Iterex was formed in 2008 to offer clients my experience in Agile development. The name was chosen from a contraction of the words Iterative Excellence - as I am a big believer in iterative development, planning and deployment. While Iterex closed in 2011 due to a unique opportunity to be “Head of Set-top Box Software Development“ for BSkyB’s, Sky+ development team - its’s legacy lives on from the ideas, software and presentations that I gave over those years.
Through Iterex I provided agile/iterative consulting to many leading companies and positively influenced their approaches to agile software development. Some of my clients included: BSkyB, MSN (Microsoft), RBS, E2X, Gazprom.
At the same time I was (and still am) interested in using minimal technology to allow teams to plan and execute work. I am a big fan of using Story Cards as a light weight mechanism for this kind of planning, and am credited with co-developing one of the earliest documented approaches for story cards - the “As an X, I want Y, so that Z”.
As part of this interest in light weight “Storycard” technology, I developed software to rapidly create story cards electronically that crucially let you easily print them out for use in team meetings - most notably standup meetings. At the same time, I further developed visualisation techniques (first described in an earlier paper) for iteration and project progress that really helps teams understand how they are performing.
This software was called Iterex Professional, however it was a thick client for Windows platforms which was never migrated to either a Web or mobile platform. While I have used other solutions, most notably Jira, I’ve never found something that matched the simplicity and clarity of Iterex Professional, and I hope to one day pick up that project and create something more teams could use.
Update: I continue to think that the balance of people and discussion shouldn’t be lost in the promise of technology. As a follow up to Iterex, my new venture More Than Technology, which is aimed at re-addressing this fine balance.