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SCRUM was developed in the early 1990s. The philosophy behind it is founded on empiricism and asserts that knowledge comes from experience. It emphasises the ‘see-feel-change’ approach which means that learning goes step-by-step to achieve success. Through lean thinking we can filter and minimise waste so there will be more focus on the essentials.

SCRUM serves as a lightweight framework for self-organising teams to implement projects in a more effective and efficient way. For companies this means that instead of having a distant deadline for finishing a whole project at once with the risk of failing in the end,  in short sprints of 2-4 weeks, a team always delivers a completed part of the total project. You can see it as a continuous and frequent cycle (plan-build-test-review) with feedback on the small feature set at every Sprint Review. These inspections are important because now SCRUM Artefacts (more on that later) can be detected and adapted to make the quality of the work better. This flexible and transparent way of working being used more and more, gives every SCRUM-team the formal opportunity to improve their current results with the final goal of creating a shippable product.

Miles strives for this more dynamic and beneficial strategy because it strengthens our management of different challenges we face. We aim to have an agile way of working. Agile can be defined as a set of values and principles that teams can use to make decisions about how to do the work of developing valuable software. With every new process Miles has, we first want to get comfortable so we can encourage the team to experiment and see what works. By responding to change instead of following a fixed plan, we are contstanting adapting the process to fit the team. And because our highest priority is to satisfy our customers' needs, we prefer customer collaboration and face-to-face conversations to use as our source of inspiration for new ideas.

The waterfall methodology is considered the traditional way to execute tasks that are well understood and documented from the start. It follows a linear top-down approach, so the process goes only one direction with each phase representing a distinct stage that needs to be finished before the next one begins. But these fixed scopes, budgets and timelines made it almost impossible for developers creating a new product to succeed in their work. Because their testing phase only takes place at the end of the development, the risk of bringing the wrong product to market is high, since market command or technology can change while the original plan is being developed. Agile intends to solve these issues of a rigid structured methodology by breaking the project development down into sprints. All these sprints can actually be seen as a collection of various projects on their own, which gives the flexibility to change the test plan at each evaluation. The Agile methodology is the most ideal approach when crucial details are not known yet from the beginning and the project is centred around rapid and continuous delivery.

Why do we use SCRUM & Agile within Miles?

SCRUM and Agile enable us to finish projects with more attention and the deliverables connect more with the actual users. Because we value a cohesive collaboration with intensive communication and adequate productivity, we chose a small team that works together on all projects. We have a clear division of tasks while maintaining our focus on the same end goals. This is not only time- and cost saving, but it also gives us the perfect opportunity to work in an autonomic environment where everyone can work independently. We believe that this is the way to work faster, more motivated and more efficiently to deliver the best quality for our clients.

Agile as a method originally comes from IT. Software developers were not satisfied with the standard working method at the time, which was mainly based on a clear and final design with a detailed planning and procedure. However, this method never matched reality since unforeseen problems were not calculated in the time span and planning became difficult in an increasingly dynamic, complex, volatile and   uncertain (IT) world. In 2001 this led to the Agile Manifesto, which prioritised individuals and collaboration over tools and procedures and a creative mindset responding to change over following a plan.

How can you implement an agile way of working?

At Miles we give the preference to work together in a small and self-managing team. In order to make the SCRUM framework function properly, there are different and clear roles within our team. The three specific responsibilities are the Product Owners, the SCRUM Master and the Development team. They form a cohesive unit of professionals that are all focussing on the same product backlog which has been simplified into specific sprint backlogs.  The product backlog is a mega list of user stories that describe the needs and wishes of the client. The sprint backlog is a more specific and smaller list of user stories that the development team and SCRUM master create based on priorities and can work on during 2-4 week long sprints.

It’s an innovative way of working that helps teams (including us) ship faster with more quality. It allows for more flexibility than traditional methods such as waterfall. The mindset is the most important, tools come last. There are lots of benefits to working in an agile way, which you can implement in small steps by dividing roles and setting clear boundaries for a sprint using the product and sprint backlogs. If you want to learn more about SCRUM and the agile way of working we recommend looking at the 

SCRUM was developed in the early 1990s. The philosophy behind it is founded on empiricism and asserts that knowledge comes from experience.

How did we implement an Agile way of working?

Today, a good user experience on all devices is a must. All digital products are a lot more complex than they were a few years ago and to bring unity and structure to this, we use Atomic design in our process. This is a story about why.

In 2014 Brad Frost introduced the concept of Atomic design. Inspired by his highschool chemistry classes, he came up with the idea of dividing his designs into atoms, molecules and organisms. If a digital design were also constructed this way, any complex design could be reduced to the smallest components: the atoms.

Atoms are the fundamental parts of a design system. Colours, typography, but also buttons, the input field, labels, check boxes and paragraphs are examples of this. Individually, the atoms aren’t as useful, but can be seen as the building blocks that comprise the UI’s. By slicing it becomes immediately visible in a library whether the atoms fit together in style.

But a label, input field and buttons do not amount to much by themselves, but combining the atoms gives it a valuable meaning. For example, hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms together form water molecules. By combining the unique properties of atoms, molecules are more tangible and operational. By bringing smaller components together, they suddenly become recognizable in things like the search field. Now we’ve come to the more complex section of the design system, namely the organisms. They are assemblies of molecules that can be put together in a broader context. The ‘header’ organism can consist of the logo, navigation and search form and can thus be reused more easily in several places.

The next step in the development of an Atomic design are the templates. These consist of grouped organisms that collectively begin to form a page. These organisms are placed in a layout at the page level to articulate the underlying content structure of the design. In essence, these are the wireframes: the blueprint of a digital product.

The highest level in this development process is the final page. This is like a template, but then filled with representative content. This allows the page to be tested with different types of content. What if the content is twice as long as usual? What does this do to the design?

Atomic Design is becoming more and more popular in the digital world and this way of creative thinking is not going to disappear anytime soon if it is up to the designers. Instead of visualising the complete end result, Brad Frost uses a chemical equation to show the precise ‘ingredients’ of the total product. This experience shows a shift in the perspective of website design from statistical page templates to a dynamic system of customizable components.

This approach makes it possible to make complex UIs concrete and structured from scratch. This makes it easier to keep an overview and to keep future developments of digital products consistent. The time spent on further developments will definitely be a lot shorter because designers work with an existing system.

But ultimately a digital product is intended to be experienced by the end user. Atomic design is user-friendly because certain patterns, buttons and layouts of the digital products are known to users, which makes navigation and interaction with the UIs faster and easier to learn.

Today, a good user experience on all devices is a must. All digital products are a lot more complex than they were a few years ago and to bring unity and structure to this, we use Atomic design in our process. 

Atomic Design: The building blocks of digital design

We are fast, while paying our best attention and giving our full commitment to your project. But what is Miles and why do we and those ‘buzz’ words matter? Why would you work with this group of creatives and forward-thinkers? What follows is a story of where we came from, who we are, and how we work. This is a story with lots of intricacies and learnings along the way, and hopefully with your interest to collaborate, we can together achieve and learn so much more.

It all started with two close friends. We've always had a nick for letting our creative minds flow by producing devised work we love(d). The occasional website, conceptual applications, and even flyers for school parties sparked our fire for design. Slowly but surely, we started to notice something brewing: the concept of helping one another attain their goals, wishes, and vision through a digital canvas.

From that concept, we always wanted to stay true to our way of working, which we like to call 

 , like how the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis did. It's a term we have held dearly from the beginning. It symbolises flexibility, open mindedness, and making sure you feel comfortable and assured when working with us. Miles, it's a name that embodies our potential for being different and innovative, all while jamming along.

We are a creative studio, and while that's not something out of the ordinary, the fact that we handle your project so carefully definitely is. We play this game with attention from the get-go, giving you a personal experience when creating digital products and experiences with our full-time dedicated Miles team at your disposal. More like a boutique than a full-blown agency.

We are a multidisciplinary team. Ranging from great graphic designers to web developers, we are able to control most aspects of every project within Miles. Next to that, it powers us to collaborate with like minded individuals.

We follow a proven method that always works when we are fabricating the projects for our clients. We work agile first through the discovery, design, and development phases, all while making use of Atom-based design principles. This allows us to be flexible and keep our focus on delivering the attention that's needed to a project, while also aiming to exceed client expectations.

Who’s this group of creatives that call themselves “Miles”?

Each and every person on our team has an affection for and a specialisation with a certain discipline. From designing battle-tested interfaces to writing the cleanest code, this combination of amazing, interesting, and above-all ambitious people on the Miles team would be very keen to meet you:

Miles is absolutely one of my biggest joys in life, with an ever growing team, clientele and amazing projects we get to work on. Making sure everyone within the team is in their power to be as creative as possible is one of the biggest accomplishments so far. And yeah, I really like dinosaurs :P

Hi, I'm Ezra, a creative who especially likes to make other people's concepts come to life. From concept to the visual end product. The hours that I'm not working on that, I spend a lot of time on music and can often be found in a record store.

Someone who likes to face the unknown of tech with an “anything can be done mindset”

We are all a very close team! There is a 'work hard, play hard' mentality that ensures that we want to get the best out of every project together. We work on many different projects, so the work is never boring. Every customer comes with their own challenges, delivering a product that works for customers and users really gives energy!

It's always fun at Miles! Besides that, we also work hard. And play hard! I have been interested in computers from a young age. I like programming, cars and motorcycles, fishing, gym, traveling and having fun with friends and my girlfriend.

We like to put our thinking into your vision. From websites to apps, brand identities to platforms, and anything and everything in between, we apply our special Miles touch that we find very exciting. You can always be sure that you belong to the Miles community of amazing and interesting people. We'd love to know what you're thinking about and what we can do to help you work towards fulfilling your vision.

Keep an eye on our website and Instagram channel for that we are expanding our community by reaching out with editorial and informative content such as customer cases, thoughts and podcasts.

We are fast, while paying our best attention and giving our full commitment to your project. But what is Miles and why do we and those ‘buzz’ words matter?

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