Enough Design, with Ian McFarland at Pivotal Labs

Hi Everyone,

It's been a little while since our last event, so hopefully that just means we'll have more to share and talk about at this one :)

For this event, Ian McFarland, VP of Technology at Pivotal Labs (https://pivotallabs.com/), will be leading a session on Enough Design. This is a talk Ian has given a few times, including at the SF chapter of this Meetp, and which has been very well received. More about the session and about Ian below.

Hope you can join us!

Agenda:
6:30-7 - Networking and refreshments.
7-8:30: Show & Tell
8:30-9: Continued discussion and/or Networking/Socializing.

Thanks to Pivotal Labs for hosting and providing light refreshments!

About the Enough Design Session:
A great agile design process is complementary to a great agile development process, and is one that produces great products, that people love enough that they generate real value.

There is a tension in the agile world between the notion of ultimate flexibility that agile proposes, and the need for coherency and excellence that great design provides. This talk is intended to provide a framework to help yourself ask, as a designer or as a developer, "What is Enough Design?", and to share our experience as to what has worked well in practice on our many projects at Pivotal Labs.

The right amount of design, and how far ahead that design needs to occur, varies significantly by task. Knowing what it is your building before development starts leads to a much more focused (i.e. better, faster, cheaper) product, but high fidelity, pixel level design work is best done with the designer pairing with the developer directly, rather than producing documentation that becomes ever more stale between writing and implementation. The investment in a 500 page PRD filled with pixel-perfect photoshop comps is one that tends to bring more rigidity than value to a product. Design ideas need to be tested as quickly as possible, so that the design process, like the development process, benefits from a short feedback loop and real user validation.

A great agile design is thematic and generative. It consists of a coherent vision, and a set of rules we can apply to new problems as the application develops.

About Ian:
Ian is a principal and VP of Technology at Pivotal Labs, a leading agile development shop with over 75 people in their offices in San Francisco, New York, Boulder, and Singapore. They've built over 80 rails apps in the past 4 1/2 years since moving their focus to Ruby on Rails development. They've seen a lot of what does and doesn't work at the intersection of design+agile development as a result.

On the design side, he's worked with such leading firms as Vivid Studios and Cooper Design. He started working with worldwide distributed Hypertext systems in 1989, working with Ted Nelson at Autodesk. He was on the launch team at HotWired, and was one of the 4 people who by circumstance would determine that banner ads would be 468x60, for which he apologizes. After HotWired, he founded Neo Communication, a consultancy working with companies like IDG and Sony. At Neo, he started doing Java development in 1995, developing the first client-server application ever built in Java, as part of the public launch of Java at SunWorld.

He was Java Evangelist at Symantec for VisualCafé, and was Sr. Director of Technology at HSX.com, before returning to consulting, and later writing Mastering Tomcat Development for J. Wiley and Sons.

He joined Friendster in 2004 as employee #4, becoming Chief Architect as the company grew from 120,000 to 6,000,000 users, growing the physical plant from 4 machines to over 300 machines, and automating configuration and cluster management.

Ian speaks frequently on the intersection of agile design and development, and the importance of Agile, Rails and the Cloud, from both a business and a technical perspective.