Aral Balkan
Bio
Aral Balkan acts and sings, leads development teams, designs user experiences, architects RIAs, runs OSFlash.org, the London Macromedia User Group, and his company, Ariaware
Aral loves talking design patterns, authored Arp (the Open Source RIA Framework for the Flash Platform), writes for books and magazines, is generally quite opinionated, animated, and passionate, loves to smile, and can even chew gum and walk.
Session
Memo to the CEO
From: Aral Balkan
To: CEO, Web App Construction CO. (WACCO)
Houston we have a problem: According to recent studies, 50-70% of all IT projects fail. Development teams toil under unrealistic deadlines and implicit expectations for usability and accessibility that are impossible to satisfy. Many of us are stressed out and unhappy on a daily basis. And it doesn't have to be this way.
If you want happy developers and projects that succeed, there are three simple things you can ask them to do:
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Use an agile development methodology such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and work in iterations.
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Use a user-centered development process. Your teams must capture quantifiable usability requirements and you must budget to cover usability testing in every iteration of development.
- Use software design patterns in the architecture of your applications to provide a common high-level language for your developers and take advantage of time-tested solutions to common problems.
All the best,
Aral
In this session, Aral Balkan will talk about high-level decisions that development houses can take to make the development process a fun and relaxed experience. User-centered development, usability design patterns and testing, agile development, eXtreme Programming (XP), and software design patterns and application architecture are among the topics Aral will be covering in this session.