Reward: Getting the deal with a great discount

@FabioSisinni talks us about the relevance of the omni-channel concept for groupon, and the need to understand how the customer are driving through the differents devices, and which kind of product are purchasing in each case
@FabioSisinni share with us the context information they are evaluating to provide to the customers better and personalized deals:

Time
Location
Calendar
Travel patterns
Implicit / Explicit preferences
Lifecycle (Is the first visit, is a recurrent user?) Is very important to provide scaffoldings to the customers from the newbie to the mastery level - again a gamification concept

@FabioSisinni finally they give us the next reflexion, design for desktop and for mobile is completely different, design MOBILE first, will help you to think simple
@LarsFjeldsoe-Nielsen from Dropbox introduce a nice concept, is not about mobility, is about "DIGITAL DARWINISM" and how they are focus on an ABC loyalty & retention strategy

Across Platform
Bundling
Connecting

@LarsFjeldsoe-Nielsen explain the agreement between dropbox and samsung to integrate some dropbox's services on the samsungs devices (for example in the new samsung S5) Bundle is about agreement, is about partnership, to offer together with telco operators new services for customers

Mobile Retail: The one stop shop #mwc14ret

I expected to listen some others speakers, relevant speakers in that segment, like amazon, paypal ... they're providing great solutions to the market, anyway the Walmart introduction achieve completely my session expectations

@GibuThomas from Walmart share with the audience very relevant insights about the US market and also the Walmart store strategy off-line and on-line.
@GibuThomas: They try to have their stores to a maximum of 5 miles from all customers
@GibuThomas: They want to provide an integrated shopping experience (omnichannel) they know that the 90% of the purchases were in-store, and the mobile is not relevant as a new commerce channel (m-commerce) is relevant as a way to digitalize the customer experience in-store, as a way to use the customer context
@GibuThomas: They provide to us some relevant insights and examples about the black friday. For Walmart the loyalty 2.0 is not about cards, points or PBL's strategies, is about transparency, is about best prices guaranteed with automatic refunding and so on
@syniverse and @mastercard explained us some insights about the travellers behaviors, and the threats or weakness of the smartphone and data consumption when we're travelling. Basically we forget the smartphone when arrive to other countries, according to the security and also according to the data availability (roaming is still an experience service)
In that case is also relevant the T-Systems strategy and how they're providing a free roaming service to their customers
@syniverse and @mastercard and @tsystems have an agreement to provide a solution to the market to accelerate the adoption of the mobile payments around
@GregBaxer from Citi share their thoughts about the relevance of context, the relevance of provide a personalized experience to customers and integrate on-line and off-line world. He also considerate that the retail don't need to see mobile for m-commerce, they need to see mobile as a way to impact to the off-line commerce and complement the omni-channel experience

Best regards,

Lets meet at the MWC14

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 21:41:00 +0100

Well, after months of hard work, we're almost ready to enjoy the Mobile World Congress. We'll wait for your visits on the NFC pavilion (Hall 7) stand 7J20.

We've prepared some interesting information about the context solutions our team has developed the last months (Sentilo/Smart Cities, Connected Car, Loyalty/Mobile Consumer, Mobile POS...) You'll also be able to play with some of our product demostration, and some other nice surprises.

;-)

We hope you enjoy our new context landing page

And also the great job our communication / design team have done.

We're proud of you. Great job!!!

Best Regards,

Let me dream - FCB and LFP

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 23:39:00 +0100

Introduction

I've been thinking the past few weeks that I could start two new blog's sections, one dedicated the amount of books I was reading and other to share with you my dreams about how I imagine the future of my favorite applications, and how these application could be affected by the age of context.

Just for fun!

I thought that the first "dream" could be dedicated to Nespresso, I enjoy a lot when I visit their stores, is a great customer experience. But I was suprised (disappointed) according to the poor level of the mobile application, or with basic mistakes like sending not-mobile adapted newsletter (WTF)

Another candidate is airbnb, one of my favorite internet services. I'm using these days the application because we're planning a visit to Berlin on april. Both mobile and web solutions are great products, so will be difficult to identify "nice-to-have" ideas.

But the news of the last days, according to the future of the FC Barcelona stadium, related to one of my favorite parts of the Age Of Content book, the chapter about the NFL context "revolution" is the winner.

So, I'll start with that.

Requirements

I listened some rumors about a huge project to improve the wifi of the stadium, I'm pretty sure they took a look to the New England (NFL) strategy and how the Patriots are working to contextualize the fans experience.

They are providing hundred of HD video cameras in the field, to broadcast better than any other place the match, with new and exclusive perspectives of the best moment, only and exclusive for the fans on the stadium. Also in-door routes to help the fans to locate the stadium points of interest (access doors, toilets, merchandising stores, fast food & drinks and so on)

And to do that, the stadium needs not only one of the best wifi infrastructure, also an important coverage of electronic sensors (NFC & BLE)

I'm pretty sure they will have enough budget for sensors and wifi infrastructure (600M €)

Don't you think?

Value proposition

I evaluated the possibilities based on the visitor's journey, based on the different moments they could need a mobile application, according the next three value proposition principles:

Save money
Relevant information
Productivity

And also based on the self-determination principles / Intrinsic motivation (Gamification):

Automony
Competence
Relatedness

Before the session/match

Before a match, or before the season, the user should be able to bring a scheduling capability to the fans, maybe the professional soccer league (LFP) should evaluate other professional sports associations and try to professionalize their behavior. The current weekly scheduling is disappointing.

If they improve the scheduling method, the fans could decide which season's matches they'd like to attend. And identify opportunities to purchase combined tickets (bascketball / handball + soccer with 10%) And of course buy (or rent) merchandising of their favorite players.

The application must provide a mobile payment feature, allowing to the visitors select the preferred seats based on the availability of the stadium.

Ideally for the club could be great be able to developed some loyalty programs (up-selling / cross-selling) and drive some fans for the non-soccer events. Also to improve the management of the empty seats on the stadium, with a real-time interaction tool inviting entity partners that will not use their seats during the match to relese them.

As we will describe on the "during the match" section, the club could develop some premium, and exclusive services for some fans. Food&drinks on-your-seat delivery, premium parking, exclusive magazine of the match, pictures with the players after the match and so on.

They could develop this premium services based on a special ticket (of course with an premium price)

The match day

The day of the match is important helping fans to arrive at time to the stadium, to bring them an easy a great experience. So, let's provide them relevant information to drive them to the stadium using the best way.

Barcelona is one of the pioneer cities adopting "smart cities" technology, so we would integrate our services with the City systems to provide information about the public transport loading status, and about the road / street status to save them to stay stuck in the trafic.

Of course we could also bring the public parking status information to our visitors, from the city systems, also integrating the stadium's parking places status.

Finally, we could also provide to private parkings around the stadium an advertising platform to share their free places status, allowing to the people to arrive to the parkings with availability. Of course this platform could define some comission policy based on CPM, CPC or CPL/CPA policies.

The system should be smart enough to balance the trafic to the diferent resources dynamically.

When the fans arrive to the bus/subway stop, or when they are already parked, we should help them to know the best way to arrive to the stadium and the best door based on the bought tickets (stadium seats) and, of course, based on the loading status of the stadium doors.

Integrating sensors on the stadium doors the stadium systems will be able to predict/report the loading status

The platform could also know which people has been looking for tickets without buying it, we also know the last available seats, maybe we could provide a "last-call" tickets promotion using real-time notifications, trying to get to the stadium as much fans as we can. (Maybe we could finish with the re-sellers at the stadium's doors)

Finally, the mobile could be the new ticket to personal-access to the stadium, if we provide to the doors to the required infraestructure (NFC, BLE) to identify the users and their bought tickets just using the smartphone.

During the match

Maybe this part of the fan journey is the most developed by Robert on the book "The Age of Context", based on the New England Patriots experience.

The premium fans will be able to order for food&drinks to receive on their seat. But they also could provide to the rest of the visitors indoor maping and routing based on the wifi tecnology location engines. This indoor services will provide to them an easy experience to arrive to the differents stadium's points of interests (doors, bars & restaurants, vending machines, etc)

And, why not? they could also install sensors to dispose real-time overloading status of these POI's. To be able to provide them a way to decide the best time to bring their foods&drinks.

Also based on Robert's book, the best moments of the match will be available on the mobile application, giving the opportunity to select the best point of view for each situation. Exclusive HD videos just available for the fans on the stadium.

Often the fans enjoy listening the match through the radio, the club could bring to the people a way to listen the match directly from the sport journalist working at the stadium. And capture information about the favorite broadcasting station for the club fans.

Of course, the club could bring to the users real time insights, simulating when they are following the match on the TV, warnings, goals, kilometers, exclusions, changes, possession. This information is a great example of the insights that we could integrate in our point of view through the smart glasses. Or synchronize the referee stopwatch with the smart watch of the user.

For the clubs is important to generate event's difusion, to promote matches' content, one way is inviting stadium fans to share their experience easily. The club could define a gamification (D6 strategy) to promote the social engagement, maybe we could include elements/componentes like a ranking, or rewarding the best journalist of the match (how many messages shared, how many retweets...) and give them a gift, a free-promotional access to the next match, etc.

The match is also an opportunity to meet new people, just for fun, maybe the match is a "dating" opportunity. Maybe the loyalty application could provide to the users a way to interact between others during the match and promote the fun between them.

Finally, we all know about the gambling solutions economics, the gambling sector moves thousands of millions specifically on sport betting, why the club could not provide a way to allow fans to bet about differents moments on the match (first goal, last goal, final result, etc)

After the match

At the end of the match, we should provide to the fans similar services as we provide for the arrival. Is important to give them an easy experience to get out of the stadium. Closest door, overload status of the points of interest (roads, parkings, doors, etc)

But they could also provide a restaurant/bar marketplace for the places around the stadium, often the fans look for a place for lunch/dinner afther the match, is one example of the external economy generated by the event ... So, why the club could not offer a marketplace (like for the parkings)? And advertising platform with comission policy (CPM, CPC or CPL) to drive people to the places allowing them to book places using the club loyalty application?

The end of the match could be also a good time to generate up-selling / cross-selling activities, we could send invitations for the next match or promotions to buy merchandising ... like last-call messages.

All the purchase funnels must be analyzed accurately, maybe after a good match we detect a best selling behavior.

Summary

The more time I dedicated to this post, more new ideas I had about lots of opportunities of the context solutions for the clubs and for the professional league associations.

Lets see what the future bring to us.

Are context-aware systems finally here?

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sun, 1 Dec 2013 13:47:00 +0100

A few weeks ago, I received the recommendation from Roberto Serrano about the book "The Age of Context", I was very interested in the concept and to be honest the content of the book has not disappointed me.

Is not a new concept, nothing further of the reality, if we analize the google trends history of context-aware we could see, the same with smart cities, they were widely used concepts in the past decade.

I've also included a more contemporary concept as omnichannel.

The book talks about five technologies allow us TODAY to create context aware systems, like Google Now etc. but before start talking about technology, let me make an introduction about philosophy.

I was evaluating the reviews of the book on Amazon when I saw one deep and interesting review from Thomas Wendt (Surrounding Signifiers) based on Thomas point of view the complexity of the context is based on the next three pillars:

Emotional - How are you? How do you feel? Are you angry, happy, sad?
Cognitive - How do you arrived here? Which is your background? Your expertise, your experience?
Situation or Physical - Where are you? What are you doing? What are you plan to do next?

There are a lot of excellent presentation of Thomas Wendts here.

I reviewed some week ago one of my favorite TED Talks, from Simon Sinek about the power of why, and in my personal opinion that's the main principal missing thing of "The Age of Context" book and also the reason because I considerate Thomas Wendt's point of view the key, because is the why of the history.

Returning to the book, the authors talk about five technologies involved on the age of context:

Social Media. Based on the last statistics only facebook has 1.8B of MAU (Monthly Active Users) from the 7B people in the world. There is a huge number of people sharing information through social media, sharing content that could be managed to identify their feelings, their emotions.
Big Data. We're generating huge quantity of information every second, and is complex to process in order to generate knowledge. The big data term is applied to this new tools designed to allow us to process that complexity instead of the tools and database management traditional products.
Sensors. Just one smartphone provide about 15-20 sensors capturing information about the owner, gps, wify, accelerometer, nfc, ble... we could also include the external sensors provided for smart cities systems, or for in-door solutions and so on
LBS (Location Based Services) The location is maybe one of the most important information to target one customer. We could also evaluate the recent studies from Google Think about the use of the smartphone to manage local needs of the user
Mobile. Well, it's difficult to provide here something new to talk about the mobile, It's clear today we've more mobile devices than people on the world, and the Internet consumption from the mobile devices has passed the desktop consumption during the current 2013

Well, that's why I thought that Thomas Wendt point of view is so important, because if we evaluate this five technology, or maybe with the glasses, or smartwatches ... we're giving focus on the WHAT, and not on the WHY.

The mobile is, in my opinion, the key on the equation, is the big bang of the future, and this scenario give us the answer for example, why facebook is trying to buy blackberry, or any other mobile platform? Because the information you could get from the mobile about the user (the information we're providing to Apple, Google, Amazon (Kindle) and so force has an incredible value) is the key for the future and it supose one of the biggest threats or opportunities for Facebook.

That's also why the brands need a clear mobile strategy, because they NEED to be in our pocket.

Before finalize this post, let me talk about one of the most commons mistakes of the companies when they are designing the mobile strategy, some of us use the term "mobile myopia", and is the tendency to think on the mobile as the solution and forget that mobile is part of it.

We need to give a consistent experience to our customers, because now they want to interact with us using the old channels and, of course, with the new ones, depending on the location, or the moment (living room, office, car, transports...) And that's why terms like omnichannel, responsive design and so on should be present in our mind, at least for a while.

Because, like Thomas Wendt express in some of the presentations, we're just learning to walk.

So yes, the context aware systems are already here, and not just around the corner, they were here some time ago, waiting the right moment, when the early majority is ready to understand and welcome to the big brothers systems!

:-)

Regards,

Tritium Software - ForceManager | Lessons learned

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 23:21:00 +0200

Qué difícil me resulta escribir este artículo, que por otra parte se podría perfectamente titular "O cómo la teoría de la relatividad cae como una losa sobre nosotros"

Quizá esa sería la mayor lección que me llevo de este maravilloso proyecto al que nos hemos dedicado en cuerpo y alma los últimos 2 años largos.

Cuantas veces habré leído de la importancia de los pactos de socios, desde esa primera lectura hace ya no se cuantos años del Libro Negro del Emprendedor (Trias de Bes) En este caso no era viable escribir un pacto de socios, cuando yo me incorporé a la iniciativa me incorporé como trabajador, pero con ciertos commitments verbales, que se han quedado ahí ... en verbales.

Ahora en perspectiva, debatir quien tiene razón, que habría pasado si las cosas hubieran ido mal, que habría pasado si las cosas hubieran ido menos bien, o si hubieran ido mejor, que... son valoraciones subjetivas que no vienen al caso. Y que cómo son subjetivas guardaré privacidad.

Creo que si en su día se hubiera dejado claro todo, vesting, maturity, porcentajes, etc. ahora no habría margen para la subjetividad. Simplemente se cumpliría lo pactado, ni más ni menos. Si con el vesting y el maturity no es suficiente, hay fórmulas dinámicas, etc. que protejan tanto al emprendedor como al profesional que también asume riesgos, renuncia a situaciones más estables, mejores salarios, así como el coste de oportunidad de dedicar su esfuerzo, su pasión, a otras aventuras profesionales.

Fin de tema, a partir de ahí vamos con lo interesante.

Achievements del equipo:

Implantación desde cero de una adopción completa de desarrollo de producto agile. Adoptando guidelines de Scrum, Kanban, Lean ... y empezando a adoptar principios de CI y TDD.
Implantación de toda la infraestructura colaborativa completa, iniciada con el sistema cloud (Assembla para producto y TeamBox para servicios) para acabar adoptando la suite Atlassian (JIRA, GreenHooper, Confluence) más Jenkins
Consolidación de un equipo multi-disciplinar (8 personas) en entorno multi-producto exigente (backend, web, web configuración, android, black berry, windows 8, iOS)

Achievements de empresa:

Consolidación de equipo humano de los 3 originales que éramos a los más de 20 actuales
Crecimiento sostenido del MRR de la compañía, no daré datos por confidencialidad, pero muchos startups actuales con mucho más impacto mediático envidiarían el MRR de ForceManager, su LifeTime Value y el User Value
Adopción completa de metodología de implantación e industrialización del despliegue de la plataforma, liderado por Santi Trenchs
Cierre de segunda ronda de financiación en diciembre 2012

Fails:

No he conseguido evangelizar con metodología Lean a nivel de empresa, es decir solo el equipo de desarrollo ha adoptado estos cambios metodológicos... Stakeholders, pruebas de validación de assessments, etc. iban por libre, no orientábamos nuestra labor ni la evolución de producto a KPI o a Customer Development si no a lo que últimamente viene a denominarse Sales Driven Development, lo respeto y lo valoro (es algo fantástico tener ventas) pero si no lo gestionas adecuadamente puedes perder el foco y convertirte en una empresa de servicios. Fue durante mucho tiempo mi lucha interna, la lucha de todos, pero fracasé... Y a la compañía no le va mal, por lo que no tengo por que pensar que yo estaba en lo cierto.
No he ayudado lo suficiente al equipo de fundadores a liberarse de la plataforma tecnológica, para ser honesto ellos no tenían especial interés en liberarse, pero en última instancia era mi responsabilidad y habría sido beneficioso para todos que así fuera
Como no... hemos fracasado en el proceso de negociación, es evidente que ha finalizado como un lose-lose
Y seguro que muchos más que dejo en el olvido ...

Por último, me gustaría agradecer a Xavi y a Óscar la oportunidad que en su día me dieron, las cosas podrían haber sido diferente, pero ahora lo que importa es que la cosa siga yendo viento en popa y os deseo todos los éxitos.

Así mismo, me gustaría tener una mención especial para Jordi Coscolla, alguien que me ayudo a descubrir una nueva manera de vivir mi profesión, consolidando maneras de hacer que admiraba de Stefan Klumpp en nuestra época de bliquo.

Por último, gracias a Andrea y Santi llegasteis en el momento preciso y oportuno sois dos enormes profesionales qué realmente hacéis que el día a día sea más fácil. Gracias por vuestro apoyo y por vuestra complicidad siempre que la he necesitado.

Y para finalizar, gracias a Laia, Roger, Bruno, Josep, Ricard, Xavi y Álex... muchas gracias por creer, sois un equipo profesional y ejemplar como pocos.

Como bien sabéis os echaré de menos.

Un abrazo,

Gamification, Motivational Design y los proyectos Memorables

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sat, 6 Jul 2013 23:33:00 +0200

El pasado jueves, muy bien acompañado con Toni López, Bosco Curtu y Josep Lagunas, asistimos al seminario de Gamification & Motivational Design de Óscar García Pañella, organizado por el FIB Alumni.

Podéis ver el streaming del evento en el siguiente enlace

Siempre es agradable volver a "casa" la de horas que habremos pasado en esa facultad...

Qué decir de Óscar García Pañella, pues creo que la presentación no tiene desperdicio por lo que con el permiso de FIB Alumni usaré la presentación del evento:

Como avatar, el player Oscar García Pañella se convierte en KOKOPUS. De hecho, pertenece al clán de los Ingenieros en Telecomunicaciones por La Salle-URL. Se adentró en los reinos californianos (universidades USC y UCI) para después pasar de fase doctorándose en Realidad Virtual aplicada a Medicina. Entre sus PJs y PNJs (Personajes Jugadores y No Jugadores) preferidos se encuentran el bueno de Horacio, protagonista de una maravillosa trilogía de juegos para Sinclair ZX Spectrum allá por 1983, y también Guybrush de la Saga Monkey Island, publicada por LucasArts a lo largo de los últimos 20 años. En todos los casos imperando siempre el más absoluto rigor científico, que para nada necesita ser tan serio como lo pintan. Como en la Gamificación: esos polvos mágicos que podemos tirar por encima...de nuestro producto, servicio, actividad...para que simplemente mejore, enamorando y persuadiendo, en positivo, al usuario final.

Pero sigamos con la aventura. Oscar decidió aventurarse y acometer un gran reto, como buén seguidor del monomito que es: volar al planeta Pittsburgh para así poder conocer a otros avatares. Aterrizó en el Entertainment Technology Center de Carnegie Mellon University donde laboró con el maestro Jesse Schell, un visionario implementador de Game Design, atesorando muchos puntos de experiencia y trofeos. De hecho, Jesse estará en Barcelona a finales del mes de Junio en el certamen GameLab.

Por último, Oscar es un gran amante de los inventarios virtuales y de los enemigos finales de fase razón por la cual se dedica con empeño a múltiples campañas: entre ellas, dirigir el máster internacional de Creatividad, Tecnología y Diseño del ERAM College (Girona), el nuevo Grado Universitario en Videojuegos de ENTI (UB), el de Gamificación y Narrativa Transmedia online de IEBS School o, incluso, de ofrecer remedios gamificados en consultoría de RRHH desde Cookie Box para siempre contar fantásticas historias en foros notables como este...

Alguien que ha estado en Carnegie Mellon es alguien que para mi está "1000 pantallas más allá" que el resto, y yo que me conformo con poner en mi tarjeta profesional Imagineer en homenaje a Randy Pausch ... que iluso!!

En fin, proceso a dejar aquí algunas notas del seminario, que complementan en gran medida las notas de la formación realizada en coursera. Espero que sea de utilidad.

En primer lugar un par de infografías:

The gamification of Education
Gamify is good for you (Sorry no encontré el link)

Así mismo, Óscar nos facilitó un registro de serious games, que se puede sondear para analizar ejemplos existentes para necesidades que podamos tener:

http://serious.gameclassification.com/

Repasamos también las contribuciones de Nicole Lazzaro y 4 Keys to Fun

Repasamos los 10 puntos clave que compartió Jesse Shell, en especial la self-determination theory y la búsqueda de placer. Ya hablamos de la teoría de la auto determinación en el pasado, repasaremos la búsqueda de placer en breve.

Creo que nombrar el nombre de Jesse Shell merece como mínimo hacer mención de alguna de sus maravillosas ponencias, por ejemplo esta de TED.

Todo lo que encontréis de este hombre es sencillamente #memorable una palabra que utilizó en diferentes momentos Óscar en su presentación, por que se trata de eso, de proyectos memorables, de productos memorables, de experiencias memorables ...

En relación a Jesse, una de sus magníficas contribuciones son las 100 cards, reflexiones de lo que debe incluir tu producto ¿para qué? para que sea memorable.

The Art of Game Deisgn

Repasamos también alguno de los puntos educativos que un video juego puede aportar a una persona, en especial a un niño (todo con moderación por favor):

Se paciente
Gestiona la frustración
Convive con situaciones nuevas
Aprende a delegar
...

No me gustaría dejar atrás una afirmación que describe muy bien uno de los criterios de evaluación continua que siempre me gusta recordar a mis compañeros profesionales, la orientación a resultados:

Lo perfecto es enemigo de lo BUENO

Abandonando temas de desarrollo de producto, y educativos, comentamos el caso de Pam Kato y sus conclusiones doctorales y cientificas en relación a los beneficios del juego en ámbitos sanitarios. Fue otra de las entrevistas de la formación de coursera.

Su producto http://www.re-mission.net/ fue "utilizado" con niños con cáncer para incentivar su lucha contra la enfermedad, no quiere decir que el juego cure la enfermedad, eso sería ostentoso y superficial. Sus conclusiones van en relación a la motivación generada en ciertas zonas del cerebro de los pacientes y las consecuencias. Existen creencias fundadas que la esperanza de la curación es clave en los casos de éxito.

Creo que vale la pena repasar alguna presentación de Pam Kato en relación a la aplicación de gamification en en ámbito de la salud.

Otro punto comentado fue la necesidad de Taxonomizar tu audiencia, tus usuarios. Uno de los puntos de guía es la clasificación de Andrzej Marczewski, en el seminario repasamos 5 tipos:

Player - Rewards
Socializer - Relatedness
Free Spirit - Autonomy
Philantropic - Purpose / Altruism
Achiever - Mastery

En el anterior artículo hablamos de 4 tipos, siguiendo el modelo de Bartle. El siguiente esquema describe como clasifica Andrzej en base a la actividad de los usuarios

Volviendo a la búsqueda de placer, encontramos los siguientes 8 placeres. Óscar nos invitó a localizar donde residen estas características en los actuales éxitos mainstream (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram...)

Sensation
Fantasy (Estás dentro del círculo mágico)
Story
Immersion
Social
Challenge
Discovery
Expression

Vamos llegando al final del resumen, os dejo un último enlace, las 10 mejores presentaciones del pasado Gamification Summit 2013.

Por último comentamos la necesidad de medir la propuesta de valor de la Gamification, su ROI. No resulta fácil defender su valor ante un potencial cliente, creo que en este sentido el 6D framework nos ofrece ejercicios de reflexión claros para identificar insights, para identificar KPI's.

Un abrazo,

Gamification - The 6D Framework

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:11:00 +0200

The last two months I have been participated on the Gamification Training at Coursera, from the University of Pennsylvania (Kevin Werbach), I will try in this post to share with you some of the principal aspects of this "point of view" of the design.

You could also check the website of the book made by Kevin Werbach "For the Win"

First of all let me share with you my general conclusions. To be honest, maybe is one of the best trainings in which I have participated, I feel very confortable with the structure of the course, the content, and the possibilities that it gives me to be applied on my daily responsibility.

I evaluated and applied before some other design methods, for example Design Thinking, Lean Startup, etcetera. In my opinion, Gamification is another strategy to design a product, or a marketing strategy, or an human resources strategy... But unlike other more philosophical ways, Gamification gives you some detailed and structured frameworks to drive you on the design process. So, the perfect match with my square brain.

On the first part of the course, Kevin Werbach, introduce us new concepts like behaviorism, the motivational design, the fun (and their categories), the rewarding, the emocional, the engagement, the dynamics, components and design elements, and of course the dangers of the different technics.

Will be imposible summarize in this post all the concepts described during the course, so I will be focus for the moment on the 6D Framework.

The 6D Framework

The 6D framework is a design process with the next six elements, steps or premises:

Define Business Objectives
Delineate target behavior
Describe yours players
Devise activity loops
Don't forget the fun
Deploy appropriate tools

Define Business Objectives

Which are the achievements of the project, of the system, of the campaign?

Process:

Make a list as concrete as possible and rank them

Eliminate the things is not a final business objective

Justify objectives … why is that something to achieve?

For example for bliquo (leisure aggregator) the main goal was to encourage the people to book restaurants, the secondary ones was:

Collect a huge number of users

Have a healthy database content of places

...

Delineate target behavior

Things you want users to do. Process:

Specify the tasks

Define the success metrics, the win states for every tasks

Define the ways to measuring this win states:

DAU/MAU - Ratio between daily and monthly active users, 100% shows a high engage application

Virality - Sharing activity

Activity volume

According again to bliquo (leisure aggregator) the things we want users to do was:

Encourage people to book (KPI #Books/User #Books/Week #Books/Weekday ...)

Encourage people to rate and review places (KPI #Rates/User #Rate/Week #Rate/Weekday ...)

Encourage people to share this activity (KPI #FBShare/User #TWShare/User ...)

Encourage people to invite friends (KPI #NewsUser/Invitation/Channel ...)

...

Describe yours players

What do you know about the players? (Demographics, Age groups, Psychographics, Kind of Behavior… ) Knowing this players, the kind of players, make a big different … in order to know how to motivate them.

The most common model is the Bartle model, this model define four categories, is a good starting point:

Achievers. People who prefer acting and explore the world. So, people interested on rewards
Explorers. People who prefer interact and explore the world. So, people who wants to learn and discover
Socializers. People who prefer to interact and play
Killers. People who wants to fight, compete, vanquish

There're some iterations of this Bartle model, based on verbs. Could be an easy way to identify our kind of users.

Your system could be addressed to some of these groups, so you should define different elements, different mechanism for each one, in order to motivate them.

Devise activity loops
We must identify and evaluate carefully the repetitives, recoursives structures, specifically our analysis must focus on the next two kinds of tasks:

Engagement loops

Progressive loops

Engagement loops. Based on the Motivational Design rules, we should identify the task we want the users to repeat, and motivate them to do it, and give them feedback to learn it

Motivation, motivate the users to do something we expect

Action, the user do the task

Feedback. we give to the user an immediate feedback to become them motivated and iterate the loop

Progressive loops. Loops we will include on the design to drive them from a newbie to a master of our product.

From start to finish and a set of intermediate steps

Provide small challenges to the user to arriva to a final goal.

A well design must provide engagement and progressive loops as the natural way to help the user to learn and to become a master of the product.

Don't forget the fun
Personally, maybe is the most difficult part of the framework, because, also in my opinion, is more philosophical against the others ones.

When people are in the path to design a gamified design, sometimes lose the focus, in easy to forget that the point is create something FUN.

Because the FUN is also an intrisic motivation.

Deploy appropriate tools

Use the right tools. Apply the dynamics, the mechanics, the components based on the previous premises, which verbs are aligned with our kind players, how we provide scaffolding to our users to become masters, who we want to provide FUN to them, and obviously to align the user behavior with the product objectives

As I share with all of you at the beginning of this post, I enjoyed a lot this course and I'll go deep on some of the concepts of the course like the self-determination theory, etc.

I'll let you know.

Next step the 42 rules of product manager book review.

Regards,

Mobile developer / Survival Kit

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:45:00 +0100

This is my first post in English, I decide to switch the usual language of the blog to arrive to most people, according to the visits of the blog. So, be comprehensive ... ;-)

As a Software Engineer, every day we have more and more applications and tools to improve our life and be more productive, is part of our professional commitment to be alert about them and try to aggregate to our work method.

We will not discuss about general tools for code storage, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and other essential tools. I'll assume is part of your life.

I will focus on:

Beta distribution
Quality Assurance: Crash Report Management
Analytics
Multi-language distribution

TestFlight | www.testflightapp.com

If you are developing for Android, Windows Phone or BlackBerry maybe is not the most interesting tool for you, all of these platforms allow you to distribute your beta versions easily through any way (e-mail distribution, cloud storage services like dropbox, box, ... and so force)

But for the iOs development Team, TestFlight is a "MUST" on our survival kit. You could manage some applications, and some distribution list, you can also contact with testers ... but in general, the most important thing, at least based on my requirements:

You could distribute your beta releases periodically to partners, stakeholders, customers, testers before release your final version to the app store.

In general, on the Apple market is critical to guarantee the stability of the release, according to the distribution lifecycle (5-6 business days). You could try to use the fast release way if you make the mistake to release a buggy version ... firstly because this way has a limited number of bullets ... but the most important reason because you should guarantee your customer confidence.

Crittercism | www.crittercism.com / BugSense | www.bugsense.com

The second weapon to store in our survival kit is the crash report management, in order to control the customer crashes that our users are suffering.

There are a lot of competitors in this market, but after a product research my decision was to integrate crittercism for iOS and Android solutions, they also support HTML5 and the Windows 8 Beta is announced (we're waiting for...)

BugSense seems also a very nice alternative, I meet with the CEO on the last Tech Mobile event at Barcelona. He was one of the Pitch elevator competitors.

The reason to integrate one of these tools is not only according to collect information of the crashes, and solve in next releases. Is also to have critical KPI related to the quality assurance of the product, and also analytics about the customers.

For example with crittercism you could evaluate (using the Trends Analytics) insights like:

DAU - Daily active users
MAU - Monthly active users
# Application loads - Number of loads of your application
# Crash - Number of crashes
% Loads with a crash
% Users affected by at least one crash
...

All the information segmented by the version of the application.

In my opinion you have enough KPI hear to define goals for you (your team) to succeed (In quality assurance terms)

Crittercism | www.crittercism.com / GA | www.google.com/intl/es/analytics/

You can get this information using crittercism or other consolidated products like flurry or AdMob, but I decided to integrate with Google Analytics, the main reason was because it is a familiar tool for me. And, although is not a mobile specific tool, is one of the best tools for analytics ...

The mission of the analytics tools is evaluate the engage of the users, the usual navigation path ... and a lot of insight you could get from your customers using these tools. Please take a look for example to the Web Analytics 2.0 (Avinash Kaushik) book.

The best development decision here, is create a wrapper for logging the user action when the view controller is loaded for example, in order to maintain your code clean to the partners SDK's. Then, create a wrapper in your code where integrate with these partners.

For example, in iOS application, I setUp the session for crittercism and google Analytics when the AppDelegate has been started. But after that I have a logger shared instance, who is the responsible to manage the tracking of the users activity, now for crittercism and google analytics, maybe tomorrow with other tools.

OneSkyApp | www.oneskyapp.com/

The last weapon I want to include in my survival kit is not just for mobile developers, in any case, for me is one of the most customer designed tools I had been evaluated the last years.

We're on a global age, and we should provide our products in as many languages as we can. Manage the translation of your application is usually dangerous, keys without all the translations, different words and phrases in different applications ... and so force.

And is difficult to have a global visibility of the situation. One Sky is a product focus in help you on that purpose. You could create as many application as you have in your solution, upload the files in the original format, evaluate the state of the translations (All the language's resources files have the same keys? All the translations have a similar length? ...) Contract the translation for a new language? Define a glossary for all the application ... And, at the end of the process, download the translation on the native resource format that you need.

Simply amazing!

Waiting for your contributions.

Best regards,

2013 Product Development Chain

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:13:00 +0100

Como os introducía en el anterior artículo, fruto de las retrospectivas y con la motivación de concretar más nuestro método de trabajo, hemos iterado nuestro proceso de desarrollo.

El proceso se divide en tres grandes grupos y responde a las necesidades actuales, lo natural, en caso contrario deberíamos preocuparnos, es que lo volvamos a iterar en pocos meses:

User Research & Design
I+D
Quality Assurance

El objetivo no es necesitar tres sprints para poder aportar valor al usuario, si no que el equipo de trabajo, disponga de horas durante el sprint para trabajar en la definición y estimación de las tareas que van a ser acometidas durante los siguientes sprints. Pero que el flujo de generación de valor sea contínuo durante los sprints (15 días)

El método individual debe ser igualmente madurado, introduciendo conceptos de TDD. Necesitamos mejorar la calidad de nuestros desarrollos, y el test coverage de nuestras producciones.

Así mismo, un trabajo más real en las tareas de estimación y proveer a la compañía de un calendario de producto. Algo nada fácil dado el generoso alcance de ForceManager. Pero que es fundamental para una correcta toma de decisión.

Una necesidad clara que teníamos durante este pasado 2012, además de la disponibilidad pública de un calendario, era basar nuestro trabajo en métricas que dirijan a nuestro jinete (Switch).

Hemos definido KPI en tres grandes grupos:

Método de trabajo. Insights que midan el seguimiento del método de trabajo definido
Quality Assurance. Insights que midan el nivel de estabilidad de nuestros productos
Customer Commitment. Insights que midan impactos positivos/negativos con nuestro cliente (consecución de calendario previsto, tiempo promedio de liberación de una nueva funcionalidad, tiempo medio de liberación de una incidencia)

Para compartir estas métricas con todo el equipo y toda la compañía, hemos seguido las buenas guías de Visual Management, y hemos creado diferentes cuadros.

Por una parte gestionamos el LogOfWork del equipo diariamente para todo el sprint, con el objetivo de incentivar en el uso de JIRA, todos sabemos lo importante que es conocer la velocidad como equipo. Así como la realización de los StandUp matinales.

A continuación un cuadro resumen de:

Bugs graves reportados por clientes durante el sprint. El objetivo es durante el sprint meeting repasar los bugs y mediante técnicas como 5whys identificar oportunidades de mejora
Customer Earned Value. Valor generado al cliente durante el sprint
Feature Speed. Tiempo requerido para liberar funcionalidades e indicencias

Por último, hemos iterado el Cardwall del equipo, para ilustrar las nuevas fases de nuestro LC. Dando visibilidad a todo el equipo tanto del trabajo del presente sprint, como de lo que está por venir en los siguientes sprints.

Una última novedad en el modelo de trabajo ha sido la de incluir un SCRUM MASTER rotativo, de manera que todo el equipo en mayor o menos medida tiene que involucrarse en el método, y en algún momento del año, en realidad en varios momentos, va a ser responsable de liderar al grupo.

Tengo que decir que ya, en tan solo un sprint de 2013 hemos empezado a notar un cambio de dinámica positiva. Una imagen vale más que mil palabras (Velocity Report JIRA) ... apoteósico el cambio en el LogOfWork del equipo.

Un abrazo,

2012 Retrospective

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:33:00 +0100

Una vez llegado el final del 2012, a nivel de equipo creo que es un momento excelente para reflexionar e identificar oportunidades de mejora de cara al 2013. No tienen por que ser ejercicios anuales, pero creo que como mínimo un ejercicio anual se hace imprescindible.

Para dinamizar el ejercicio del año utilizamos la técnica Starfish, podéis encontrar una lista muy interesante de posibles retrospectivas en este link.

Como se puede observar, tenemos tanto por adoptar y hacer, que no hay casi nada en Less Off y Stop Doing. A ver que sucede en las futuras retrospectivas.

En nuestro caso las revisiones de proceso se hacen imprescindible, dado el proceso de continuo cambio en el que vivimos, no tan solo por que somos un startup y debemos convivir con el chaos si no también, por el volumen de crecimiento en el que estamos sumergidos.

Las líneas maestras de nuestro proceso de trabajo se resumen en la siguiente presentación que tengo pública en prezi.

Pero de cara al 2013 tocaba concretar medidas, y aprovechar sin lugar a dudas el feedback aportado por todos.

Los puntos de mejora identificados, además de ilustrar las carencias actuales que tenemos en el método de trabajo individual (sobretodo en lo referente al testing unitario/integración) también ilustraba las carencias como equipo ...

Falta de visibilidad sobre el calendario
Falta de implicación en la planificación
Falta de implicación en toma de requisitos

Algunos de estos puntos pueden parecer obvios, pero no lo son. Hay medidas o guidelines de agility que están totalmente enfocadas a mejorar estos puntos, pero a veces no sabes encontrar el momento para empezar a implantarlos.

Pues el momento es ahora.

En el siguiente post introduciré brevemente el método de trabajo, que se basa en encadenar sprints para integrar los outputs del equipo de user experience con el de desarrollo y posteriormente con el de quality, siguiendo esquemas similares a los expuestos en el User Agile Development LC.

Un abrazo,

Atlassian vs TFS

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Thu, 1 Nov 2012 18:34:00 +0100

El equipo sigue creciendo, y necesitamos mejorar nuestra plataforma colaborativa. Consolidar el equipo de producto es uno de los pasos fundamentales que tenemos que superar satisfactoriamente si queremos garantizar nuestro camino al "éxito".

Hasta ahora habíamos intentado sin éxito integrar CI & TDD, pero hasta el camino más largo empieza por un paso. Por lo que este intento será todavía con mayor intensidad.

El primer paso, y complejo dada las exigencias de nuestra plataforma, es la plataforma colaborativa más idonea para nosotros.

Queremos implantar un ALM basado en LSUX, por lo que necesitamos dar apoyo a los ejercicio de User Research/User Test, a los de desarrollo y a los de calidad de producto.

Con este objetivo inicié una evaluación entre la suite de Atlassian y TFS, dado que Assembla empieza a quedarse pequeño.

TFS es quizá una alternativa menos popular en el ámbito opensource, pero es seguramente la plataforma más consolidada del mercado. Así por ejemplo lo refleja el siguiente estudio de Gartner.

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1AX7YJM&ct=120614&st=sb

Los puntos críticos para nuestro equipo son los siguientes:

Genéricos

Herramientas cliente
Repositorio de código
Configuración/Personalización de workflows

En el caso de Atlassian, toda la suite de productos son Web, TFS ofrece una web que se complementa con VS2012 Premium o superior o plug-ins para eclipse. La integración con XCode debe realizarse a través de un plug-in de Git, o bien si desarrollas iOs debes utilizar eclipse como cliente del repositorio de código.

Quality Plan

Posibilidad de definir planes de calidad
Exploratory Testing
Issue Tracking Integration
TDD support for User Story

Ninguna de las herramientas ofrecen vías realmente satisfactorias para gestionar planes de calidad, controlas ejecuciones, etc. En el caso de TFS, el sistema de gestión ágil integra plan de test, aplicando por tanto TDD, así mismo dispone de una herramienta de Test Management, que sí que podría cubrir con los requisitos, pero es un cliente desktop ... shit! En relación al exploratory testing, está cubierto con el plug-in Bonfire de Atlassian, realmente interesante y totalmente integrado con JIRA.

He leído alguna información de como especificar un plan de calidad con JIRA o confluence, pero en ningún caso se comportan como herramientas externas como TestLink en las que tipifican los planes de calidad, se controlan ejecuciones de calidad, y se pueden llegar a extraer KPI específicas de esta importantísima parte del proceso.

UX/UD

Requirements / Specifications
Charting / Sketching
Prototyping

En el caso de TFS, existe una vía para especificar user stories, pero no he sabido encontrar integrado un portal colaborativo, que permita generar contenido fuera de las especificaciones. Atlassian, a través del portal Confluence, ofrece una excelente herramienta de documentación. Incluye además la posibilidad de integrar el plug-in Gliffy para incluir esquemas, diagramas, UML's, etc aunque no llega al alcance de herramientas como Balsamiq por ejemplo.

Agile

Backlog Management
Forecasting based on the team capacity/velocity
Sprint cardwall
Kanban / Scrum support
Burndown chart
Multi - product management on one team
StandUp report

Ambas herramientas disponen de una orientación clara a la gestión ágil, pero a nivel subjetivo, creo que la suite de Atlassian, mediante su plug-in Greenhopper es mucho más madura que TFS. Ofreciendo un cardwall multi-proyecto, pudiendo general boards SCRUM o KANBAN, y con informes excelentes como el Burdown Chart o Velocity Speed.

Support Management

Collect eMail issue tracking
Continuos feedback tools
Ad-hoc or Customizable feed-back form
Multi-project management

En la actualidad utilizamos TeamBox con un resultado excelente, en el caso de TFS puedes recoger feecback del cliente, con un instalable microsoft que el usuario se debe descargar y disponer de una cuenta windows live ... demasiadas barreras. Atlassian cubre las necesidades de gestión por projecto/cliente, de alta de tickets vía correo electrónico, de configuración de formularios de feedback ad-hoc ... aunque no se si por ahora vamos a renunciar a TeamBox.

Source Control

Tools for code review
Integration with the issue tracking
Offline support for development
Graph and mergin tools
Tools for automatic evaluation of the code

En este punto ambas plataformas ofrecen soluciones interesantes, Atlassian con FishEye, Crucible y TFS con integración de herramientas de revisión de código, eso sí, totalmente integradas con Visual Studio 2012 (imagino que también 2010)

Continuous Integration & Continuous deployment

Automatic Build on Commit
Automatic Rollback
Notification System on crappy/break-build commit
Automatic technical document generation
Continuous deployment. Automatize the deployment (Integration environment)

En este punto ambas plataformas ofrecen debilidades, si bien en nuestro caso, el CI va a destinarse al servidor que está desarrollado en .Net, y por tanto TFS ofrece la solución ideal, pese a que en el caso del continuous deployment se limita a servidores azure. En el caso de Bamboo, hay limitaciones sobre soluciones .Net. Una lástima.

KPI & Reporting

Reporting for evaluate the support team
Reporting for evaluate the production team

Al igual que sucedía con la gestión ágil, a nivel de reporting Atlassian parece una solución más madura.

Collaborative content

Wiki tool
Requirement description tool

En este punto, Confluence creo que es la respuesta a todas nuestras necesidades. Sería idea poder gestionar de una manera más jerárquica los user stories, aunque también a través de Atlassian puedes usar las stories de JIRA como tickets. Algo similar a lo que ofrece TFS. Quizá sea el mejor modo para gestionar la trazabilidad del producto ...

Sí, lo se el alcance es muy ambicioso, pero mejor mirar con perspectivas de futuro. Después de mucho pensarlo y no sin muchas dudas. Las conclusiones fueron las siguientes.

Atlassian

En general Atlassian parece una solución fantástica, con una gran suite de productos, quizá sea un handicap, la complejidad de la solución, la integración de todos los posibles components y plug-ins. Fuera de eso, las debilidades que le encuentro son las siguientes

Bamboo, la herramienta CI de Atlassian, parece no integrarse de la manera más adecuada con .Net, plataforma con la que está desarrollado nuestro servicio web. Otros productos como Jenkins y evidentemente TFS lo solucionan mejor
FishEye y Crucible, las herramientas de Source Control de Atlassian, están más orientados a lenguajes como Java, Ruby, etc. que con .Net
La versión onDemand, en Cloud, presentan ciertas limitaciones críticas, por ejemplo en el caso de Bamboo con projectos Visual Studio, que hacen que la única vía en el caso de seleccionar Atlassian sea on Premise, en un servidor propio

TFS

Que TFS es un producto magnífico, es algo irrefutable, tal y como refleja el estudio de Gartner, pero al igual que Atlassian tiene ciertas debilidades, Microsoft ha hecho un esfuerzo en abrirse a otras tecnologías fuera de .Net, ofreciendo vías de integración con eclipse y XCode. Pero existe una incertidumbre clara en relación al alcance y el precio que va a tener TFS preview, la propuesta cloud de TFS (Precisamente hoy han anunciado que se tratará de un servicio gratuito)

El primer handicap, y creo que el principal motivo por el cual el servicio web es gratuito, es que gran parte de los productos que cubren nuestras necesidades o bien son clientes desktop de microsoft, o bien requieren de Visual Studio 2012 para acceder a las funcionalidades, eso es un handicap insuperable para un equipo multi-plataforma como el nuestro - Cuando digo que creo que es el motivo por el que el servicio web es gratuito, es por que VS 2012 Premium no lo es ... y la web es huérfana sin el resto del producto.
Aunque sea una continuación del anterior, no disponer de un entorno web colaborativo debilita la apuesta TFS
Así mismo el sistema de gestión ágil de TFS es más simple, que el de Atlassian, y están más orientados a equipos de desarrollo. Nuestro equipo también tiene necesidades para equipo de soporte y mantenimiento.

La decisión final ha sido lanzar en modo evaluación JIRA y Confluence, con los plug-ins Gliffy, GreenHopper. También hemos evaluado Crucible y FishEye, así como Bamboo. Pero por ahora únicamente vamos a lanzar JIRA(GreenHopper) y Confluence.

Utilizar TestLink para el quality plan, y evaluar Jenkins como alternativa a Bamboo para el Continuous Integration del backend.

Saludos,

LSUX - Lean Startup User Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 22:36:00 +0200

Este pasado sábado 14 de Julio pude disfrutar de un workshop de Lean User Experience organizado por La Salle.

La verdad es que ha sido un breve taller de 4 horas, pero tengo el feeling que va a suponer un gran cambio, y una apertura de nuevas iniciativas interesantes.

El workshop fue presentado por Albert Cubeles, Alexis Roqué y Marc Pifarré. Creo que vale la pena situar a las personas de referencia del Workshop por si fuera de interés poneros en contacto con alguno de ellos:

Marc Pifarré -  Investigador en User experience, responsable científico del Userlab de La Salle y Director del postgrado en experiencia de usuario (PUX). Licenciado en psicología es profesor de la facultad de ingeniería La Salle y lleva a cabo proyectos de usabilidad y experiencia de usuario para empresas de innovación de índole diversa, desde emprendedores que lanzan nuevos productos a multinacionales consolidadas.
Alexis Roqué -  Emprendedor y co-fundador de <Undefined>, agencia interactiva especializada en el diseño y desarrollo de aplicaciones web multidispositivo. En combina tareas directivas con gestión de producto y diseño de ux, desde la fase inicial hasta su lanzamiento. Tiene una gran experiencia a la hora de analizar las necesidades del producto y alinearlas con el diseño, el negocio y la tecnología con el objetivo de crear productos que ofrezcan experiencias memorables.
Albert Cubeles  - Director de los másters de Marketing y Digital Business y del International MBA de La Salle Campus Barcelona.

El objetivo del workshop era un vistazo general de los siguientes puntos. Quizá un alcance excesivo para el poco tiempo, pero fue una prueba piloto, desde mi punto de vista excelente.

El evento siguió el siguiente programa:

1. Lean Startup

Albert Cubeles. Introducción general a la evolución de las metodologías de gestión.

Una visión interesante de la evolución desde los iniciales modelos predictivos a los modelos actuales.
Comentarios en relación a como se unen nuevas tendencias de emprendeduría (Lean Startup Method) de gestión (Agility) y de gestión del cliente (Customer Development) para crear nuevas vías de ejecución de un proyecto centrado en el usuario final
Dentro de los comentarios más interesantes que se dejo caer fue la de la evolución de la figura del Project Manager, incluso del actual Product Owner (figura existente en los equipos SCRUM o SCRUMBAN) Desde el punto de vista de Albert, esta figura cada vez va a estar menos representada por managers, ni tan siquiera personal de márketing, y sí en cambio por personas de UX, que sean capaces de captar las necesidades del cliente, del usuario, y conceptualizarlas en diseños con buena experiencia de usuario ... muy muy interesante ... punto a explorar. Es decir un diseño desde las trincheras

Alexis Roqué. Introduce el concepto MVP promovido por ERIC RIES en el libro Lean Startup Method.

Alexis repasó los guidelines principales de Lean Startups, por enumerar algunos

Averigua las debilidades de tu competencia, y pon tu foco en mejorar esas debilidades
Simplifica, menos es más
Analiza ... mide mide mide

Un MVP puede ser algo tan simple como:

Landing page (Alguna automatizada sin ir más lejos) por ejemplo usando servicios como unbounce o betapolis de mi gran amigo Bosco Curtu
Genera tráfico (céntrate en la fase de adquisition) SEM, Social Media ... realiza AB testing
Recoge feed-back del usuario, estos primeros pilotos solo van a llegar a usuarios Early Adopters, que suelen ser muy colaborativos en sus contribuciones, dales vías, utiliza vías como wufoo, uservoice o tantos otros disponibles on-line con un budget mínimo o 0
Y analiza ... integra herramientas como Analítycs (Google o Yahoo) y no dejes de explorar y segmentar

2. User Experience & Design Thinking

Este punto fue uno de los más interesantes para mi, debido a que era uno de los más desconocidos.

Hablando de las actuales tendencias, el diseño ha pasado de ser liderado por la parte analítica, la racional, a pasar a ser lidera por nuestro hemisferio izquierdo, más visual y emocional.

En la fase de diseño, se consideran las siguientes seis fases:

Idea/Propósito. User research
Form (Arquitectura de la información)
Idiom (Information design)
Structure (Interaction design)
Craft (Usability test)
Surface (Visual Design)

Repasamos diferentes técnicas aplicables a cada una de las fases. Aunque dado lo intenso del curso solo pudimos profundizar en algunos de ellos.

De la parte inicial, la de User Research

Analizamos durante la sesión en detalle la técnica de las personas (Alan Cooper) acompañado por un ejercicio de definición de personajes que fue muy interesante. En cualquier caso, aplicable a la labor profesional diaria, lo más interesante fue la técnica de definición de una entrevista:

Cómo estructurar una entrevista
Cómo formular las preguntas
Cómo estimular la narrativa del usuario y explorar los deseos de los usuarios (Evitar las preguntas dicotómicas)
Cómo soportar los silencios

Es muy importante que la recogida de datos permita la posterior segmentación/explotación, para las siguientes fases del diseño/conceptualización de la solución.

Comentamos la técnica de laddering, o técnicas como la de 5whys para profundizar desde una pregunta /respuesta genérica para estimular la narrativa y llegar a conectar con los deseos del usuario.

3. Arquitectura de la información

De este punto a penas pudimos profundizar, comentamos muy por encima la técnica de Card Sorting. Os paso para complementar algunos artículos de interés:

http://www.nosolousabilidad.com/articulos/cardsorting.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorting
http://www.nosolousabilidad.com/articulos/cardsorting_unicauca.htm

4. Interaction Design

En el punto de diseño interactivo, lo dividimos en tres fases:

Sketching. sí sí ... muy inspirador, por lo de tele-sketch, pinta y colorea como primera fase de la conceptualización ... navega expansivamente las posibilidades que ofrece tu mente para solucionar una feature
Wire-frame. Elaboración más madura de los esquemas generados en la fase previa
Prototype. Reproducción (de cartón piedra) lo más fiel posible a la solución final. Debe permitir la interacción del usuario

Steve Krug - Don't make me think

Algunas de las citas que repasamos:

Economizar las acciones y el tiempo
Analizar la curva de aprendizaje
Mensajes visuales
Confirmación de feed-back por parte del sistema (confirmación de acción)

Para ello nada mejor que el user testing

5. User Testing

En relación al user testing realizamos otro trabajo en equipo, el objetivo era definir tareas que debe hacer un usuario. Las tareas deben ser diseñadas siguiendo los siguientes criterios:

Razonable
Específica
Breve

Estuvimos basándonos en una solución de sketching, dado que supone la mejor solución a un coste más bajo para empezar a colaborar con stakeholders en la diseño de la solución.

Facilitación

Fase de acompañamiento al usuario durante el test

lenguaje verbal (Think aloud --> Expresar en voz alta lo que está viviendo el usuario durante el test)
Evitar desviación del tema, centrarse en el test diseñado
Profundizar sobre su experiencia

Recolección de datos

Es habitual la presencia de un observador, este puede estar en una habitación contigua, es importante evitar que el usuario se sienta presionado.

¿Que información es interesante recopilar para su posterior explotación?

Navegación realizada por el usuario
Tiempo por tarea
Resultado de la tarea:

exit. Es importante definir que debe realizar el usuario para considerarlo un éxito
fail. El usuario no consigue completar la tarea
fail exit. El usuario cree completar la tarea pero no es así
fail fail. El usuario ha logrado completar la tarea aunque está ya ha sido completada

6. Agile techniques

Este punto, de nuevo lo pasamos por encima, estábamos ya fuera de tiempo. Analizamos un concepto que no hemos explorado antes en el blog. El círculo de deming:

Que describe las fases iterativas de un proceso agile:

Planifica
Actua
Valida
y Actualiza

Para finalizar hicimos dos ejercicios de retrospectiva interesantes.

Un Time feeling indicando el índice que interés de los asistentes para cada uno de los capítulos del workshop.
Y en segundo lugar, un Starfish se basa en dividir en un wall ideas de los asistentes siguiendo los siguientes criterios:

Keep doing. Puntos que te han gustado y crees que deben ser mantenidos
Less Of. Reducir la importancia de este punto
More Of. Incluir con mayor profundidad este punto
Star Doing. Incluir un nuevo punto
Stop Doing. Dejar de incluir el punto

Podéis profundizar más en estos puntos en estos artículos:

http://www.thekua.com/rant/2006/03/the-retrospective-starfish/
http://www.proyectosagiles.org/retrospectiva-estrella-mar-starfish-retrospective-scrum

Espero que haya sido de vuestro interés,

Coursera: SaaS (Berkley)

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:48:00 +0200

Han sido realmente 5 semanas muy intensas, y creo que la resaca durará semanas. El contenido del curso es tan extenso que necesitaré alguna semana más para finalizar el contenido, y meses para digerirlo.

Podéis ver la información del programa aquí, realmente ha sido una formación muy interesante, y bien organizada. Basada en:

material visual (vídeo chats, clases y screencasts)
material didáctico (presentaciones y libros)
pruebas. Dos tipos de pruebas, pruebas tipo test, y pruebas de codificación prácticas

Intentando cumplir con el proceso de aprendizaje óptimo según el equipo de Berkley: lee, mira y practica (Creo que no estamos en disposición de dudar del método) Más bien al contrario. Estoy gratamente sorprendido.

Podéis obtener más información del curso y apuntaros aunque teóricamente empezó hace un par de días en el próximo curso en este link

Aunque el objetivo, que era explorar nuevas vías de crecimiento ha sido muy satisfactorio, además me llevo conmigo varios tesoros que hoy quiero compatir con vosotros.

En primer lugar la formación me ha venido bien para descubrir Ruby & Rails. Un lenguaje simplemente delicioso. Con una agilidad parecida a la que aporta python.

Por otra parte, profundizar en técnicas que hasta ahora solo conocía de forma teórica, sobretodo en relación a BDD (Behavior Driven Development), ha sido de lo más interesante. A priori era muy escéptico en relación a poder especificar cualquier requisito mediante lenguaje semántico, y poder automatizar la ejecución de pruebas de aceptación.

Sigo siendo escéptico en la viabilidad de su implantación en grandes proyectos, es posible que si desde el primer día introduces la dinámica sea sostenible, pero adoptar a medio camino me parece inalcanzable.

Se trata de especificar mediante un pseudo-lenguaje natural las user stories, para automatizar su posterior cumplimiento.

Existen productos como Cucumber que proveen de la infraestructura necesaria para implementar un entorno BDD. He visto incluso versiones alineadas con proyectos XCode, por lo que no descarto incluirlo o si más no realizar alguna prueba a corto plazo.

En relación a TDD, sí que era un proceso más conocido, pero he podido profundizar en relación a la teoría RedGreenRefactor

Red: Escribe un set de pruebas sobre una funcionalidad (que todavía no has implementado) y ejecútalo. El resultado debe ser ver la suite en rojo, dado que los test no se superan
Green. Realiza el código código posible para conseguir superar las pruebas, hasta ver la ejecución de la suite en verde
Refactor. Una vez superadas las pruebas, y teniendo la garantía que posibles incumplimientos de los requisitos van a ser detectados por la suite, itera y mejora el código

En fin, animaros a probarlo, realmente es un recurso fantástico y gratuito. Creo que la siguiente formación será la de Standford - Machine Learning (una de mis debilidades intelectuales)

Aunque tengo la lista de libros llena, y me gustaría acabar cuanto antes Running Lean y Customer Development.

Un abrazo,

Una de libros

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:58:00 +0200

Se que no tengo disculpa, pero la verdad es que estoy tan sumamente concentrado en ForceManager, que no

saco tiempo para poder aportar artículos. No tengo perdón.

Y la realidad es que hemos aportado muchas novedades en las últimos meses dentro de nuestra metodología de trabajo. Menos de las que me habrían gustado para ser honesto. Tiempo al tiempo, ahora tenemos problemas mayores, como configurar un buen equipo.

En cualquier caso, me gustaría compartir con vosotros alguna referencia bibliográfica de este año, he leído algunos libros últimamente realmente interesantes. La mayoría de ellos, por iniciativa compartida con Jordi Coscolla, y decididos por el grupo de google agile-bcn.

El primero es The Pragmatic Programmer, es de esos libros que cuando acabo pienso, como he podido vivir hasta ahora¿??? No, hablando en serio, creo que es un libro imprescindible para toda persona que se dedique y disfrute de nuestro trabajo como Ingenieros. Conceptos como ortogonalidad (acoplamiento), y aplicación de patrones con racionalidad, y ese pragmatismo que dan algunas líneas de las metodologías ágiles que tan de moda están hoy en día... son algunos ejemplos de lo que nos puede aportar este libro, muy actual pese a los más de 10 años que tiene su primera edición.

En segundo lugar, el libro de Eric Ries, The Lean Startup Method, este es un libro mucho más orientado a metodologías ágiles, mezclando las líneas lean de "optimización de la cadena de producción", al mundo de la emprendeduría. Fue empezar a leerlo, y empezar a arrepentirme de no haber asistido al lean.kamp.

El caso es que ha movido en mi algún interés en realizar alguna formación ... a ver que decisión acabo tomando. Me ha parecido muy interesante las entrevistas que he realizado con el equipo de LaSalle, en especial Paul Fox el coordinador del MCNI. Compartimos una buena relación de referencias bibliográficas que ya forman parte de mi pipeline ;-)

Fue muy interesante encontrar a alguien tan apasionado por estos temas, y con una relación tan similar de bibliografía. Entre otras referencias, por supuesto la de Steve Blank, otro imprescindible!

Un abrazo,

Story Points vs Hours

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Sun, 8 Jan 2012 11:54:00 +0100

Llevo meses mascando este post, la verdad es que he tenido varios debates con otros ingenieros, y no hay una opinión convencida por ninguna de las dos alternativas. Lo mismo se puede deducir de una búsqueda rápida en google por: Story Points vs hours ... veréis que no son pocos los post relativos a esta temática.

Creo que lo más razonable es exponer pro's y contra's de ambas posibilidades y a posteriori explicaré que decisión hemos tomado en Tritium y las motivaciones.

En cualquier caso, no voy a poder ser muy objetivo, por que no he vivido ninguna implementación por el momento basada en Story Points, en los equipos en los que he trabajado trabajamos con esfuerzo.

Story Points

Como bien podéis deducir del nombre se trata de otorgar una valoración a la tarea, en general suelen ser aplicados a historias (Story) Y ese es para mi el enfoque ideal de aplicación.

Uno de los factores más importantes a considerar es que los Story Points valoran la complejidad, ni el esfuerzo ni la duración. Y para mi ese es uno de los puntos más importantes para, en función de tus necesidades, descartar esta opción.

No existe una definición clara en relación al proceso de estimación en ninguna de las metodologías ágiles, suele ser habitual para facilitar la asignación de complejidades utilizar la serie de fibonnaci 1 3 5 8 13 21 34 ... por ejemplo.

En general se consideran, y me sumo a la consideración, una perfecta herramienta de valoración/estimación a largo plazo. Pero poco recomendable para gestionar el SPRINT PLAN.

Existen pero equipos que se sienten cómodos haciendo uso de estos, y obteniendo métricas de velocidad de sus equipos en base al número de puntos que son capaces de resolver en cada SPRINT.

Esta métrica, primordial para los equipos ágiles, tiene un pero, y es que no pueden ser extrapoladas a otros equipos, la velocidad en puntos, es algo subjetivo, en función del valor que le des a una historia. Un equipo puede otorgar una complejidad 3 a una historia que para otro sea complejidad 8...

Este factor es, desde mi entender, contraproducente cuando la organización dispone de más de un equipo, no obtienes métricas que te ayuden a identificar puntos de mejora en la organización. La velocidad es algo atómico para cada equipo. En cambio puede ser suficiente para una organización monoteam.

Otro factor contraproducente es como resolver la pregunta, al más puro estilo "The Simpsons" de "¿Cuánto falta?" Recuerdo que los Story Points es una métrica de complejidad, no de duración ni esfuerzo ... por lo que de nuevo nos encontramos con falta de herramientas a la hora de resolver esta habitual pregunta.

Siempre podemos optar por, viendo el número de puntos restantes para cumplir con el objetivo y la velocidad del equipo, deducir el número de SPRINTS que nos faltan para cumplir como el hito requerido. Pero dificulta la transparencia de la información.

Hours

La estimación por tiempo tiene otras complejidades, pero tiene la ventaja de la transparencia, la comunicación es en una unidad temporal que otros miembros externos al equipo de producción entienden, el tiempo.

Eso sí, hay que dejar muy claro en cualquier caso, que las estimaciones son sobre esfuerzo, jamás sobre duración, la duración es otra herramienta de estimación que se convierte en peligrosa ...

Voy a tardar 8 horas, por tanto lo tendrás mañana. !!!ERROR!!!!

Como diría mi profesor de lógica, A si B, no A --> no B ... ya sabemos que es imposible trabajar sin interrupciones, para que nos vamos a engañar. Las tareas deben estimarse en esfuerzo, cuanto tiempo estimado requiere esta tarea para ser desarrollada.

La duración la establece el SPRINT, hay que evitar en la medida de los posible realizar entregas parciales dentro de una unidad de planificación. Las entregas se realizan al final del SPRINT. Por lo que la duración no es representativo en esta situación.

En cualquier caso existen muchos contras de fundamentar las estimaciones en horas. Es algo que sucede de manera habitual en entorno "Consultoría", las estimaciones no se realizan en base a complejidad, si no en base "al tiempo disponible". Es decir se suele planificar en base a un budget definido de tiempo provocando las indeseadas situaciones que muchos de nosotros conocemos.

En ese sentido, medir la complejidad del proyecto a nivel global, y conociendo nuestra velocidad en puntos, nos puede dar un horizonte muchísimo más fiable que nuestras estimaciones basadas en duración o esfuerzo (Vamos a tardar 1800 horas, o lo vamos a tener en 2 meses... qué escalofríos!!!)

Solución Mixta

Creo que en este post podéis encontrar una explicación perfecta de mi opinión. Me parece una solución equilibrada y es utilizar ambas métricas para diferentes necesidades.

Estimar las historias del PRODUCT BACKLOG con Story Points, que nos ayuden a estimar la complejidad de la historia, pero una vez aplicamos el breakdown en tareas y trabajamos en el SPRINT PLAN utilizar horas en base a esfuerzo.

Cito textualmente:

No discussion of story points. No discussion of velocity. It’s just about commitment and we decide how much we can commit to by breaking product backlog items into tasks and estimating each. This is called commitment-driven sprint planning.

Poco más me queda añadir

El año ágil en Tritium

La adopción de las metodologías ágiles en Tritium sigue un paso lento pero firme, durante el presente año, integrando la herramienta Assembla, hemos dado un primer salto de calidad.

Además de herramientas imprescindibles como son el repositorio de código, la wiki (que aún infra-utilizamos) la herramienta de management ha empezado a dar sus frutos.

Iniciamos el proceso de adopción con SPRINTS de 14 días, que redujimos a 7 por que estamos en un momento de iteración de producto que nos exige más flexibilidad en la adopción de cambios de prioridad y liberación de nuevas features.

Ese cambio, pese a que inicialmente supuso un aumento de tensión, fue algo positivo que ahora está completamente adoptado por el equipo.

Es habitual que planifiquemos siguiendo con las recomendaciones de SCRUMBAN, dejando lacks de tiempo para incidencias/imprevistos y investigación (si es necesario) por lo que nuestro límite de planificación suele rondar las 120h

En estos meses, dado nuestro volumen de equipo, y el trabajo tan continuo, no ha sido necesaria la adopción de los StandUp meeting, pero sucederá tarde o temprano.

Otra de las conclusiones a las que hemos llegado es que disponer de un SPRINT Cardwall digital es perfecto, compartes la situación a tiempo real del SPRINT, es distribuido (puedes consultarlo en casa o en cualquier lugar) y además actualiza en tiempo real en función del reporting de dedicación de cada persona.

En cambio, no resulta tan práctico y tenemos sin duda que mejorar, la toma de decisiones en la definición de nuevos sprint PLAN. Tenemos que trabajar más en mejorar el PRODUCT BACKLOG para tener toda la información en los SPRINT meetings.

Y para este próximo año vamos a crear un STORY BOARD que represente el product backlog de Force Manager, y que nos ayude en la priorización y la toma de decisiones.

Otro de los objetivos que nos marcamos para este inicio de 2012 es el despliegue de un entorno de integración y la configuración de un entorno de integración continua.

Step by step ...

Referencias:

Un fuerte abrazo,

Nuevos horizontes - Tritium Software

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Wed, 6 Jul 2011 22:28:00 +0200

Bueno, llevaba semanas queriendo escribir este artículo, pero no había encontrado el momento.

Como alguno de vosotros ya sabéis hace ya unas semanas que acepté un nuevo reto profesional, después de una larga y, por que no decirlo, dura pausa. Durante este tiempo he aprovechado para estudiar mucho, cumplir una de mis cuentas pendientes - User Agile Development), y cuidarme menos de lo que me habría buscado.

La incertidumbre te atenaza, más de lo que jamás habría pensado.

He participado en multitud de, agotadores, procesos de selección, y la decisión no fue nada fácil. Me siento muy afortunado, en primer lugar por poder haber podido decidir, y además por haber encontrado un lugar en el que, pese que voy a currar de lo lindo (es lo que quiero, lo que me gusta, y lo que me llena) voy a seguir trabajando en un start-up, dentro del ámbito de producto, y teniendo la oportunidad de crear y liderar el equipo de trabajo.

Tritium Software, S.L. es una compañía catalana, que acaba de cerrar su primera ronda de financiación, y que dispone de un producto CRM (para los no iniciados - una herramienta de gestión de clientes (Customer Relationship Management) ofreciendo una clara orientación a movilidad, ofreciendo clientes para iPhone, Android, BlackBerry y próximamente para iPad y Playbook.)

Como buena startup todos tenemos que empujar en todas direcciones, pero mi responsabilidad es la de dirigir el equipo de producción, consolidar el uso de buenas prácticas (basándome dentro de lo posible en metodologías ágiles, perfectas en este contexto)

Para ello, después de evaluar diferentes herramientas TeamBox, GoPlan, Assembla ... y como no JIRA, la decisión ha sido continuar con el mismo sistema que utilizamos en Grouxo, y no es otro que Assembla.

Los motivos son los siguientes:

Ofrece un repositorio SVN integrado con la herramienta colaborativa. Git es una propuesta de lo más interesante, y mucho más potente que SVN, pero exige cierta disciplina y experiencia en el uso de repositorios (Algo que no tiene por que estar asegurado en nuestro contexto)
Dispones de herramienta wiki integrada en el portal
Dispones de issue traking totalmente adaptado para metodologías ágiles, con un Cardwall que hace las delicias como un perfecto Task Board, unas gráficas BurnChart suficientes, y una sección StandUp para los informes matinales de actividad de todo el equipo
Además los planes básicos, aunque se me antojan algo limitados ya que solo permiten 1 espacio y 1 Gb de espacio, tienen un precio de lo más razonable 9$ /mes (90$ / año)

A medio/largo plazo mi opción predilecta es JIRA, que en su versión cloud integra confluence, greenhopper, subversion, fisheye, bamboo ... es decir lo ideal para tener un entorno de integración continua completo. No se si es buena opción en cloud o gestionado por nosotros mismos si disponemos de los recursos necesarios, eso nos permitiría por ejemplo incluir Sonar, etc.

En fin, una aventura muy interesante.

Estamos en un momento de consolidación/constitución del equipo, no dudes en hacernos llegar tu CV si te gusta la iniciativa y consideras que puedes aportar tu granito de arena.

Un abrazo,

Actualidad emprendedora / Ágil

noreply@blogger.com (Iván Peralta) — Wed, 8 Jun 2011 15:18:00 +0200

Hace ya unos días leía en el interesantísimo blog Pensamientos Ágiles una noticia relativa a la creación de un proyecto web nacional para dar soporte a la gestión ágil.

El proyecto es Scrumrf que permite mediante en entorno web gestionar proyectos ágiles. Vale la pena echar un vistazo. El artículo completo de pensamientos ágiles aquí.

A esto hay que añadir la noticia, en otro orden de magnitud, de Rally Software, la podéis leer en TechCrunch, compañía con un foco total en la creación de aplicaciones para la gestión del ciclo de vida ágil ... mmmm interesante ¿verdad?

Podéis obtener más información de esta compañía en su web Rallydev.com

Saludos,