Amer's Blog

Sometimes we hear about Agile in the software industry, which might sound cool from the first glance. Agile encourages the practices that makes the process of crafting software more humanized. But, at the end of the day, the software is built around code, and code is being built by programmers. So, when you think more, what does it mean to Agilize the software building processes (i.e. writing the code base, maintaining it, testing it) you might wonder, how can people do this on a day-to-day basis? If you wondered before, let me please introduce you to Extreme Programming! How XP differs from Scrum? Scrum is a very popular Agile product management framework, that’s more interested in the processes around the software, how people interact and collaborate to get things done. While it’s very focused around software, it doesn’t provide a prescription of writing the code itself, which is the building blocks of the whole thing. XP on the other hand, is a framework that’s more interest...

Digital products are floating around, everywhere, no wonder with all these products out there, there should be a lot of waste. The problem is not that we’re going to have some waste, the problem is how much is that waste out of the whole thing? Most of the products need to solve real painful issues in order for them to succeed and flourish. But more often, the products got stuck in something called ‘Death Cycle’ which was illustrated by David Bland in 2014. So what’s that death cycle? And how can we avoid it? This is what I’m going to tackle in the following lines. What is product death cycle? The product death cycle is a phenomenon happens when no one uses the product and we don’t know why. And based on that we start to take action, but rather than solving the issue, we produce more software that no one uses as well! The 3 corners of the death cycle Customers who don’t use the product . Because they don’t like it, or because they don’t find it really useful. Prod...

Digital products usually hit this plateau phase, where we don't know what to release next? Most business usually have their core features, which they use to drive most of the business revenue, but in order to stay in shape, you need to challenge your processes and learn from them. In the following lines, I'm talking more about 'Learning' activity in an Agile environment, and how to evaluate this core activity?  Learning as a job in software development Software is a set of complex and creative processes that being maintained by creative human individuals. That being said, the process of creating new software is extremely tricky when it comes to predicting the market needs, or in a more Agile terms, what users are after in order to use your software product. To predict, you need knowledge. In order to be knowledgeable, you need to understand your users, hence, you need to learn about them. Your ability to lean specifies to what degree you’ll hit your target. Lea...