The topic of hothousing has come up recently in several conversations with Agile colleagues. When it was first described to me as a two or three day intense working session that produces a work product or provides portfolio and architecture planning for organizations that use Agile, I also breathed deeply and reminded myself of Bikram’s Hot Yoga that I’ve incorporated in my personal yoga practice. Until recently I never heard of “hothousing” as an agile term, but it seems to be making a debut.

The term originally came out of England at British Telcom as a way to plan out the backlog for a given product. The entire project team and several different disciplines come together with business partners to creatively solve problems and launch into a 90-day development cycle.

If you have experience designing views in Xcode you likely have run into an instance where a UIView or one of its subclasses is rendered blurry.  This is caused by anti-aliasing, an attempt to avoid jagged looking edges by blending with the colors of the layer below it.  This blog discusses both simple and complex issues with rendering UIViews with anti-aliasing.

In the image below, the left text and image have been anti-aliased. Select an image to see a larger view.

The difference can sometimes be subtle.  The left image below is anti-aliased.