During last August's Agile 2010 conference, I attended a session that used a board game to simulate the collaboration between developers and UX professionals. The object of the game was to coordinate the schedules of these two groups, who normally follow the beats of different metronomes. On top of that basic timing challenge, unexpected events complicated this dance between development and UX.

While this session does show a novel application of serious gaming (one of my favorite topics, in case you hadn't noticed), the interesting aspect of this session is that it happened at all. Until recently, UX was not a major concern for Agilists – or most people developing software, for that matter. The phrase, "And then we'll throw a UI on top of it," summarized the indifference of all too many development teams to UX concerns.

In the last few years, many teams have learned a new attitude. Instead of treating UX as a tarpaulin, thrown over the application to clumsily hold it all together, UX is as much a part of the system as the technical architecture or the application logic.

Last week, Microsoft unveiled its Windows Phone 7 software, which is dramatically different from this company’s previous software for mobile devices. This new mobile operating system software provides an improved user interface, animated icons, a colorful touchscreen, and personalization features which enable users to customize aspects of the phone’s appearance and performance. In addition, these smartphones work with Sharepoint servers, which are being deployed by enterprises.

Sixty mobile operators, including América Móvil, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, O2, Orange, SFR, SingTel, Telstra, Telus, and Vodafone, will be supporting Windows Phone 7 in 30 countries. In the US, Windows phones will be available in November. AT&T will sell Windows phones from HTC, Samsung, and LG Electronics, and T-Mobile USA will offer phones from HTC and Dell Inc.

Even with these distribution channels, Microsoft faces tough competition in the smartphone arena. The US smartphone market is dominated by Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices, Apple iPhones, and devices that run on Google’s Android operating system. Given this intense competition, Microsoft is going to be fighting for fourth place in the US. Microsoft has a better chance to capture a significant share of the smartphone market in developing regions, including China and Latin America, where customers are not tied to Android or Apple smartphone devices.

When you were a child, you may have played with a paper fortune teller (a.k.a. cootie catcher). By folding and unfolding this origami-like construct, you produced answers for questions you posed.

The topic of technical debt is a lot like the paper fortune teller: the more you unfold the topic, the more interesting observations emerge. Israel Gat wrote two recent posts (click here and here) at his blog, The Agile Executive, that illustrate the sort of costs that technical debt imposes. His second post focuses on the most conspicuous cost: The more you develop, heedless of the technical debt you create, the harder and harder it becomes to make further changes. While this may seem like an obvious conclusion, it's not one that has the impact on software development that it should. In their rush into the future, building code that is supposed to expand choices, many teams are actually constraining their choices.

For ISVs, technical debt has a lot of important ramifications. Here are just a few:

• For startups, aggressive product road maps can be counterproductive. The more you develop, the more competitive your product, right? That formula seems obvious to most insurgent vendors, but there's definitely a point of diminishing marginal returns, when the cost of maintaining all that aggressively-developed code exceeds the company's ability to continue developing and supporting it. 

Obviously, as a regular blogger, I think social media are the cat's meow. However, when I use social media, I don't lapse into that blissed-out state that cats enjoy when they bust open a jar of catnip. Your experience may be different:

If you believe that Twitter is of net-benefit for the world, and only someone who hasn't used it much would say otherwise, then what's good for Twitter is good for the rest of us, too. Costolo's adventures with the last world-changing messaging system he [led] may have worked out better for himself than for the rest of us in the long run, but his work at Twitter so far has been key at building staying power for this new, more accessible way for people around the world to speak with each other.

That's the concluding paragraph from a ReadWriteWeb story about Twitter's new CEO. It's just the sort of gushy, overblown statement that plays well in the pocket universe of people with a vested interested in social media using social media to sign hosannas on the highest about social media. Outside the pocket universe, it's just the sort of hyperbolic prose that makes people who are on the fence about Twitter, who don't necessarily see it as good for the rest of us, nervous that anything sold that hard must not be as good as advertised. For people who still look at their email inbox with despair, Twitter may be one more channel of communication that they don't need.