Annotation Great technology alone is rarely sufficient today to ensure a products success. At Microsoft, scenario-focused engineering is a customer-centric, iterative approach used to design and deliver the deeper experiences and emotional engagement customers demand in new products. In this book, youll discover the proven practices and lessons learned from real-world implementations of this approach, including:Why design matters: Understand a competitive landscape where customers are no longer satisfied by products that are merely useful, but respond instead to products they crave using. What it means to be customer focused: Recognize that you are not the customer, understand customers can have difficulty articulating what they want, and apply techniques that uncover their unspoken needs. How to iterate effectively: Implement a development system that is flexible enough to respond to early and continuous feedback, and enables experimentation with multiple ideas and feedback loops simultaneously. How to bridge the culture gap: In an engineering environment traditionally rooted in strong analytics, the ideas and practices for scenario-focused engineering may not be intuitive. Learn how to change team mindset from deciding what a product, service, or device will do, to discovering what customers actually want and what will work for them in real-life scenarios. Connections with Lean and Agile approaches: See the connections, gaps, and overlaps among the Lean, Agile, and Scenario-Focused Engineering methodologies, and achieve a more holistic view of software development.

Usability engineering is about designing products that are easy to use. This text provides an introduction to human computer interaction principles, and how to apply them in ways that make software and hardware more effective and easier to use.

This volume is based on a workshop sponsored by the editor at IBM, and includes contributions from an international group of researchers in the field of human computer interaction.

John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design. Difficult to learn and awkward to use, today's information systems often change our activities in ways that we do not need or want. The problem lies in the software development process. In this book John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design. Traditional textbook approaches manage the complexity of the design process via abstraction, treating design problems as if they were composites of puzzles. Scenario-based design uses concretization. A scenario is a concrete story about use. For example: "A person turned on a computer; the screen displayed a button labeled Start; the person used the mouse to select the button." Scenarios are a vocabulary for coordinating the central tasks of system development—understanding people's needs, envisioning new activities and technologies, designing effective systems and software, and drawing general lessons from systems as they are developed and used. Instead of designing software by listing requirements, functions, and code modules, the designer focuses first on the activities that need to be supported and then allows descriptions of those activities to drive everything else. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of the principles of scenario-based design, the book includes in-depth examples of its application.

Extending the scenario method beyond interface design, this important book shows developers how to design more effective systems by soliciting, analyzing, and elaborating stories from end-users Contributions from leading industry consultants and opinion-makers present a range of scenario techniques, from the light, sketchy, and agile to the careful and systematic Includes real-world case studies from Philips, DaimlerChrysler, and Nokia, and covers systems ranging from custom software to embedded hardware-software systems

Write code that can adapt to changes. By applying this book’s principles, you can create code that accommodates new requirements and unforeseen scenarios without significant rewrites. Gary McLean Hall describes Agile best practices, principles, and patterns for designing and writing code that can evolve more quickly and easily, with fewer errors, because it doesn’t impede change. Now revised, updated, and expanded, Adaptive Code, Second Edition adds indispensable practical insights on Kanban, dependency inversion, and creating reusable abstractions. Drawing on over a decade of Agile consulting and development experience, McLean Hall has updated his best-seller with deeper coverage of unit testing, refactoring, pure dependency injection, and more. Master powerful new ways to: • Write code that enables and complements Scrum, Kanban, or any other Agile framework • Develop code that can survive major changes in requirements • Plan for adaptability by using dependencies, layering, interfaces, and design patterns • Perform unit testing and refactoring in tandem, gaining more value from both • Use the “golden master” technique to make legacy code adaptive • Build SOLID code with single-responsibility, open/closed, and Liskov substitution principles • Create smaller interfaces to support more-diverse client and architectural needs • Leverage dependency injection best practices to improve code adaptability • Apply dependency inversion with the Stairway pattern, and avoid related anti-patterns About You This book is for programmers of all skill levels seeking more-practical insight into design patterns, SOLID principles, unit testing, refactoring, and related topics. Most readers will have programmed in C#, Java, C++, or similar object-oriented languages, and will be familiar with core procedural programming techniques.

A human-centric guide to solving complex problems in engineering management, from sizing teams to handling technical debt. There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams—and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies. Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.