Posted by Andrés on May 11th, 2010

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Good People Drinking Wine and talking to each other – Rioja Recap

Good people; check. Drinking (great) wine; double check. Talking to each other; yes!

TWG would like to thank:

Anil Patel: for sharing his expertise in working with Google Apps/Salesforce.com/Echosign.com and other SaaS tools for his small, yet influential non-profit, Timeraiser.ca. Check out their full IT portal here: http://it.timeraiser.ca. AND a big thanks for pitching in a case of the delicious Ontario white wine blend called Sibling Rivalry.

Rob Ballantyne: for sharing his photos, experiences, and deep rooted passion for Rioja wines. Not to mention the delicious bottle of 1987 Lopez de Heredia, Viña Tondonia Gran Reserva, and the bottle of 1995 Gravonia by Lopez De Heredia.

Rebecca Baran: for her flattering photo booth shots, and persistence in getting all our guest’s in front of her lens. Check her out at http://rebeccabaran.com

And to all of you; our guests, colleagues, neighbours, and fellow creative professionals: thank you for making the second installment of “Good People Drinking Wine and Talking to Each Other” a resounding success.

Until next time, (we’re thinking 2 months)
Your friends at TWG.

*all photos by Rebecca Baran

  Posted by Dominic on May 3rd, 2010

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May 7th – Good people drinking wine and talking to each other

Friday May 7th:
Another jam-packed installment of ‘good people drinking wine and talking to each other’

Please RSVP to join a hand-picked group of good people – friends, colleagues, and super interesting bon-vivants – to drink some great wine, eat some delicious things, have your photo taken, and enjoy three short, yet spell-binding, presentations.

PRESENTERS:

Dominic Bortolussi & Rob Ballantyne: Will talk about and offer wines from the magical kingdom of Rioja. Where new world meets old world, unicorns run wild, and where countless people found their first love of wine. Maybe you will too. For the first dozen or so people who arrive, there will be tasting glasses of a ’1987 Tondonia Gran Reserva’ from the renowned Lopez de Heredia vineyard. For those who arrive later, you’ll also get crazy good wine, but it won’t be 23years old.

Anil Patel: Topic: Decision-making when thinking about Software As A Service (SaaS) tools. There’s a difference between Open-source versus an Open-Architecture, and connecting people and content is what matters most, not who owns the software.

Andres Aquino: Will announce the impending launch of our brand spanking new commercial web-application. PostageApp – “The easier way to send email from web apps”.  PostageApp, which started as a side-project to solve our own email problems, seemed a good candidate to sell as a service. Andres will highlight the major pain points in PostageApp’s development and how we overcame them.

Rebecca Baran: Who has recently launched her eponymous website, will be here at the studio, taking photo portraits of the fully clothed or soft nudes.

SUMMARY:

It’s an early thing. Short and sweet. There will be tasting glasses of wine, as well as other alcoholic and non-alcoholics things. Cheeses and good nibbles will be all around, but it’s not meant to spoil your supper.

And then … at 7:00 pm, our encounter will end, and you will all move on to your dinner reservations and vegetarian yoga classes, full of cheese and ideas, a good wine buzz, and fun people to stalk on Twitter or Facebook over the weekend.

THE VENUE:

Our studio, in the Burroughes building, at 639 Queen Street West. Suite 502. We’ll jimmy the door to stay open, but buzz us at 5002 if it’s locked when you arrive.

THE TIME:

Friday, May 7th
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

ATTENDEES:

There will be neighbors in the building, entrepreneurs, graphic designers, fashion designers, industrial designers, web developers, animators, film-makers, gamers, writers, musicians, painters, wine lovers, comic book lovers, maybe even foot lovers – all stylish, vivacious and friendly people. So you should be here.

You’re strongly encouraged to bring along equally amazing people too.

  Posted by Dominic on April 15th, 2010

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TWG’s graduating class

It is with great pride mixed with a bit of sadness that TWG offers a big congratulations and fond farewell to a long time team member – Sean Lerner.

Three years ago, Sean came in our door, like a friendly stray cat; slightly disheveled, a bit wide eyed, but hungry for interesting work and some tech camaraderie. We liked him a lot, and so we asked if we could keep him. He said ‘sure’. After a few short weeks, Sean was an integral part of the team, jumping in to help on projects, inspiring us with his idealism, earnestness, entrepreneurial thinking, and occasionally brilliant improv and comedy skills.

Sean always went above and beyond to help TWG as we went through our growing pains. He was (and still is) a handyman who could pitch in on any project, and Sean could always be relied on make sure that checklists were completed, and clients were contacted with updates. Sean was the inventor of our first Customer Data Management System (the infamous cdms) which housed all of our easy to forget passwords, for the umpteen servers and services we ran over the years.

I know that as Sean sets out on his new journey as a freelance internet consultant, we’ll be crossing paths now and then, and I also know that I speak for everyone at TWG when I say ‘good luck’ and ‘thanks for “forgetting” that mac-mini box full of broken glass under your monitor’ :P

  Posted by todd on February 18th, 2010

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TWG Kicks Off 2010 with Scrum!

TWG would like to formally welcome you to 2010 and talk a little bit about something we’ve decided to kick off the new year with: Scrum!

Scrum is an agile framework that allows teams to become self organizing and focus on delivering high business value.

In 2010, TWG is committed to delivering working, high business value, high quality software, faster.  This is something Scrum enables us to do.

Why Change?

While TWG has previously used plenty of agile practices, the time has come to formalize the process so that we can get all the benefits of being an agile organization.

How Is Agile Different?

Many agencies and web development companies typically insist on gathering every single requirement up front, locking them down, forcing the client to sign off, swearing that these requirements will never change.  We now know better.  Requirements will change, we learn as we go, and we will inevitably discover new and more valuable features as the project comes together.  TWG is using Scrum to build partnering relationships with our clients, so that we can see and adapt to requirements as they emerge, and deliver better and more useful websites and software.

Build Less Software…

So how do you build high value, high quality software, quickly?  Build less, but build it better!

This may seem unusual, but remember, when you start a project, application or a web site, you don’t really know what you or your users want until you get your hands on it and start playing with it.  This is normal.  So instead of trying to plan it all up front, we’re going to be working on building the things you know right now, and get them done, Done, DONE!

Nothing gets feedback better than working software, so why wait until the end of your project to see it?  Once you’ve seen it and learned from it, you can add to it, change it or even scrap it!

At TWG, we’re starting Scrum with 1 week sprints.  These are time boxed working periods where at the end, our goal is to deliver working software, as opposed to things like documents, mock-ups or in-progress features.  This is a tough, aggressive process that we’re working on, but we feel in the end it will enable us to deliver better, more valuable software, faster.

…Get more value (rather than a laundry list).

Many web development companies will work with you to look around at all the sites that are out there, collect a large laundry lists of  possible features that you might want your system to do, and then give a quote on building that.  You sign off, and the work gets started.  You wait potentially months until all the features are built, the schedule might slip two or three times, and when you finally get it, you discover you really didn’t end up with the software you really hoped for or needed.

Not only that, but while the software was being built, the market changed and some features became irrelevant or new features became more critical.  Too late to change now.  I guess you’re stuck.

What if you had your list of features prioritized in order of importance/ROI and what if you got the most important features first each iteration – say every week?  Maybe you’d find out you didn’t need to build those last few features since they weren’t all that valuable anyway, or maybe you’d find you could swap some of those less valuable ones out for new ones.  Who wouldn’t want that kind of flexibility?

What Comes Next?

This transition is a work in progress and we’re going to give you regular updates and insights into our experiences with Scrum.  You’ll get to see some of the nitty-gritty details like our task board, and burn up charts, as well as some of the struggles and discoveries we make as we go down this road.  We hope you’ll keep your eye on our blog and provide us with any feedback or experiences you’ve had.

  Posted by Andrés on February 10th, 2010

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Please welcome the newest TWGer: Todd Charron

The entire TWG cast would like to formally welcome Todd Charron to the team. Todd joined TWG at the beginning of 2010, and has been pivotal in helping us evolve our Agile development practices and project management system.

As a Certified ScrumMaster, Todd is ideal in leading TWG’s formal transition from “Scrum-ish” to an actual Scrum Agile Development process. Dom and I have always desired for our agile methodology to improve, but without the experience of scrum training we always seemed to stop short of ideal.

Todd has over 9-years of software development experience, and as a former lead developer, he has a terrific understanding of the dev team’s needs. We’re happy that Todd has decided to join us, and you can look forward to learning a lot more about Scrum, as Todd will be active in updating you on our Scrum-Evolution right here on this blog.

Welcome Todd, great to have you aboard!

  Posted by Andrés on September 9th, 2009

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TWG Sponsoring TEDxTO

As long time fans of TED, The Working Group is proudly sponsoring tomorrow’s TEDxTO event at the Theatre Passe Muraille. Dom and I look forward to meeting fellow attendees, and watching the great line-up of speakers (13). Give us a poke and say hi if you see us there.

If you’re looking to catch the event online, check out http://ted1.epresence.tv/webcast/ for a live stream. The show starts at 1pm, goes till 7pm.

You can also follow TEDxTO on Twitter: @TEDxTO or Facebook: Fan Page.

  Posted by Andrés on April 27th, 2009

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Your Daily Candy: Do Good. Be Great.

This morning, our Chicago-based client ActofGood.org went beta!

To get the ball (seriously) rolling, ActofGood was featured in this morning’s DailyCandy.com Chicago (apparently a big deal in the US):

Use your networking powers for good through ActofGood.org, a Chicago-based website launching today. Designed to connect people based on their causes and promote local philanthropic initiatives, ActofGood is organized, user-friendly, and — in our unbiased opinion — going to change the way people give.

ActofGood is a pleasure to work with, and we strongly believe in their “Do Good. Be Great.” mission. The Working Group looks forward to a long working relationship with the AOG team; congrats ActofGood!

– The TWG Team

  Posted by Andrés on April 5th, 2009

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Are Estimates the new ‘Spec’?

For those that will be at MeshU tomorrow, come check out Professor Bortolussi speak on: Experiments on selling agile development projects. Are Estimates the new ‘Spec’?

Dom’s talk begins at 10:35am somewhere in the MaRS Collaboration Centre.