Thursday, May 09, 2002

uiweb: Strategic usability. Tactical use of usability engineering is responsive and isolated, focusing on adjustments to existing designs, often late in the schedule. Strategic use of usability or user research is proactive and integrated, improving decision making at many levels of project and business planning. [Tomalak's Realm] comment []  2:18:58 PM

Software Development Magazine: IT Salary Survey, November 2001 Some interesting stats for those wanting to compare salaries. comment []  1:49:53 PM

February 2002 - Agile Modeling - How Much Proof Do You Need? "Adopting and then tailoring a software process to meet your team's needs is an important and difficult decision, one that is critical to your project's success. You face a myriad of choices, ranging from prescriptive methods such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and the OPEN process to agile software methods such as Extreme Programming (XP), SCRUM and Dynamic System Development Methodology (DSDM)." The article goes on to say that you can't expect a lot of metrics about agile software methods because they are both very young (late '90s) and are most practitioners are busy practicing without time to do theoretical analysis. Agile methods are something that might work for corporate applications where requirements may not be well known or are changing quickly, but I am definitely no expert (or even very knowledgable on the subject). comment []  1:36:20 PM

Wired: Flash: Blogging Goes Corporate "Macromedia calls this "the blog strategy," and some see the company's moves as the start of a trend. These days, it's almost unfashionable for a self-respecting Webophile to not have his own blog; if Macromedia's effort is any indication, soon a tech company that doesn't embrace weblogs may seem equally dated." comment []  10:13:12 AM

Multi-Author Weblog Tool "A multi-authored weblog has posts that appear on the home page which are written by a group of people, instead of by a single author. The Multi-Author Weblog Tool makes it easy to use Radio to create a multi-authored weblog." There are lots of different uses for this. In addition to the use I try below, you could have multiple bloggers working on a project agree to route project-related to a certain category, then the project knowledge engineer (nice new title) would combine those feeds into one project blog (which could then be subscribed to by any interested in the project). A quick glance at the tool show that it will need to be enhanced to support multiple routing scenarios...the knowledge engineer being able to set up multiple project-related blogs (categories) that different subscribed feeds (from project team members) can be routed to. It looks like you can only route subscribed feeds to one category (or your home page) and only set that up once...not multiple times. I hope I'm not too fuzzy on this...I'm having a little trouble explaining it clearly. Anyway, on with my first experiment... It's so funny that this would come out now. Yesterday, I got my RCS working internally (behind my corporate firewall) and wanted to start posting things there. The problem is that I also want to post the same technology related posts on both my internal blog and my public blog. And I don't want to post the same thing twice. My current situation is to post to my public blog, subscribe to my public blog RSS feed with my internal Radio news aggregator, and then when the news aggregator gets new items from my public blog RSS feed, I manually post them to my internal blog. It works and I'm not typing twice. But I am posting twice. If this tool works like I think, I can take the extra step of posting the initial public blog post (tech-related only) to an additional category (just a checkbox next to my new Vince Outlaw's Tech News when I post to the home page). Then I'll internally subscribe to that Tech-only feed and have the tool automatically post those my internal home page blog. Let's see... (Here is some additional text to see if changing a post will refeed it and then post it to the internal page. I couldn't subscribe to the feed until the first item was posted (and the feed actually written the first time). So now it's probably ready, but this first post wouldn't automatically make it. I'll make this edit, post it, and wait to see what happen on the next scan.) comment []  9:47:24 AM