Blog

About a week ago, I was chatting to one of my friends about his new job. He seemed to be happy, he has a great Team, a friendly and supportive manager, a nice office - overall he was very positive, with the exception of one little niggle. When he ...

Recently we launched a new site for one of our customers: http://www.thiswaytoamazing.com/ Up until the launch date we had been re-directing the URL to a different site. The only problem was that the page had a ‘like’ button on it, a...

When you work for one of London’s leading Agile companies it is hard not to get inspired by the scrum processes. Inspired or brainwashed your choice, but I adopted some of the scrum processes when I was the Office Manager. To have daily sta...

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs said ‘every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything’. The industry shifted but when Apple opened up the iOS software development kit (SDK) to third...

For those of you looking for the answer to how to escape a comma in an XPath text match, I’m sorry but I just don’t know it. But if you are using Capybara, have no fear, there is a way round. It was Friday afternoon and I was cleaning...

I remember my first planning game well. I was very excited. Someone had just mentioned the need for a good bassline and I was about to jump up doing some serious air guitar to Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, “man this is going to blo...

Smart phones and tablets are changing the way that consumers interact with brands. No longer is it just an online web experience at the office or at home, but now consumers are making purchases, travel arrangements, checking bank statements and ex...

We use Pivotal Tracker quite a lot these days and I was looking around on the web for a quick image of the Pivotal Tracker Workflow.  I didn’t find much so I did a quick drawing which I thought I would share.  I might put this into...

We recently launched our first Social Media game, www.pinmeifyoucan.com - for Contiki. It’s a Google maps integration with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. It was a challenging project on tight timescales which presented some unique problems ...

Picture the scene. You’ve designed and built an iPhone app. You’ve put your heart and soul into it. Years of experience have finally come to fruition; all your imagination, moxie, know-how and learning from computer science or graphic ...

  My wife and I had a friend over for dinner last night and during conversation she asked me what it is I do. I replied that I work for a software consultancy and I’m a QA and ScrumMaster. ‘Huh?’ was the reply I got. I kno...

In Part One of this blog I discussed how we set up the kanban board and the process we used to try out kanban for the first time on our own internal Timesheets application. Here is what we learned about the process. The first thing I learned, as ...

When I joined the world of Ruby on Rails development and testing I was quite happy with all the tools and testing frameworks available, I was using a lot of them during development process. Words like Rspec and Cucumber quickly became part of my v...

After reading the book ‘Kanban and Scrum - Making the most of both’ (Henrik Kniberg & Mattias Skarin, 2010), I was quite eager to give Kanban a try on a project. All I needed was a project that had fantastic clients that understand...

Another perfect release- this is what it’s all about, now time to kick back, cocktail in hand, bathing in the glorious glow of heaped praise as stakeholder after stakeholder thank Goldilocks and the Three Bears for managing to translate thei...

In an ideal world there won’t be any problems in production. In an ideal world there’s a great soundtrack playing while the dev team, PMO and the business high-five one another in slow-mo.  If you’re talking about a complex ...

Many people new to git wonder: “what is rebasing?” and “why would I use rebase?”. Following is my attempt at an answer to those questions. Git lets you easily mess around with branches. A branch is just a set of commits wi...

I recently listened to a podcast called ‘Developers Life’ where a couple of developers and project managers talked about some rotton projects they’d worked on and how it’s sometimes hard to get perspective and realise that ...

You might be wondering what’s up with the strange title. It’s just one of those conference things – you come to the end of a conference and you are on a “conference high” and cant stop reminiscing about what went on...

Here at Unboxed, we’ve recently received delivery of a brand new lava lamp - the novelty lights that are filled with lurid oils that hypnotically swirl around. Today, it seems to me that the lava lamp’s retro styling makes them an ob...

When discussing pair programming, I have never heard the following point of view. So I’ll just shoot and cover. Let me introduce it with an example. Imagine for a second that you have an appointment at a location you’ve never been bef...

It’s 7 month since I joined the ubxd crowd and I think it has been the most productive 7 month in my life. I asked my self why. What drives me, challenges or motivates me ? I think that you have already heard about companies like Zappos, Gor...

Yesterday, I posted a message on twitter. It went like this: “TechHub is currently just a PR company producing misleading press releases. The idea they represent Silicon Roundabout is wrong.” I thought quite hard about this short u...

Why is it that some things can look incredibly beautiful, but quickly lose it the moment you start interacting with them? Nope, I’m not talking about an old flame I met down the local discotheque: I’m referring to Website Design. Why ...

Not long ago I saw a presentation about Scrum and kanban and the differences between them. At the end of the presentation the presenters were suggesting that we should take from both these methodologies. This new mixed methodology could be called ...

When I bite into my apple, I don’t expect a cheeky worm to be wriggling around inside. I don’t expect the wheels to fall off my speeding bicycle, I don’t like it when shoes fall apart on the first wear, and I hate when my parachu...

The problem There’s just one tiny validation to add to a user model. The impact on the application code is small whereas the impact on the test code is enormous. The change takes a day to implement. The context A large code base, Rails 2....

I was talking to Matt Frank the other day and he mentioned something important - agile is all about feedback loops. I’ve been thinking and reading over this concept for a while now and I’ve come to the conclusion that feedback loops ar...

It is well known that about 50 years ago the first real computer programs started crawling out of the oceans… Even with all the improvements and accumulated knowledge that we have nowadays in our computer-based civilization, users have been...

The desire for a site re-design together with the difficulty of editing existing content prompted Channel 5 to commission a rebuild of their main website and a consolidation of their catch up service Demand 5 with the new site. Development kicked ...