Building Successful Software Teams

picasso in your software team All too often we see products that don’t make the transition from good to great.

Products with great potential let down not by a lack of innovative features but from a lack of user accessibility. Today alternatives are just a Google away and it is not sufficient for a product to be technically outstanding, it must be intuitive, low fuss and easy to use. A development team must nail the user interface and user experience so consumers can access the technology. I firmly believe many companies are still missing the mark here, simply because their team composition is stacked heavily with “scientific and technical talent”. A balanced team is in my opinion critical to success.

The challenge then is to ensure technical teams and managers hire talent from a range of intelligence pools, don’t hire just tech-heads (your Einstein’s).

Where to start? Howard Gardner suggests that there are multiple, unique forms of intelligence; he identified these eight:

Logical-Mathematical – scientific and technical talent;
Verbal-Linguistic – the ability to use words and language effectively;
Interpersonal – the ability to interact effectively with people and teams;
Intrapersonal – self-reflective and self–understanding tendencies and talents;
Visual-Spatial – imaginative and artistic talent;
Bodily-Kinesthetic – physical talent and dexterity;
Musical – the ability to create music; and
Naturalistic – an ability to manage and relate to the natural world.

Here is a great article “Innovation for Innovators” covering team composition and what is now becoming the stereotypical comparison of Apple vs. Microsoft. I believe it should get you thinking. Get a few Picasso’s in your team and make that transition from good to great.

Graphical User Interface Design – How to get it right (Part 1) – Use Colour

Use colour in user interfaces

User interface design tips:

Use colour, nice colour (engineer defaults like grey are not friendly)
Multi-media and artist types can provide good advice on colours to use
Users are people, think about how you are communicating with them

So why do so many companies get graphical user interface (GUI) design so wrong?

I attribute a large part of my success directly to two key factors:

Working with a great team (they can build anything I can think up)
Functional user interface design (building things real people can use)

One of the biggest mistakes I see on a regular basis is where companies bring together a group of super smart people and say “Here’s a piece of work, go for it” expecting to get something miraculous and assuming those smart people know exactly what to do because they have been given a task (sometimes even with requirements). Now I am not saying this can’t work, what I am saying is you typically get the solution you are after with a user interface designed to be used by Engineers. Now this is ok if your target market is Engineers, but there aren’t too many companies making money selling software to Engineers other than Microsoft.

VMware Fusion4 vs Parallels7 Review

VMware Fusion 4 vs Parallels 7 After more than 20 years using PCs, I’ve purchased my first Mac. And I loved it for the first week, then I needed to do some real work. Thank goodness you can now run Windows on a Mac.

While there are many choices, some of which are free, as a hard core ICT dabbler I only considered the really serious options from commercial vendors. They are:

VMware Fusion 4
Parallels 7

Why would anyone want to run Windows on a Mac? Well that will be blog post all in itself, suffice it to say that when I purchased may MacBook Air I was expecting the same experience I had with the iPhone…..I’ve been seriously underwhelmed.

So began two weeks of research and testing to pick the best Mac Virtualisation platform for me. It didn’t take long to identify the two key contenders were Fusion4 and Parallels7 and my timing was perfect with new versions of both products just released. Overall verdict:

VMware Fusion 4 wins for me (based on cost, cross-platform support & reliability)

MacBook Air 11″ Review

MacBook Air 11"

Time for a new laptop but what to buy?

It is amazing how far technology has come. Only a few short years ago personal laptops were almost luxury items and now very capable machines can be had for just over $500.

Why bother with a NetBook when you can get an UltraBook for a few dollars more and then do just about everything that once tied you to your desk or study PC. I kid you not!

But with so many choices how do you narrow the field…

I started by looking at my needs and goals (other than just wanting a new toy). The new device had to be:

Small & Light – My work laptop is huge and heavy
Cool – Most laptops burn your legs if not used on a stable table
Laptop – Literally! Intended work place, in front of TV
Capable – Netbooks just don’t cut it
Cheap – A web browser shouldn’t cost you $2000

Bring on the MacBook Air 11″. What a marvel of engineering. Just like the iPhone4, the Engineer in me appreciates this technical and aesthetic masterpiece from Apple.

I chose as follows:

Core i5 – Coolest, but I dilemma over the i7 for ages (happy which choice)
11″ Screen – Doesn’t obscure view of TV while sitting (perfect)
4Gb RAM – Max possible (not enough these days!)
128Gb Disk – Not enough and always 90% full (most cost effective option)

Read on for the detailed review.

Best iPhone4 Apps

iPhone4 Favourite Apps There are so many Apps for iPhone4 it’s a challenge to know which are worth installing. I’ve purchased a bunch so thought people might benefit from knowing the ones that have been great value and those that have been installed and not really used.

iPhone Apps I use daily:

Pocket Informant – Calendar/Organiser
Groups – Contacts Manager
mSecure – Password Manager
OzTv – TV Guide
Inbuilt Apps – Notepad, Messages, Mail

iPhone Apps used regularly:

iThoughts – Mind Mapping
Instapaper – Offline web page reader
Flashlight – Amazingly handy light
Tom Tom – GPS / Maps
Pocket Weather AU – Weather reports
Photosynth – Impressive photo stitching
Angry Birds – Game

IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games

The IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games took place in Perth in 2008. I was privileged to be asked to be one of the judges for the Computer Artificial Intelligence (AI) competition, the 2K Bot Prize. Excellent! Paid to play games and I won the very nice trophy pictured left for being the most accurate judge.

A cash prize of $7,000 plus a trip to a major games studio in Canberra was on offer for anyone who could create a game-playing bot (the game was Unreal Tournament 2004) that passes the “Turing Test for Bots”, that is say the bot AI had to convince a panel of five judges that it is actually a human player.

So how did I pick the bots from the humans…..read on as I describe the strategies I used and explain what gave the bots away or convinced me a player was human.

Agent Based Modelling (ABM)

Have turned the focus of my current research to ABM. Using a collection of autonomous decision-making entities called agents it is possible to explore the dynamics of real-world systems, including the relationships between entities, their environment and resulting emergent behaviour. Cool stuff and far more exciting than excel spreadsheets.