My lightning talk about Software Development and Tragedy of the commons (“Kollektivt kodägarskap och allmänningens tragedi – eller hur blir min kodbas inte utfiskad) from Agila Sverige 2013
And here is the video recording from the event. My presentation begins 12 minutes and 10 seconds into the film.
Here’s the (almost word by word) english transcript of the speech:
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Improvement Theme is a tool in the form of a poster that works as a conveyor belt for continuous improvements once the Retrospective is over.
I’ve been reading a little bit about Toyota Kata and seen great presentations on the concept. In order to make it practical and useful for me I found myself tweaking it and packaging it in a concept I’ve come to call Improvement Theme. I’ve tried this concept a couple of times now and found it to be a good tool to extend improvements beyond the Retrospective and bringing it into the daily work. In this article I describe how to create the poster and how to use it as a tool for continuous improvements.
The Improvement Theme is a poster. I’ve been using magic charts since they are easily moved between the room in which the retrospective is held and the teams wall.
The charter consists of five areas.
1. Name of the Improvement Theme
2. Now/Problem – Description of the current situation
3. Definition of Awesome – How would we like it to be?
4. Next Target Condition – X weeks from now, what has changed?
5. First Steps – 3 slots for three post-its that describe the first (next) actions we will take?
It’s a living document, preferable put up next to the scrum/kanban wall. Once or twice a week the team reviews the theme and agrees upon new actions as they get completed.
When X weeks has passed the team does a review of the theme itself. If they want to continue on the same theme they identify a new “Next target condition”. Otherwise they create a new Improvement Theme poster.
Here follows an extensive description of how I’ve been using the concept as a tool for improvement and a more in-depth description of the different aspects of the poster.
What is quality? Why do it energize us so much? Can we measure it? In a new Smartbear blogpost I trace the philosophical history of quality, and what that might mean for us.
Socrates started his quest to find out what knowledge is by taking on the lurking trap of the relativists, Protagoras and Heraclitus. Both meant that the world was in constant flux and that the only thing we could know was the sensations we get through our perceptions, or as Protagoras formulated it: “Man is the measure of all things.”
We recognize this stance from today’s definition of quality in business settings: Quality is the extent to which a product or service meets and/or exceeds a customer’s expectation. Quality is relative to the need of a user and is expressed as the right combination of price and quality. High quality, per se, is not desirable. Man is the measure.
That was not the view of Plato.
Last friday, I had the day off. Again.
Yes, there were some code!
This was just one of several days that I have had off, not counting weekends and vacations. So am I just a slacker that don’t work 5 five days a week? No, on the contrary! This makes me a better programmer. How? Read on.
Nyligen så hjälpte jag till med att planera och facilitera en affärsplanering hos en kund. Då jag tycker både utfallet och genomförandet var väldigt bra så kommer här en beskrivning av vad vi gjorde och de olika övningar vi hade. Det var en relativt stor grupp som samlats föra att genomföra den årliga affärsplaneringen, vilket syftade till att utifrån företagets övergripande mål finna vad denna avdelning skall göra under året som kommer. Alla som varit med på dessa tillställningar vet att de kan vara rätt tunga och inte alltid kopplade till medarbetarnas vardag. Jag känner dock att detta tillfälle bröt traditionen, mycket på grund av att de aktuella cheferna fokuserade på att jobba kring det positiva och möjligheter i stället för problem och hinder.
Det var en grupp på 30 personer fördelade i två olika linjegrupper, och huvudmålet var att finna förändringsåtgärder för året som kommer. På vägen mot det målet, en väg som var lika viktig som slutmålet i sig, jobbade gruppen kring sin historia, arbetade fram en mission och sedan en framtidsbild om var de vill vara fem år framåt i tiden.
Agilist these days don’t recognize the true value of proper design. It takes a master to understand the subtle details that make your IT department’s self confidence melt away faster than ice in Schwarzenegger’s pants. It’s all about design. Interior design.
A few weeks ago Daniel Sundman wrote a blog entry about how to test drive JavaScript with Grunt. Today we’ll talk about how to run your Jasmine Grunt setup using Gradle!
There are no standard plugins for Grunt in Gradle, but it’s easy to add all the code manually. After all, this is Gradle not Maven 
We’ll assume that node and grunt-cli are already installed see (Test Driving JavaScript with Grunt).
