A daily tool of the trade for specialists. Handbook of Usability Testing gives you practical, step-by-step guidelines in plain English. Written by Jeffrey Rubin, it arms beginners with the full complement of proven testing tools and techniques. From software, GUIs, and technical documentation, to medical instruments, VCRs, and exercise bikes, no matter what your product, you'll learn to design and administer extremely reliable tests to ensure that people find it easy and desirable to use. * Requires no engineering or human factors training * A rigorous, step-by-step approach--with an eye to common gaffes and pitfalls--saves you months of trial and error * Liberally peppered with real-life examples and case histories taken from a wide range of industries * Packed with extremely usable templates, models, tables, test plans, and other indispensable tools of the trade

    He describes a broad range of agile product management practices, including making agile product discovery work, taking advantage of emergent requirements, creating the minimal marketable product, leveraging early customer feedback, and working closely with the development team. Benefitting from Pichler's extensive experience, you'll learn how Scrum product ownership differs from traditional product management and how to avoid and overcome the common challenges that Scrum product owners face. Coverage includesUnderstanding the product owner's role: what product owners do, how they do it, and the surprising implicationsEnvisioning the product: creating a compelling product vision to galvanize and guide the team and stakeholdersGrooming the product backlog: managing the product backlog effectively even for the most complex productsPlanning the release: bringing clarity to scheduling, budgeting, and functionality decisionsCollaborating in sprint meetings: understanding the product owner's role in sprint meetings, including the dos and don'tsTransitioning into product ownership: succeeding as a product owner and establishing the role in the enterprise This book is an indispensable resource for anyone who works as a product owner, or expects to do so, as well as executives and coaches interested in establishing agile product management.

    That's why we created Digital Adaptation, a new practical book on how to help senior management understand the Web and adapt the business, culture, teams and workflows accordingly. No fluff, no theory — just techniques and strategies that worked in practice, and showed results. The book will help traditional businesses and organizations to overcome their legacy, and help you plant the seeds of change with very little power. If you do want to finally see changes happening, this is the book to grab. Written by Paul Boag. Designed by Veerle Pieters. 176 pages. YOU'LL LEARN TO: • Tackle bureaucracy and overcome legacy culture, • Develop a flexible and effective digital strategy, • Use responsibility matrix to minimize delays and costs, • Adopt a digital culture and become digital by default, • Apply techniques from mid-sized and large organizations, • Avoid toxic working practices and improve internal processes, • Organize teams and boost their efficiency, • Embrace social media and use them effectively, • Understand the value of a digital team and invest in them, • Break down the walls and nourish collaboration, ownership and innovation.

    How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.

    Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls “an intellectual Wild West.”The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

    This book is chock-full of material that will help you with your Django projects.We’ll introduce you to various tips, tricks, patterns, code snippets, and techniques that we’ve picked up over the years.

    This book claimed that through a piece of software called a "browser," which accesses "web sites," the world economy and our daily lives would change forever. Would you have believed even 10 percent of that book? Did you take advantage of the first Internet wave and get ahead of the curve? "Pull" is the blueprint to the next disruptive wave. Some call it Web 3.0; others call it the semantic web. It's a fundamental transition from pushing information to pulling, using a new way of thinking and collaborating online. Using the principles of this book, you will slash 5-20 percent off your bottom line, make your customers happier, accelerate your industry, and prepare your company for the twenty-first century. It isn't going to be easy, and you don't have any choice. By 2015, your company will be more agile and your processes more flexible than you ever thought possible. The semantic web leads to possibilities straight from science fiction, such as buildings that can order their own supplies, eliminating the IRS, and lawyers finally making sense. But it also leads to major changes in every field, from shipping and retail distribution to health care and financial reporting. Through clear examples, case studies, principles, and scenarios, business strategist David Siegel takes you on a tour of this new world. You'll learn: -Which industries are already ahead. -Which industries are already dead. -How to make the power shift from pushing to pulling information. -How software, hardware, media, and marketing will all change. -How to plan your own strategy for embracing the semantic web. We are at the beginning of a new technology curve that will affect all areas of business. Right now, you have a choice. You can decide to start preparing for the exciting opportunities that lay ahead or you can leave this book on the shelf and get left in the dust like last time.

    By understanding what the browser can and cannot do, you’ll be able to make better design decisions and deliver faster web applications to your users.Author Ilya Grigorik—a developer advocate and web performance engineer at Google—starts with the building blocks of TCP and UDP, and then dives into newer technologies such as HTTP 2.0, WebSockets, and WebRTC. This book explains the benefits of these technologies and helps you determine which ones to use for your next application.- Learn how TCP affects the performance of HTTP- Understand why mobile networks are slower than wired networks- Use best practices to address performance bottlenecks in HTTP- Discover how HTTP 2.0 (based on SPDY) will improve networking- Learn how to use Server Sent Events (SSE) for push updates, and WebSockets for XMPP chat- Explore WebRTC for browser-to-browser applications such as P2P video chat- Examine the architecture of a simple app that uses HTTP 2.0, SSE, WebSockets, and WebRTC

    But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way. Noted software expert Robert C. Martin presents a revolutionary paradigm with Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship . Martin has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code on the fly into a book that will instill within you the values of a software craftsman and make you a better programmer but only if you work at it. What kind of work will you be doing? You'll be reading code - lots of code. And you will be challenged to think about what's right about that code, and what's wrong with it. More importantly, you will be challenged to reassess your professional values and your commitment to your craft. Clean Code is divided into three parts. The first describes the principles, patterns, and practices of writing clean code. The second part consists of several case studies of increasing complexity. Each case study is an exercise in cleaning up code - of transforming a code base that has some problems into one that is sound and efficient. The third part is the payoff: a single chapter containing a list of heuristics and "smells" gathered while creating the case studies. The result is a knowledge base that describes the way we think when we write, read, and clean code. Readers will come away from this book understanding ‣ How to tell the difference between good and bad code‣ How to write good code and how to transform bad code into good code‣ How to create good names, good functions, good objects, and good classes‣ How to format code for maximum readability ‣ How to implement complete error handling without obscuring code logic ‣ How to unit test and practice test-driven development This book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code.

    Good site defense can make or break the customer experience. This book shows the right (and wrong) ways to get defensive, offers guidelines to prevent errors and rescue customers if a breakdown occurs.It also shows you how to evaluate and improve your own site's defensive design.

    It reduces design debt, accelerates the design process, and builds bridges between teams working in concert to bring products to life. Learn how you can create your design system and help your team improve product quality while reducing design debt.

    Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin's experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum's roles, artifacts, and activities. Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

    It took the open source world by storm since its inception in 2005, and is used by small development shops and giants like Google, Red Hat, and IBM, and of course many open source projects.A book by Git experts to turn you into a Git expert. Introduces the world of distributed version control Shows how to build a Git development workflow.

    Written by a panel of expert authors, the book covers every aspect of Drupal, from planning a successful project all the way up to making a living from designing Drupal sites and to contributing to the Drupal community yourself. With this book you will:Follow practical approaches to solving many online communication needs with Drupal with real examples. Learn how to keep learning about Drupal: administration, development, theming, design, and architecture. Go beyond the code to engage with the Drupal community as a contributing member and to do Drupal sustainably as a business.The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 was written by the following team of expert Drupal authors:Benjamin Melançon, Jacine Luisi, Károly Négyesi, Greg Anderson, Bojhan Somers, Stéphane Corlosquet, Stefan Freudenberg, Michelle Lauer, Ed Carlevale, Florian Lorétan, Dani Nordin, Ryan Szrama, Susan Stewart, Jake Strawn, Brian Travis, Dan Hakimzadeh, Amye Scavarda, Albert Albala, Allie Micka, Robert Douglass, Robin Monks, Roy Scholten, Peter Wolanin, Kay VanValkenburgh, Greg Stout, Kasey Qynn Dolin, Mike Gifford, Claudina Sarahe, Sam Boyer, and Forest Mars, with contributions from George Cassie, Mike Ryan, Nathaniel Catchpole, and Dmitri Gaskin.For more information, check out the Drupaleasy podcast #63, in which author Benjamin Melançon discusses The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 in great detail:http: //drupaleasy.com/podcast/2011/08/drupal...

    Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines. It also takes the ability to come up with the big ideas that make a desirable product or service, as well as the skill and perseverance to execute on the thousand small ideas that get your design into the hands of users. It requires expertise in project management, user research, and consensus-building. This comprehensive, full-color volume addresses all of these and more with detailed how-to information, real-life examples, and exercises. Topics include assembling a design team, planning and conducting user research, analyzing your data and turning it into personas, using scenarios to drive requirements definition and design, collaborating in design meetings, evaluating and iterating your design, and documenting finished design in a way that works for engineers and stakeholders alike.