Gojko Adzic

Today at the Oredev conference in Malmo, James Marcus Bach suggested renaming a large part of what is now called tests to checks. Bach said there is a big difference between a conscious process of questioning and evaluating a product and almost mechanical rule-based verifications. These two things are different enough that they should have different names, and bundling them under the name of “test” causes confusion. He suggested calling the former kind of work testing and latter checking. Continue Reading »

Michael Schade, CEO of Fishlabs, talked today at Oredev on strategies for maximising revenue from iPhone games. Citing research to Mobilegamesdb, PinchMedia and Appsfire, he said that $900M was paid out to developers from AppStore last year and that the estimate is that this figure will surge to $2.8b in 2.8b. An average user spends $80 on 65 apps, out of which 65% are free, making average commercial spend $1.90 per application. In average, an application earns $8500, but the store sales are top-heavy, so most applications make much less than that. Budgets for high-end games are now well over $250k, so it is very important to carefully position and market the games if to compete. Continue Reading »

Dan North gave a very inspiring talk at the Oresund Developer conference today, titled Our obsession with efficiency. His presentation focused on perceptions of efficiency and pitfalls of applying wrong efficiency models to software development. efficiency. Most efficiency is measured as budget/revenue, effort, time or activity and improvement efforts focus on these things, but according to North this is wrong. Continue Reading »

Today at the Oresund Developer conference, Bjorn Regnell presented the QUPER model, a very interesting way to think about specifying non-functional requirements. QUPER stands for Quality Performance and in the QUPER language Quality represents all the “ilities”. According to Regnell, the most difficult requirements are the ones related to quality. The problem with quality requirements, such as performance targets, is that they are often given without precise explanation. QUPER is a way to increase and align the debate within a company on quality that a project should deliver. The model promises to make tacit requirements explicit, help to introduce a coherent terminology across organisations, give us a more qualified scoping debate, support change management, help evaluate competitor products and allow us to make better product management decisions. Continue Reading »

Oresund developer conference 2009 started today in Malmo, with 120 speakers planned to take the stage over three days and 8 tracks per day. This year’s theme is efficiency. Marc Lesser opened the conference with a keynote titled Accomplishing more by doing less.

Doing more by doing less sounds contradictory, but Lesser put it in context by saying “our task is to get rid of the things in our business that are not necessary and finding what is the real core of our business”. He quoted Michaelangelo: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Lesser suggested doing less in these five areas, and people should try to reduce them:

• Fear
• Assumptions
• Distractions
• Resistance
• Being busy

According to Lesser, doing less in these areas leads to more effectiveness, more composure and more meaning. It leads to accomplishing more of what really matters. Being busy is now a cultural status, said Lesser, often being used to avoid tasks and questions. People in the IT industry are always too busy, there is always too much to do. Lesser compared that to a carpenter who doesn’t have time to sharpen his tools, saying that “when you work with dull tools nothing much happens”. Pausing to sharpen the tools and then applying the same amount of effort leads to more effectiveness, said he, suggesting that programmers are tools themselves and that they should take time to sharpen to be more effective.

I’ll be covering Oredev on this blog over the next few days. Subscribe to my rss feed to get notified when I post a new article