Today we start a series of blog posts that dive into the design and development process we use here at AndPlus.
Our philosophy at AndPlus follows the Agile development methodology. By way of review, Agile breaks down a development project into short (one- or two-week) mini development cycles called sprints. A fundamental principle of Agile is that at the end of each development sprint, the team should have a working (albeit not necessarily complete) version of the software product.
Humankind had been cooking rice for over 12,000 years before someone had the bright idea of automating the process with rice-cooking appliances. (Why we needed to automate a process that runs mostly without human intervention anyway is a debate for another time.) Although the electric rice steamer (some models of which could be considered “robots” in the broadest sense of the term) didn’t revolutionize the culinary arts the way, say, fire did, it’s just one small example of the surprising application of technology in an area one might not consider “high tech.”
Have you ever used software whose user interface had some or all of the following characteristics?
If so, you’re not alone—in fact, if you haven’t encountered such software, you are in a tiny minority.
Earlier in this space, we talked about the meaning of digital transformation, both for business in general and for AndPlus in particular. For today’s post, let’s dig a little deeper and explore what motivates businesses to seek such a thing.
In one of the many memorable scenes from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, heroes Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect find themselves on Earth, circa 2,000,000 BC, in the company of a large population of middle managers, hairdressers, management consultants, marketing people…in short, the “useless” third of their home planet who were sent to colonize Earth. In a committee meeting, they discuss the difficulty they’ve had in inventing the wheel. Ford Prefect, exasperated, exclaims that it’s the “single simplest machine in the Universe,” to which a marketing person replies, “All right Mr. Wiseguy, if you’re so clever, you tell us what color it should be.”
Once upon a time, photography was all about delayed gratification. You couldn’t see the results of your efforts until you had taken the film someplace to be developed and printed—a process that could take a day or more. And if you didn’t take many pictures, the roll of film might stay in your camera for months before you finished the roll and took it in for processing. If the photos were out of focus, too light, too dark, or poorly composed, you were out of luck.
