Posted on June 17, 2013 – 3:36 pm by Mattias Skarin
Just got back from DARE conference in Belgium. I don’t know how Maarten makes it happen, but I always leave with more ideas than I had when I came.
I ran a session on visualization – highlighting our brains limited capacity capture and record knowledge (and what to think of when using visualization).
An amazingly interesting subject. I also introduce five lenses to visual work which (you as coach) can choose to apply in the order the organization is capable of learning from it Room was packed which always warms a presenters hart.
Posted on June 10, 2013 – 11:02 pm by Mattias Skarin
Let me introduce a tool I’ve found useful – Concepts.
Concepts is a one page specification, in A3 format that represents a product idea of feature. It is enough to enable a prepared conversation with the engineers developing the product. Think of it as a “flexible minimum specification”.
The idea
The concept owner is a person passionate about the idea, regardless of role, who works to realize the product idea all the way to happy client.
There is no handover.
Concepts helps you
Treating post release challenges as part of normal design
Decrease friction between business and development by setting clear expectations of what should be prepared before entering into conversations with developers
Develop a minimum specification, flexible for your context
Increasing the value added time of your development team by training business people to arrived prepared with the right questions
Increase learning by completing the feedback loop all the way to customer use
Sharing the work load of a product owner onto a team
Lower waste:
- preventing ideas with unclear value (hidden in big requirement documents) to enter solution design,
- less rework after release “bugs development should have foreseen”
- avoiding heavy documentation in the early stages of product development when uncertainty is at it’s greatest
Companies have used concepts to:
Keep a single thread all the way through to working at client
Help product owners spend more time with real users
Sisyphus, artistry, cult of quality, weaving, broken windows and all the other stuff you have to care about if you want to build high quality software. Here’s my speech on how we did it at Atex Polopoly, held at the SmartBear MeetUI user conference May 23 2013.
I ended my talk on the SoapUI user gathering MeetUI singing the stop the line song. Now it has ended up on youtube.
Here’s the text:
I keep a close watch on these tests of mine
I keep my Jenkins open all the time
I see a defect coming down the line
Becuse you’re mine, I stop the line
Posted on May 24, 2013 – 11:43 am by Henrik Kniberg
Good news: Alistair Cockburn is in Stockholm June 17-18! We’ll be teaching Advanced Agile, a workshop for those of you who already have agile training and experience, and want to dig deeper!
Alistair is a very inspiring fellow! He wrote the original book Agile Software Development and was one of the people who started the whole agile movement. He has also written books about Use Cases and agile requirements. Alistair has a great knack for balancing theoretical depth with practical real-life examples and a dose of humor.
During the conference Agila Sverige 2013, I - the Evil Coach – made my first public appearance. I gave a lightning talk on how to maximize the team’s performance. The room was filled to the brim. The talk ended with standing ovations which were immediately followed by an early termination of the conference since no one could possibly top my performance.
I gave the following short statement to someone before leaving through the back door: “I feel new energy surging through me. It feels nice to enlighten people on the true power of agile.”
If you know Swedish you can now experience the talk in video below. The talk starts at 00:14:00.
Just got back from DARE conference in Belgium. I don’t know how Maarten makes it happen, but I always leave with more ideas than I had when I came.
During the conference 
