Category: Articles (Page 200 of 258)

According to Wikipedia, kaizen is defined like so:

Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the best”, refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, business management or any process.

Generally speaking, this is used to talk about the continuous improvement of a product. It’s also a core idea of lean manufacturing that has also been adapted into lean software development.

Anyway, the idea isn’t anything new and I honestly think now, more than ever, more people are familiar with the idea (even if it isn’t practiced) than ever before especially because some applications use the word in the release notes for their application.

Paper By FiftyThree mentions it with nearly every release.

As far as building products is concerned, this is something that I think many designers and developers want to do (if they aren’t already doing it, of course), but it are sometimes hindered by the nature of their environment.

By that, I mean that can we do continuous improvement – that is, can we practice kaizen – on projects that aren’t deployed on any type of particular schedule?

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When it comes to selling a theme for both WordPress.com and for self-hosted installations, one of the questions that I find myself asking is:

“Is it worth maintaining two repositories for the same theme?”

And I wonder this because when it comes to maintaining a codebase of a theme on WordPress.com and a version for the self-hosted version of WordPress, you can make the case that there’s no need to have a difference in the version of the themes.

But for anyone who has worked in both variants of WordPress, then you know there’s actually little bit in variation.

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If you’re any sort of a WordPress developer, then one of the things that you’ve no doubt noticed is how we market our work.

I’d say that it can be divided into two camps:

1. You have the developers who promote the features, design, and options that the theme or plugin offers.
2. You have the developers who promote all of the things that have gone into the theme as to what makes it significant.

When it comes to marketing WordPress themes or plugins (or any product, for that matter), then the first group has it absolutely correct.

The second group, on the other hand, can take a few cues from the first group – namely, stop trying to market your WordPress products based on the tools and technology that were used when working on the project.

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One of the things that I try to do with my projects is to create quick, iterative releases. When it comes to client work, I’ve made a lot of progress with this over the past year; however, when it comes to working on products (be it plugins, themes, or something similar), I’m not as good as I’d like to be.

Nonetheless, I’m still working on it and one of the ways in which I’m trying hard to focus on that is through creating a system of bug ticket triage.

Sounds all fancy, right?

It’s not :).

Basically, it’s a way that I sort tickets as they come into the support channel and decide how I’m going to be resolving them according to their level of severity.

Though I don’t think there’s a definitive way to do this, I thought it might be worth sharing how I’ve been doing this with Mayer (as well as some other client projects) in order to try to create the leanest release experience possible.

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