There comes a point in every project where the team enters a fun little time called Quality Assurance. One may think that such a process could be frustrating, especially when conducting a QA across multiple satellite offices, but I have found the solution! Bullet points and screen grabs! No joke. These two simple steps make conducting a successful QA via email a cinch!

Bullet Points are helpful because you can separate out your steps, clearly showing the developers where one thought ends and the next begins! How novel. I’ve also found its helpful to include a bit of background about what you were doing when you ran into your bug or error (browser type, previous steps, what you were trying to accomplish, etc).

Screen grabs are equally as wonderful because you can visually display what went wrong. Rather than saying “something’s looking weird” and following it with an incoherent explanation of what you see on your screen, you can simply say “something’s looking weird” and drop a screen grab of the error you encountered right into the email. Now the developer doesn’t have to decipher your rambling, descriptive paragraph – they can just SEE it.

Follow this simple steps and the QA process will be simpler for all parties involved. You’ll be happy because you won’t receive emails back from the dev team asking you to clarify points of your email, and the dev team will be happy because they won’t have to guess what you were trying to explain. Do a really succinct job, and someone on the dev team may just send you a fancy blue ribbon… similar to this one I received from Mr. Adam Miller and proceeded to print, cut out, and proudly display on my monitor. Blue ribbons all around!

Good lord, have we had a lot of requests for iPhone Apps lately.

And who can blame these companies? With the iPhone fast becoming one of the most prolific and exciting new developments in mobile computing, with the App Store seeing stratospheric download rates and profits, who wouldn’t want a piece of the action? If you’ve got a brand, you need an iPhone App.

Except, really, you don’t.

This came my way last week, and kinda blew my mind. On his eponymous site, Don Hodges has looked into some of the most famous programming bugs in early gaming history – the Donkey Kong kill screen, Pac Man’s level 256 split screen, Dig Dug’s instant-death screen, and others. Although the solutions are very technical (we’re talking assembly code here), the level of detail and understanding of the algorithms is what really impressed me.

A couple months ago, I did an interview with some of the students of “Hyper Island”http://www.hyperisland.se/, a really great interactive design and development college in Sweden, whose class of 2009 Creatives Unlimited project we are a sponsor of. I realized as I was writing it that it tied in nicely to my recent lecture/post about interactive design education, so I asked the gang over there if I could reblog it. Groovy. The original is over on Hyper Island Student Max Orlander’s Blog

Such an interesting time in the advertising business. Who should clients rely on for brand strategy? Media strategy? Digital? In the old days, when television advertising was a given it was simple: the ad agency. Today? Well, I guess it depends. It must be tough for clients to decide and to separate strategy from execution. Either way, it’s fun to watch.

I read an article in the wee hours the other night about Integrated Production. If you want to sound like you are hip and on top of what is happening, throw that around at the next industry party. The concept is pretty simple – the entire team is involved in crafting the concept and strategy for a project from the minute the RFP comes through the front door. On an agency level this means interactive, broadcast and print teams come together to tackle concept and strategy across all media outlets but you probably already knew that. It really could not get any simpler – communication. I am amazed anything was ever produced that was worth mentioning with teams operating in silos. It is hard not to get excited about this.

However, I have mixed feelings about the ad world finally embracing this methodology – On the one hand I am looking forward to working on projects where, perhaps, we (TBG) are brought on much earlier in the RFP process to help develop the big idea or at least help determine how digital relates to what is being done in other disciplines. In order to have a successful project, whether you are a producer or partner, it is critical to have a voice as early as possible in the process. How else are you able to communicatewhat makes sense and how to execute it in the interactive/digital space and have people listen?

It sounds like the people spear heading this movement have the same frustrations I have had over the years. Disjointed ideas, people concepting who do not understand the medium, ideas sold to clients that are impossible to pull off within the budget/time frame or just plain impossible to pull off in accordance with their spec. It sets everyone up for failure. Those projects that do get sold through tend to be contentious, where the producer spends his or her time trying to be a fire wall instead of focusing on how to get an awesome idea made into a reality. It is exhausting and frankly is a morale killer for the creative team. Perhaps this new approach will mitigate a great deal of this, which would be brilliant.

On the other hand, I am skeptical about how this is going to get pulled off. Is the ad industry ready to adopt an actual project management methodology that supports truly integrated production? Each discipline requires its own management approach. Managing interactive is an entirely different beast. To produce interactive in a traditional waterfall manner is counter to this new way of thinking. Adopting a more agile approach to design and development, would force the team to continue working together even after the idea is sold. Why set up a production department that is founded on the principle of cross discipline collaboration and then follow the old management approach? While there would be a broadly defined deliverable for the client to cling to, doing so would take the agency and end client out of their comfort zone. Hopefully, as this becomes the norm, clients will recognize that they have an opportunity to be a part of the team and have more control over making sure the end product reflects their business needs of the moment and not when the contract was signed. I guess only time will tell if the integrated production that is being bandied about is powerful enough to convert the old dogs.