By Somenath Nag

User experience is increasingly emerging as a key competitive advantage for software products. A software product that meets the customer needs, but unable to appease user passion, is not considered a winner anymore. Hence, it is critical today that ISVs are able to provide their users a compelling user experience - by focusing on aesthetics, and factoring in the ease of use and efficiency of use.

I once wrote an article titled "A Time-Saving Programming Tactic That Doesn't Work." In this article, I lamented the tendency of many programmers to deal with software deadlines by simply coding away, without stopping to think about a proper software design. "I don't have time to design the software!" they say, so they just start churning out code. The intent is to save time, but this approach almost never works except on the simplest of projects. Without a carefully considered design, more problems are bound to emerge, thus causing more time to be lost. What's worse, many of these problems won't become clear until the testing phase comes around, and by then, it may be too late.

We use Agile software developments methods and, for project management, Scrum is our preferred method. Our development team are based offshore and there are challenges to making Agile work with a distributed team but it can be done (and can be fun also!). So I thought I would share a story with you one of our real Sprints as told through the Scrum Burndown chart. Why? Well, because I think we can learn a great deal from the Burndown chart and everyone has its own story to tell. Here's ours:

As more of our clients have moved to agile software development, we've seen a growing need for business agility: getting non-engineering functions involved earlier and more collaboratively, so that companies deliver better revenue results as well as better software. Let's make this more concrete by mapping it to the restaurant business.

Scrum Product Owner
By Laszlo Szalvay

In the Scrum method of agile software development, there are three fundamental roles: the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the team. Because it is the most demanding of the three Scrum roles, I'll begin by discussing the Product Owner.

The Role of the Product Owner in Scrum
By Rod Claar

There has been a lot written about the role of the Product Owner (PO) in Scrum over the years and it seems to me that in the last month or so the question has received a lot of attention in blogs, twitter and other social media. I don't think there is a "best practice" answer. Let's look at what we do know and then see if we can find an answer. The goal of the PO must be to deliver the right business value. To do this they, engage the team(s) to create solutions that deliver the business value.

Agile Development - A Brief Introduction
By S. Gwyn Fisher

Agile is based upon a number of guiding principles that all Agile teams follow. For the purposes of this discussion, three principles - or values - are of particular interest:

Quality software development; Iterative flexibility; Continuous improvement