agent of change

In some projects, there are sometimes people that want to stay informed of what is happening without having to login to Mingle constantly.

One good example is someone that has to verify that work has been completed by the development team.

Our fictional customer, Sandy, is a busy person and would like a way to keep informed of when she needs to look at the work the development team has done so that she doesn’t get behind. She doesn’t have time to check Mingle all day and lives in email and feed readers all day.

Fortunately for Sandy, Mingle has a simple and powerful solution for her. By simply going to the History tab in Mingle, she can see all of what is going on in real time. But wait, there is too much information that Sandy doesn’t need to look at. Sandy needs to take a few steps to give her just what she needs with all of the steps highlighted in the image on the right.

# Sandy only wants to know what she needs to act on. She doesn’t care about updates to pages or code checkins. So clicking on the cards checkbox limits her search just to cards that are changing.
# This is still too much information, so she further narrows her choices down by selecting only to look at stories because she doesn’t need to know about defects.
# Her final choice is to select that the card changed to a story status of “In Customer Review” because that’s where she knows she’ll need to take some action and look at the work her team is doing.
# Sandy can then choose how she wants to stay informed via feed or email.

Mingle now keeps Sandy up to date on what she needs to review. She’s happy because she can keep up to date even while she’s out of the office.

Science Daily is reporting today on new research from scientists at the University of Portsmouth says that says smiling affects how we speak, to the point that listeners can identify the type of smile based on sound alone. Here is the abstract for the paper:

The present study investigated the vocal communication of naturally occurring smiles. Verbal variation was controlled in the speech of 8 speakers by asking them to repeat the same sentence in response to a set sequence of 17 questions, intended to provoke reactions such as amusement, mild embarrassment, or just a neutral response. After coding for facial expressions, a sample of 64 utterances was chosen to represent Duchenne smiles, non-Duchenne smiles, suppressed smiles and non-smiles. These audio clips were used to test the discrimination skills of 11 listeners, who had to rely on vocal indicators to identify different types of smiles in speech. The study established that listeners can discriminate different smile types and further indicated that listeners utilize prototypical ideals to discern whether a person is smiling. Some acoustical cues appear to be taken by listeners as strong indicators of a smile, regardless of whether the speaker is actually smiling. Further investigations into listeners’ prototypical ideals of vocal expressivity could prove worthwhile for voice synthesizing technology endeavoring to make computer-simulations more naturalistic.

This is real science folks. Remember all those times you had to cold call and you heard “smile and dial” from your biz dev manager? Well, it turns out she was right. Your customer sub-consciously heard, not only that you weren’t smiling, but that you were gritting your teeth in anger.