“User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers and other stakeholders focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process” – Interaction Design Foundation

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Software developers are a dime a dozen. Between university Computer Science departments pumping them out as fast as the debt can be run up, to boot camps, self-teaching, and the “tangential to my job” people finding themselves writing code, it is easy to see that this isn’t the most difficult of disciplines to learn. As with anything though, the difference between the merely capable, the competent, and the master can be stark.
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by Kristen Jourdonais

While practicing project management with a variety of companies, I have been fortunate to work in a time where there has been an explosion of different methods and tools. As a software enthusiast, sometimes it feels like being a kid in a candy store!

When talking shop with others in project management or software development, the toolsets we use always come up as a topic. “What is your favorite?” “What do you find works best?”

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Last tuesday, FedEx dropped off my latest Amazon impulse buy. It is a book called The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers. This is one of the recent books published by the Pragmatic Programmers. It covers a popular Ruby based testing framework called Cucumber (.) Now cucumber makes a few bold claims on their site. They claim that tests can be written in plain english, and actually test real code. They also claim that with minimal training, even a non-QA person, like a product manager, could write these tests, which would double as specifications.
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