A Lift and Shift (according to Techopedia) is “a particular technique in software migration where an application or code base is taken out of one environment and placed in another environment, without significant underlying design change.” It often happens when a big company buys a little company, and wants to rehost or replatform the little company’s application. Or it happens in any company when they want to change platforms or move an application to the cloud.
If your team wants to pursue any of the following improvement opportunities then understanding and organizing around value streams will help.
Just a few weeks after Smashingconf, I attended Queer Design Club’s first annual summit. Since its founding in 2019, the organization has fostered a growing Slack community, aiming to broaden the conversation around diversity beyond the limited silos of race and gender. With the summit, they brought that community (virtually) together while elevating traditionally underrepresented voices from the design industry. With an eye to last year’s Queer Design Count, speakers looked at both the statistics and their own personal experiences to discuss how we can all help move the design industry forward.
With a rare week of beautiful spring weather, San Francisco welcomed Smashingconf back in early June for the first time since 2019. Carefully biking my way through the chaos of the Warriors NBA championship parade, I soon arrived at the beautiful Fort Mason ready for a long day of design. After catching up with some former co-workers in town from Hong Kong, I settled in for a full-day workshop with Smashing founder Vitaly Friedman. The topic?
Lots of agencies have their own 'branded' version of Discovery. The same Discovery process that works for building Mission Control for SpaceX might not work as well for a game designed to kill time for teens. (Although some parts might be eerily similar!) In our quest to deliver value to users of 'serious' web interfaces, we pull from several different frameworks.
Have you ever been to an old quarry that was submerged and abandoned years ago? They are typically quite pretty. And they can be a lot like your organization.
As a software developer, there are some things that you’re interested in just because you’re an engineer:
You’re a product leader on the cusp of starting new development work, so you have an outline of your product strategy, and you have hypotheses about the users of your product. But you don’t have the first-person point of view because you haven’t talked to users yet. You want to have those conversations with users, but you hesitate, because you don’t want to...
If you’re a prospective client of Lab Zero, then you have a software solution in mind. It’s axiomatic: if you didn’t have a solution in mind, you would not have the approval to solicit proposals from top-shelf development agencies like Lab Zero, and we would not be talking to you. But, since we’re talking, we know that you’ve already encountered pain, or opportunity, and you have started to think how software could solve that problem or meet that opportunity. In short, if you are talking to us, then you have a software solution in your head.
Anybody floating down the river of Agile these days will look very sharply at you when you ask how much time it will take to build a feature, or how much a set of features will cost. The answer is usually, ‘By letting us do what we do best, you will get the most value possible per time. By demanding release dates and budgets, we can only say for sure that we will deliver less value per time.’ Yeah. Thanks a lot, man.