Balsamiq is an excellent tool for rapidly creating purposefully low-fi wireframe mockups

Napkee enables you to import Balsamiq mockups and turn them into HTML prototypes! Lovely!

Axure is excellent for rapidly creating interactive prototypes.

Liferay Portal is a pretty awesome portlet container that, with a bit of UX (HTML, CSS and JSP) hacking, enables you to rapidly produce fully functional portals. It comes with a vast array of portlets out of the box, saving you a whole load of time.

JQueryUI is a lovely toolkit for quickly developing interactive prototypes. I’m not completely convinced by it as a production tool (heavy JS? but i could be wrong), but excellent for prototyping

It’s only a draft, but it’s a start. More to follow…

It’s another one of those many obvious tests that we all do, but at times i’ve certainly found myself accepting insecurity within a project team as one of those things because the team are new to the pressures or software projects are always uncertain and as such stressful. With a little consideration, it’s clearly more useful to use perceptions of insecurity as more direct indications that change is required.

What might we be looking for? A few possible ideas:

• How secure are the developers about the quality and stability of their code?
• How secure are the developers about rolling code to the various hosting platforms?
• How secure are team members about their relationship with others on the team?
• How secure is the project manager about hitting the deadline?
• How secure is the account manager about conversations with the client?
• How secure are senior management about project and team performance?

The overall intention of improving security is to make everyone feel relaxed. Software development is meant to be fun after all!

Source: Agile Toolkit Podcast ‘No fluff just stuff 2006 tour’

But, what happens when we, as developers, get too close? What happens when we get too involved in the code?

It all sounds rather obvious, but it can happen:

• We don’t take a regular step back.
• We lose the wider perspective.
• We lose visibility of what ‘finished’ looks like, what parts make up the whole and how close we are.
• We strain relationships with ambiguity, overly detailed feedback and uncertainty.

Getting this wrong can result in project failure. Getting this right takes a strong, close, confident and brutally honest relationship between all members of a project team. All members maintain a focus on the scope, plan and budget; especially the seniors. Daily catchup meetings provide a platform for team members to demonstrate their responsibly to the rest of the team and a platform for all members to consistently establish their awareness of the whole. Challenge is normal and data is king.

With all this in hand, projects flow and risk is clear and manageable. Team members are empowered and in every way are a part of the solution. Resource management is possible early and in perfect balance. Reporting and escalating is possible iteratively, keeping everyone empowered and in the loop.

How do developers get to this place? More to follow…