The sum of my experience with product making

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People make companies and products. Process helps support and grow good people, but fundamentally it's all about the people.

There is a whole lot more to it than that, but this is the first thing to know.

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Goodbye

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When I started this blog, Agile was not yet the lingua franca of product development. I was passionate about teaching the Chicago community about Agile. I helped start the Chicago Agile Project Managers Meet Up. I presented at the international Agile conference. I was coaching organizations to use Agile practices and how to integrate user centered design into product development. Good times. Based on this blog’s old google analytics data I can see that I was able to help a lot of people.  Today I find myself spending very little time on blogs - reading or creating. My go to places to find content to learn and grow professionally didn’t exist when I started Planning for Improvisation. This blog isn’t needed anymore. As I have moved on, this blog can too. -Kal
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Jakob Nielsen's Kindle Fire Usability Findings

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I don't like to re-post, but I highly recommend reading this. Tablets are, finally , not going to go away and will only increase in usage. Jakob Nielsen does a great job of discussing the usability and design of 7-inch tablets. Then he talks about the future of 7-inch tablets based on the market and design choices required to ensure their future. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/kindle-fire-usability.html
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Agile in Regulated Software - Functional Testing vs Technical Testing

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Testing is a crucial part of all software development. If you don't believe this you are likely just starting your career or haven't had to support an application in production with users.  It becomes doubly important in a regulated environment. This is because testing for regulated software serves multiple purposes. There is the usual software product development reasons to consider (i.e. professional integrity and no one wants a bug in production). But it is also because the FDA, in particular, wants to make sure you are performing validation and verification of the software. Verification (Was the product built right?) Validation (Was the right product built?) While I acknowledge there are a number of useful and important ways to describe software testing techniques, I strive to keep things simple, and understandable, by the whole team. To that end, I split testing into two tracts:  Functional  and  Technical . Functional  is about bring business value to the ...
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