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Customer Connected Engineering
I posted slides on how we do Customer Connected Engineering at patterns & practices to Shaping Software .  Customers Connected Engineering (CCE) is how we engage customers throughout our product development. We formally engage customers during Read More...
Posted 19 May 09 06:00 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments   
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Model-Driven Approaches
When people ask me my take on model-driven approaches, I think of two ends of the spectrum -- human and the machine. Key Points Model for humans . For humans, I find using a whiteboard (whiteboard modeling) works well -- it's universal. Model for machines Read More...
Posted 01 August 08 05:05 by J.D. Meier | 4 Comments   
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Designing an Authentication and Authorization Strategy
What are the key steps to designing an effective authentication and authorization strategy? The keys are knowing your user stores, role stores, and who need to access what or perform which operations. In this post, I share the approaches we've used in Read More...
Posted 25 June 08 07:35 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments   
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Four Stages of Market Maturity
You can tell the maturity of a market by the consumer patterns. If you know the life cycle stages of a market you can better anticipate what level of "needs" your product needs to match to be successful. (I always think of needs in stages like Maslow's Read More...
Posted 31 December 07 11:28 by J.D. Meier | 3 Comments   
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Kano, Satisfiers, and Dissatisfiers
If you're looking for yet another way to help you prioritize your backlog or to help you shape your product's design, consider the Kano model . One concept in the Kano model is satisfiers and dissatisfiers. You can think of satisfiers as features you Read More...
Posted 31 December 07 10:24 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments   
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Human Shepherds and the Law of Relevancy
Yesterday, Ed helped me word a "law" that I use for important decisions and that I see show up quite a bit in a number of places. It's the law of human relevancy. The Law of Relevancy No matter how relevant the information is, it's more relevant with Read More...
Posted 10 November 07 08:14 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments   
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Scenarios in Practice
Scenarios are a practical way to organize and focus your product design, development and release. (We use scenario-driven engineering in patterns & practices) Key Benefits Business value . You can use scenarios to evaluate business value. What pain Read More...
Posted 15 October 07 03:21 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments   
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Roles and Goals
The next time I need to get a set of requirements, I'm simply going to start with roles with goals. I made the mistake of asking for a set of scenarios. What I ended up with is a list of user tasks. Tasks aren't the same as goals. Flying a kite is not Read More...
Posted 13 March 07 03:44 by J.D. Meier | 1 Comments   
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Requirements Perspectives
Here's a simple set of perspectives I use for rationalizing requirements: User Business Expert / Technical Industry/Standards Believe it or not, simply identifying these perspective helps a lot. You'd be surprised how many debates happen simply because Read More...
Posted 09 March 07 11:00 by J.D. Meier | 3 Comments   
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Scenario Frames for Guidance
When I tackle a problem domain, I first frame out the space. To do this, I list out scenarios and sub-scenarios. I group the scenarios under categories. Sometimes categories come first, sometimes scenarios do. I call the result, a Scenario Frame. I use Read More...
Posted 22 February 07 07:26 by J.D. Meier | 5 Comments   
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Task-Analysis Grid for Communicating Product Design
How do you communicate design decisions? … Srinath sent me a helpful link on the Task-Analysis Grid . A Task Analysis Grid is effectively columns of scenarios along with sub-tasks to complete the task. Here's the key points: The columns are organized Read More...
Posted 09 February 07 08:16 by J.D. Meier | 1 Comments   
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Actors, Personas, and Roles
In user modeling, I usually come across actors, personas, and roles (user roles). I thought it would be helpful to distinguish these so that I can use the right tool for the job, or at least understand their relationships, strengths and weaknesses. Summary Read More...
Posted 04 February 07 09:39 by J.D. Meier | 4 Comments   
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Personas at patterns and practices
At patterns & practices , we introduced personas a few years back to help design user experience for our deliverables. Personas helped with a few things: Understanding demographics. Building empathy by putting a face behind the user role. Building Read More...
Posted 04 February 07 08:42 by J.D. Meier | 4 Comments   
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Avoiding Do Overs - Testing Your Key Engineering Decisions
I noticed Rico has a Performance Problems Survey . From what I've seen, the most important problem is failure to test and explore key engineering decisions. By key engineering decisions, I mean the decisions that have cascading engineering impact. By Read More...
Posted 04 February 07 01:41 by J.D. Meier | 1 Comments   
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Idioms and Paradigms
John Socha-Leialoha wrote up a nice bit of insight on how Users are Idiomatic . John writes: "First, different users will have different definitions of "intuitive." ... Second, and this isn't conveyed directly by the definition of idiomatic, users actually Read More...
Posted 06 January 07 05:44 by J.D. Meier | 0 Comments   
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