Congratulations! You are now the Product Owner on an Agile project. Maybe your boss gave you the role, or perhaps you’re working with an agile agency and you volunteered after learning a little about it. Either way, now you have a problem: people are already asking you "When will the product be ready?"

It doesn't matter if it's your boss wanting to know when you will deliver the product, or if it's your customers wanting to know when they can use shiny new features, or even if it's the voice in the back of your mind wondering when you can ship the Next Big Thing. Someone wants to know.

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Our 4th meetup was held at the Skimlinks office.

We had about 70 people in the meetup twice as big as the last meetup.
Special thanks to @CiaranR, and @skimlinks people for providing the venue, pizzas and beers again (it's the first time we ran out of Peroni).

We had 2 speakers, Tim Ruffles(@timruffles) and Alastair Maw(@herebebeasties) and here are the links to each talk.

(NOTE: We took videos, and will update them once edited)

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In my last blog post we took an overview of using code reviews to increase communication and knowledge sharing between remote teams in Agile projects.

Since we use GitHub it was natural to turn to them for code reviews. Happily GitHub's code review tools are very nice.

Much of this will be familiar to you if you already use GitHub, but for clarity here is the step-by-step process:

1. Work on a new feature branch
2. Merge feature branch to the staging server so that it is visible for QA (Quality Assurance)
3. Push feature branch and create a Pull Request
4. Wait for QA and Code Review
5. Merge the Pull Request

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There is nothing like face-to-face contact to get an important point across or to fully benefit from planned (and unplanned) team interactions. Still, there are times where it's just not possible.

I've been working with a client in Kent over the past few months. Clearly, it's not practical to move the entire New Bamboo team down from London for the day. To complicate things further, the client has development teams in multiple places around the UK.

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I've recorded a short, 10 minute screencast about presenters to give you a good view of what they are, where they came from and what they're good (and bad) at. It's illustrated with an example from our recent work on a loans processing application for the UK government.

Presenters allow you to create simple, understandable, self-contained objects. The screencast goes a little further than Jamis Buck's ‘skinny controller, fat model’ dictum to arrive at ‘skinny everything’.

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Rails Girls is coming to London, and we at New Bamboo are proud to announce our ongoing support for this and future events. Several Bambinos are actively involved with the day-to-day organisation of Rails Girls London, the first event of which is being held on Friday the 19th and Saturday the 20th April.

You can find out more at the official Rails Girls London website, and also follow Rails Girls on Twitter: @railsgirls, @railsgirls_ldn.

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Our 3rd meetup was held at Skimlinks office.

Special thanks to @CiaranR, and @skimlinks people for providing the venue, pizzas and beers again.

We had 2 speakers, Anna Powell-Smith and Demeter Sztanko and here are the links to each talk.

• ".enter() stage left: What does D3's superstar method get up to behind the scenes?"
• "Making maps with d3"

We have 2 tentative speakers for the next meetup (date to be announced later at London d3.js google group ), but always looking for new speakers. Please let us know if you have any ideas.

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Search is an important part of any application: users instinctively know where to look when they want to search within your site. For many users search is often the preferred way of getting to the functionality they want in your app.

Implementing search usually involves some external process which manages indexing and handling queries against your data, such as Solr or Elastic Search. This is often a secondary piece of your application's architecture, and is yet another service to host and maintain. For some sites or applications this extra overhead can be an additional layer of complexity too far.

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As programmers, we might sometimes fall into the trap of thinking our ideas - and the user experience they provide - are fine, because they work for us and we can adapt to poor interfaces without much problem. Put the same idea in front of an audience, however, and you're in for one hell of a refactor if you wrote the code beforehand.

This is a story about the two days I spent prototyping a new feature with the BBC; how figuring out the UX was far more challenging than writing the code could ever be; and why nothing could possibly be more entertaining than X-Factor.

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Disclaimer: At the end of this you will not have learnt to create a deep-fried, sugar-coated ring of bready goodness. Though I may write that one next!

Working at an agency it is often the case that our clients have heard and are enthusiastic about Scrum/Agile, but struggle to move away from what they have been doing before.

One of the biggest problems is that because the business doesn’t understanding everyone’s responsibilities in this ‘new’ Scrum framework, the PO (sometimes plural if you don’t nip that one in the bud), stakeholders and ex-project managers all revert to old, default, behaviours rather then seek to understand their role better. This leads to confusion, mis-communication, pressure, ]over-commitment and conflict. For more info see this blog post about over-commitment by James Scrimmers.

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