Blog posts tagged with the following topic: "product"
Own your Alpha
Excerpt:
In Government our digital services get assessed at each stage of their journey. From Discovery into Alpha. Alpha through Beta. And Beta into Live.
Every service that ends up on GOVUK will have to go through this. Each one assessed against the service standard for Government.
A panel of trained assessors will conduct the assessment. Each panel member from a different discipline within digital. The panel will cover the team setup. Their design and research, and their chosen technology stack.
From my time as an assessor, I've noticed teams don't always conduct Alphas correctly.
On my iPhone, I don't have automatic updates turned on. I'm that guy that likes to read the release notes. Or, at least, I was.
Release notes used to be interesting. They'd tell you what the developers had been up to. What features they were adding, or removing. But, the most important thing they brought was the ability to make an informed decision. They gave you the chance to decide whether you actually wanted to install it or not.
Companies such as Slack and Monzo have fun with their release notes. They're proud to show you the new features they've been working hard on. But these two companies are becoming part of a minority. A small group of companies that actually bother to write anything.