Agile product development today

Software is developed in an agile way these days. Everyone knows that. It makes sense. In today’s world, requirements change so quickly that there’s no other way to keep up. And you want to release every two months. New features, fixed bugs. That’s what customers want. Thanks to current technologies, this is possible. This has also reached the upper echelons of the many companies that are increasingly having to become software manufacturers due to digitalization in all industries. And the competition is doing the same. So buy scrum masters, retrain product managers to become product owners, read 1-2 blogs, restructure the software department a bit and off you go!

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Hello! 🙂 I’m Ulrike, a media informatics student in my master’s degree and currently an intern at Centigrade. During my internship one of my tasks was finishing the VedaVersum app together with Mikhail. We wanted to create the application using .NET, GraphQL and React as a knowledge base where team members can log in and write, edit and delete articles (see first blog article). In this part of the series, I’d like to share my approach to link the frontend with the backend with you and briefly report how I fared as a React and GraphQL newbie. read more…

What are brand values and why do we need them?

At best, a brand is much more than the products or services it sells. Otherwise it remains interchangeable and one of the most important driving forces is missing: its value system. And that is precisely the engine that shapes the vision and keeps employees engaged. read more…

In the previously published blog articles on the LOUISA project, we discussed the general objectives of the project and reported on the weighting of the player types within our target group. Since we wanted to motivate the young patients to use the LOUISA app with the help of a digital companion, we were now faced with the task of designing it.
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Where and why do analog and digital materials differ fundamentally? And what does our Armadillo Outdoor Office desk have to do with it? Analog and digital material in human-centered design processes. read more…

Are you a project owner, project manager or do you work with designers on a regular basis and are you tired of time-consuming and exhausting discussions about necessary features and brilliant ideas?
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1. Data persistence

As we have defined before, our API has one main entity – VedaVersumCard. Our application is intended to keep the list of knowledge cards and to grant users the ability to create, read and edit these cards. To make it happen we defined one mutation and 3 queries in our API. “CardAction” mutation should take the card data as an argument and store this data somewhere. Query “allCards” should return the list of all the existing cards. Query “card” should return one card by card ID, and “allCardsAssignedToUser” query should take user E-Mail as input and return cards filtered by property “assignedUsers” which value equals to that input user. read more…

Anne Hess is a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering. As part of the interview series UX Neu Überdacht, she and Thomas Immich talk in the Outdoor Office about modern requirements engineering and creative approaches, how to get richer information from users, and which methods from disciplines outside the field can inspire and inspire UX professionals to become better.

For further reading, here is a paper by Anne Hess on exciting, alternative RE approaches:  Conspiracy Walls in Requirements Engineering – Analyzing Requirements like a Detective read more…

A UX service provider that tests games, that doesn’t go together at all, you think? You might think so, but UX and gaming methods are not that different. I would like to use a recent example to show you what you need to be particularly careful about when it comes to game testing. read more…

Earlier this year the start-up Elexir reached out to us with their unique vision of creating a more sustainable car. They built a highly customizable and extendable shared car, trying to attain the same experience as of owned, personalised cars. They achieved this by developing a completely new underlying software architecture. By using an open-source software approach they are enabling everybody to contribute to its system and giving customers the ability to replace and add hardware elements and benefit from further software improvements. read more…

 

“If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy” –  Donald Knuth

Having a good tool allows you to complete tasks effectively and enjoy the process. Twice the fun to develop the tool yourself 🙂

Hi, It’s Mikhail from Centigrade again. And let’s continue to build our tool – knowledge base called Veda Versum. This is my second article in the series “How to engage GraphQL, .Net and React together”. In the Previous article we have defined our target application, requirements and architecture. We have also chosen the .Net 6 for backend with hot chocolate library for GraphQL API and React as the UI framework. And we have created the backend application scaffold. Now it’s time to give life to our backend.

Today we will add Authentication to backend. We will define and implement the data persistence for our application. We will talk about GraphQL resolvers and data loaders and will say a couple of words about testing.

Let’s get it started! 😉 read more…

Hello, let me introduce myself first: My name is Luise, and I’m a game design student from Leipzig, Germany, specializing in 2D art and illustration. In my 5th semester, I was scheduled for a mandatory internship, where I decided to work for Centigrade. Already during the job interview I was told about the LOUISA project, which then became a convincing factor in my decision to join this company. read more…