A great agile design process is complementary to a great agile development process and produces products that people love enough to generate real value.

The right amount of design, and how far ahead that design needs to occur, varies significantly by task. Knowing what it is you’re building before development starts leads to a much more focused (i.e. better, faster, cheaper) product. However, high fidelity, pixel-level design work is best done with the designer pairing directly with the developer 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.

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.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Daniel Lieberman of BitPusher says that ten years from now, much of what we think of as “operations” will be obsolete. The current trends in operations automation, reliability engineering and cloud computing will combine and mature into a nearly-commoditized blend of operations and infrastructure. Today, the practical impact of these trends is that there are new tools and service offerings which add more complexity to operations practices, but if used well allow operations teams to manage some aspects of their environments more holistically, and sometimes do a better job with fewer resources. This talk provides a snapshot of what operations practices look like during this period of transition.

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Ian McFarland, Principal and VP of Technology for Pivotal Labs, reprises his popular RailsConf 2010 talk. Ian describes the technical and social aspects of how Pivotal practices agile software development.

“We’ve been practicing these methods for over 10 years, so we’ve learned a thing or two about how it all works. We want to share what we’ve learned…and we think it can make your own work more sustainable, delightful, and productive.”

Slides available at: http://cot.ag/cHHsCi

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Pivot Ryan Dy leads a discussion on upcoming HTML5 and CSS3 features. Ryan talks about how best to take advantage of the new features in the most modern browsers. Slides available at http://ryandy.com/html5

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Cappuccino is an open source framework for building browser-based apps. It is designed exclusively for building apps, not websites, which lets the framework focus on high-level tasks and specialized performance optimizations. Ross Boucher of 280 North, authors of Cappuccino, demonstrates the framework.

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Jose de Castro from Voxeo uses Rails and Sinatra to demonstrate the Tropo API for building real time communications apps. He discusses how media servers, SIP Servlets, and JRuby are used to create a standards-based stack for cloud communications.

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John Boykin teaches us to recognize the seven most common sources of confusion and how to avoid them. Using real-world case studies, John dissects each pattern, proposes a redesign to reduce confusion, and offers general guidelines for making your website more intuitive.

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Support for @font-face in CSS has created new possibilities for typography on the web. Like all new technologies there are hurdles, both technical and legal. Typekit aims to solve those problems with a centralized, continuously upgraded font-serving platform and licensing models that make sense for the web.

Ryan Carver of Small Batch, makers of Typekit, gives an intro to Typekit. He describes how to use the fonts and demonstrates advanced client-side tools. He also discusses their internal tools for testing and screen-shotting fonts across browsers and platforms.

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Making truly awesome stuff is hard. Pivot Carl Coryell-Martin proposes we identify common physiological responses and condense their design solutions into a pattern language. He presents a draft set of patterns in the context of crafting an iPhone app.

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David Pollak and Martin Odersky discuss the power of Lift, a Rails-like framework for Scala. David is the maintainer of the Lift framework and Martin is the author of Scala. Together they live-code a 30-line, real time, web based chat app in Lift and discuss the Scala constructs that allow for such concise applications.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks