Christian Heldstab

Make a habit of being creative with a free class from CreativeLive

Hurry up – Creativelive is currently doing an amazing free class to get into a creative habit. During the whole February, you will get a little design challenge every day. It should inspire you to try some new things but also to make a habit out of it and keep going even after the 28 days during this course. So, sign up and do something creative every day!

Here my results of the two first days:

Sorry but I have to tell you that the times of extensive requirements documentation and management in the traditional way is over! Finished!

To be able to cope with quickly changing situations and be able to be on the market quickly, User Stories are a much better way to plan and execute Software Projects (in fact all kind of non SW Projects would profit from them as well). That big up-front…

The question comes up quite often. Who will be the Product Owner in our project? And in this ninth article on Agile, I will focus in this question.

What are actually the responsibilities of a Product Owner. Roman Pichler has a great overview on his blog of which I have an own little sketch jsut below. She has ownership of vision roadmap and budget. She is also responsible for values like…

If you are a cyclist, you know what I’m talking about when I say in this 8. article about Agile, stay as close as you can.

But here it is not about the aerodynamics that helps you in an agile team but so called information bubbles that flow around. All the people sitting in the same room normally get much more information that they might would miss if they would sit somewhere else or in the…

Another article in my 10 Things about Agile Series that I initially presented at the Business Analysis Conference in London. You might now the term farmer wisdom (or Bauernweisheit in German). One of my own is that Silos are for Farmers and not for Projects.

Very often I see a BA team working with clients to get an idea of processes and collect requirements. A huge specification gets created and…

Agile Assessment – Derek Morrison

At the Agile Practitioner Meetup, we had the pleasure to listen to Derek Morrison and his stories about Agile Assessment at Tesco and how they marry UX and agile Software Development.

The talk will entail assessment, as part of:

1) an agile transformation programme

2) of recruitment processes

3) the professional development of your agile workers

4) of team development

Hope to see you there!

About…

I was enjoying great discussions at the UX Camp London organised by Event Handler. This BarCamp was for people interested in Interaction Design and Usability. Inspired by the spirit of the UX folks  and some controversial debate on Agile, I decided to give a talk myself in the afternoon.

Because of my roots as a Software Engineer who became a Requirements Engineer and Usability guy, I was…

The good weather and the increasing temperatures really gives you that feeling that spring is just around the corner and summer not far away. But hold back just a bit, I haven’t done all my skiing yet.

My personal top 10 websites plus one for photographers are:

Digital Photography School – It’s just a great website with tons of articles and a daily newsletter for all aspects of photography.

canonrumors.com – Yes, I know, that’s my canon heart pocking.

Creativelive.com– Very nice video tutorials which are for free during live broadcasting but cost something afterwards. I bought some portraiture…

There is always that initial phase when a project gets kicked off and you have to get everyone on the bus. At that moment, an agile team needs to learn about goals, intentions, visions. There are two elaborate ways to kick off such a project:

  Story Mapping

Shows a big picture, slices the whole project into shippable increments and allows an initial planning. A very good description comes from G…

Let’s talk about number five on my talk at the  Business Analyst Conference called Ten Things about Agile: Adapt!

  You might wonder why you can’t just take a process and adapt it like a recipe? Why not taking Scrum, give everyone a role, fallow the events and handle all the artefacts. And that’s it. No?

Unfortunate no. There is more to tackle a complex problem as we often see in software…

As a Swiss, it’s always a bit of a hard time, being in London in Winter when you kind of now that all your friends are enjoying themselves on the slopes or apres-ski bars. But there is at times almost a Winter feeling coming up if you stroll along Embankment. See here why:

Now your file types. JPEG, GIF or PNG?

Nice diagram comparing three popular file formats. JPEG, GIF and PNG. I normally use JPEG to publish my photos (as I’m certainly shoot RAW) and GIF for artwork including transparency. Unfortunate GIF supports only 256 colours, so it’s not what I’m looking for when it comes to my photos but it will do for drawings and clip art. It’s replacement is PNG in which certainly the future lays. Nowadays…

Hi there

We had an amazing event just before Christmas at the Agile Practitioners Meetup on which I took lots of videos and cut them in fine digestible portions. We decided on a very cool format, called Anything10 where anything was allowed in therms of topics but it shouldn’t last longer than 10 minutes.

Martyn Evans (Unboxed Consulting) – How new digital services can effect real change in…

I just found the Maker website where phantastic products and also the story of the people behind the product is told. So have you ever asked yourself how GoPro became such a great product? Or how does the KitchenAid made it in your home? Ever wanted to ride a hover board?

Have a look at this site and watch the stories behind beautiful products.

Photographers out there: It’s 12 Days of Christmas at DPS

Hey Photographers out there. Christmas time is deal and sales time. But to be honest, most of the deals or sales offers are often only the stuff we don’t really want but somehow feel now almost obliged to buy just because it’s on sale.

I never had that feeling when I look at the deals that Digital Photography School offers. It is a fantastic website per se and Darren Rowseis an unbelievable…