Many times, meetings are called to figure out what to do.

Many times, these meetings fail to do just that

On my current project, we use "scarecrows" to make sure that we focus on getting a solution and getting everyone's input

My first comic took one year to produce, my second took one month. What changed?

Most days on a project are the same. Team members are incrementally improving the application, fixing bugs or adding features.

But what about those “special days”?

• The project is started
• A new person joins the team
• The team goes remote
• A team member moves on
• The project launches to a wider audience

There is a lot of digital ink spilled about the right way to run a project day-to-day, but I will focus on what has worked for me on each of those “special days”

Every developer has used a boolean flag to solve a problem with their code.

This is wrong and it should stop

Unlike most government agencies, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) uses open source to develop their public website.  They have evolved a set of best practices to help manage the mostly remote contributors over the 5 years of developing the site.

This talk will focus on what works and what other agencies can do to emulate their success. It will also talk about current pain points and ideas for mitigating these

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth ten thousand words.  At STSI we have learned some best practices about producing rapid prototypes that get users focused on delivering their business needs and away from reams of documentation.