About As SAGE is sponsoring the Research Software Engineers conference in September we get to submit a workshop. I’m thrilled to be able to attend this conference. Many years ago I used to write research software in astrophysics. Over the years I have learnt how complex the interplay is between specification, software writing and getting to the heart of user needs. Along with this is the critical question of how we find sustainable models for these kinds of activities. ... (more)

I’ve been working with lean value tree as a framework for some time now, but there are few online resources about this. The linked presentation does a great job of giving an overview of the tool. In particular I like how they call out the need to describe the promise of value to the customer, something that we could definitely do more of. Another presentation on the same topic is this one: https://www. ... (more)

I’m catching up on some reading at the moment. Trying to make headway on some other work while jet lagged is proving a challenge. Anyway, here are a couple of nice posts about product development that popped up in my feed (hat tip to Mind the Product Weekly Newsletter. ## What do people do in the spaces in between? When thinking about what people do with your product, also think about what they don’t do, and how to help them get to where they are going. ... (more)

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a UXer within an agile environment. I thought it was a great talk. When at Mendeley we always faced the problem of trying to square the challenge to fitting an inherently creative process into the systems that emerged while we attempted to adopt agile processes, in my time there we learnt a lot, we had some success and some areas where we obviously needed to learn more, so I was delighted to hear a very thoughtful presentation from the perspective of someone who it seems has worked with quite a few teams implementing agile in a variety of flavours. ... (more)

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a UXer within an agile environment. I thought it was a great talk. When at Mendeley we always faced the problem of trying to square the challenge to fitting an inherently creative process into the systems that emerged while we attempted to adopt agile processes, in my time there we learnt a lot, we had some success and some areas where we obviously needed to learn more, so I was delighted to hear a very thoughtful presentation from the perspective of someone who it seems has worked with quite a few teams implementing agile in a variety of flavours. ... (more)