Author Archives: Ken Judy

About Ken Judy

I am an executive leader, software developer, father and husband trying to do more good than harm. I am an agile practitioner. I say this fully aware I say nothing. Sold as a tool to solve problems, agile is more a set of principles that encourage us to confront problems. Broad adoption of the jargon has not resulted in wide embrace of these principles. I strive to create material and human good by respecting co-workers, telling truth to employers, improving my skills, and caring for the people affected by the software I help build.

Usability, variability, irritability

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Small differences in user experience can be more frustrating than big ones.

In Firefox, you have the option to auto-complete a URL by pressing tab. I have become used to typing part of an address hitting tab, return.

Safari auto-completes URLs by default. You press delete to remove auto-completion.

Habit and this slight difference conspire against me:

  • If I want auto-complete in Safari: hitting tab, return moves me into the search bar, attempts a blank search resulting in “bonk!” or an error dialog.
  • If I type in a full URL, I find safari has tagged on some irrelevant location further down the site tree such as mid-transaction in my last ticketmaster purchase.

In this small aspect, I like the Firefox better. Auto-complete is something I should opt into rather than opt out of. Now if Firefox wouldn’t crash several times a day…

Age of reason

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cross by zenobia_joy on flickrMy wife and daughter are catholic. I am not. I am nothing — in a spiritual sense.

At lunch, my wife explained to me that my daughter is at the age of reason; the threshold where people are deemed to begin to be morally responsible.

It’s a fascinating concept. If true, my child is now accountable for her acts in some profound sense a younger child is not. She can be generous, indifferent, self-absorbed, cruel and kind. She is capable of guilt, courage and hope.

Second grade was hard enough.

Re: Interaction designer in a Scrum team

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Just posted a reply on the Scrum Developers Yahoo Group. Keeping up with that list would be more effort than becoming a certified scrum master.

What I am interested in is to find out how graphical and interaction designers can be eased into Scrum development.

In my previous team, our UX director, Bob Calvano, mixed in with the team: proposing UI elements in mockups but also pairing with developers to collaborate on implementations. The team and UX director shared decisions but the UX director retained authority over them.

Concept Drawing from BrainstormingThe team and product owner learned to defer to him on thorny questions of emotion, aesthetic and interaction particularly where the product owner had no clear sense of how the decision impacted tangible customer value.

The team had to learn how to deliver constructive feedback on UX. They had to learn how to express personal opinion in that context.

The UX director needed incredible patience taking in well and poorly delivered feedback. He had to understand his own process well enough to use day to day input to enable his own creativity rather than shut it down.

We evolved this relationship in a small team in an environment of high trust and we took months getting there. He came from a more traditional agency approach but he did have a personality suited to collaboration.

He eventually left our team to become an Interaction Design Director at one of the top agencies. He did so because the high profile of the work and pay were irresistible, so this experience didn’t hurt his career progression or his ability to work other ways. Though I know for a fact he misses that team and is returning to a smaller environment where he can recapture that collaborative experience.

thoughts from people who have read Jeff Patton’s book and what they think about how his ideas fit with Scrum.

Haven’t read the book yet. Talked to Jeff about his ideas at Agile 2007 (He was my adviser on my presentation on product ownership) and at the Fall Scrum Gathering.

High praise for his thinking on user experience as a precursor in product development (why) not simply as part of execution (what).

We tend to focus on story writing as the first tangible step agile plays in product conception. There are whole worlds of collaboration in terms of understanding who the software is for and how it solves problems for human beings that should come first.

Jeff Sutherland says the vast majority of teams run Scrums without real backlogs. How many of those few product owners that have backlogs derive systems and features from a user-centered perspective?

Hoping Jeff Patton will give us practices to tackle that problem.

Multiracial

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Barack Obama has put multi-racial identity in the news.

In interviews, people of mixed race said their decision about how to identify themselves was deeply personal, not political; it is influenced by how and where they were reared, how others perceive them, what they look like and how they themselves come to embrace their identity. — NY Times: Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race

My mother is issei, a first-generation Japanese-American. My father is white.

Growing up an only child with my divorced mother, I never learned her native language, I was late to study her history and never embraced her religion.

Still, I am profoundly her son. Her force of will, her choices and her halting take on American society defined my childhood.

So, I try to understand myself in the context of a racial identity I do not quite own.

My self-identification is an act of will framed by doubt.