I am planning an introductory course on TDD. In that process I have been thinking about how to convey the productivity gain with TDD.

Being a visual person, I had an idea that would illustrate this in a few pictures. Here they are for your scrutiny and enjoyment!

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Superstition is a bad thing. At least that's what I have always believed, regarding myself as totally devoid of the stuff. I mean, me, Mats Henricson, superstitious? No way!

But superstition grows out of ignorance, and that's a valley I must admit I have walked in. And some time ago it struck me that I am indeed plagued by superstition as a developer. Let me elaborate.

Suppose you're in a slow edit-compile-debug cycle, and suddenly your changes to file X aren't deployed to Tomcat any more. After some brief investigation it turns out you can get your changes through to Tomcat by prepending your Maven command with "clean", i.e. a clean compile, instead of just incremental.

At this moment your are in dangerous territory, because if you never find the root cause to the problem you are quite likely to ALWAYS do clean builds, thus slowing you down forever!

Does this resemble a situation in your past? If so, then you are also superstitious!

I have added all sorts of shit procedures to my daily work. I do WAY to many clean builds. I restart my laptop twice a day because I can't get it to dynamically go from wireless to wire, or from my second screen at work to my second screen at home, since they are of different size. My Ubuntu 9.10 distro have problems with that, and I just haven't found the root cause to it.

Staving off superstition is simple in theory but hard in practice, since it requires you to go to the root of the cause of problems. I have suddenly gotten much more respect for stubborn people!

My paper about Agile Support has been translated to French.

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On March 4-5 Tom & Mary Poppendieck will once again come to Stockholm and teach a lean course with me. "Leading Lean Software Development" is aimed at leaders in organisations that are serious about succeeding with Lean software development.



There are still a few spots left, more info and registration here:
http://www.crisp.se/leadinglean

Join us!

As a part of this weeks Kanban Applied course, the teams had to solve problems using Lego robots.

It was good fun. So fun teams almost forgot about Kanban :)

Programming the bot:

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A year ago I held an Open Space at Scrum Gathering in Stockholm about Agile Support. I have since received several requests to expand on the topic, so here it comes.

Download the article about Agile support with Kanban

Good Luck!
/Tomas

Are you looking for some concrete expression for Test Driven Development? Let me give you a glimpse of what I am working currently on – the TDD Tetrahedron.

The idea originates from when a colleague at Crisp, David Barnholdt, wrote about not focusing on one step at the time. So I thought for a while and came up with this idea, a tetrahedron where each side displayed “failing test”, “implementation” and “refactor”, respectively.

You turn it and look at the first side where you read “failing test”. You write a failing test and turn it again, reading “implementation”. Write the implementation and run the test to get the green bar. Once again you turn the tetrahedron and read “refactor”. You look for something to refactor, confident that if you do, you will be supported by unit tests all the way.

Or the thing just sit on your table to tell everyone how cool you are as being a TDD programmer. At least wish to be. :-)

Anyways, here are some sneak preview pictures of the greatest thing that ever happened to the world of programming, ta da – the TDD Tetrahedron!

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If you coach a scrum team but you're not around to observe them during the sprint, how do you know how they felt about it?

Use Emo-lines

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I'm happy to say that my Scrum Checklist has been translated to several languages:

• Russian (thanks Alexander Plutalov)
  
• Japanese (thanks Yasunobu Kawaguchi)
• German (thanks Marc Bless)
  
• Portuguese (thanks Demetrius Nunes)

Here are the slides from my breakfast seminar "Agile - ett verktyg inte ett mål" (= "Agile - a tool, not a goal"), hosted by DSDM Consortium. The presentation was in Swedish but the slides are in English.

This is more or less the same presentation as my keynote at Integration Agile 2009 conference in Holland.

A video of my presentation at Devopsdays'09 in Belgium is now available. I didn't wear a microphone so you might need to pop up the the volume :)  If you are more interested in the slides check them out here

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I was interviewed by Mitch Pronschinske on Agile Zone, this turned into two articles:

• Kanban isn't better than Scrum, it's just smaller
• Scrum and XP are new - their principles are not

I think Mitch did a good job of turning the interview into coherent articles (not an easy job). 

Doing a road map can be a tricky thing. There are plenty of constraints and dependencies to consider: how to we balance long and short term improvements? how do we rate future revenue opportunities for our clients? how well do the separate steps tie together to a coherent product? is this fun and challenging? are we keeping our team motivated? can we stop half way?

I find that pair programming is by far the fastest way of traversing the decision tree. Basically, if you are a Product Owner, construct the road map together with another person. Lay out the plan that best meets the constraints and business goals and let the other question the options. (Of course, don't forget to switch).

Altogether, it helps you check  the different options and prepare arguments. You will be better prepared when meeting the stakeholders. For when you do, there is always something uncertain waiting for you.

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Here's a video recording of my 10 minute lightning talk "Kanban vs Scrum, a practical guide" at Agila Sverige June 8, 2009. It is basically a 10 minute summary of my book "Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both".

NOTE - the recording is in Swedish.

My and Henrik's book on is out. Get a downloadable version, or buy the full copy at InfoQ. The book includes: Foreword by Mary Poppendieck and David Anderson A comparison of Kanban and Scrum - their approaches as process tools in software In-the-trenches case study of introducing Kanban in operations Hope you enjoy the reading!

For further reading about the case study,  see my presentation at Devopsday's 2009.

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My new book "Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both" is done!

The purpose of this book is to clear up the fog, so you can figure out how Kanban and Scrum might be useful in your environment.



The book includes:

• Foreword by Mary Poppendieck
• Foreword by David Anderson
• Updated version of my original “Kanban vs Scrum” article
• In-the-trenches case study by Mattias Skarin

You can read it online for free (InfoQ registration required though) or buy the printed version.

Translators: If you are interested in translating this book to your language, please get in touch with my editor Diana Plesa (diana AT c4media.com).

Merry X-mas!

Here's a Traditional Chinese translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches (not same as Chinese translation). Thanks Ko Jen-Chieh!



The other 8 translations are listed on the InfoQ page for the book.

Feel free to email me (henrik.kniberg AT crisp.se) if you want to translate the book to your language.

Configuration Management (CM) is crucial to any software project as neglecting it will easily get you in big trouble. It may look like bad luck, but it is not.

A CM-plan will deal with several matters, from simple to decide things, such as naming of releases to more advanced subjects, such as branching strategy. I will talk about the latter today.

There are of course different ideas about what a good branching strategy should be. It is my firm belief that it must be aligned with the subject at hand, namely changes.

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If you are near Atlanta and want to meet me and the rest of the Agile Alliance board feel free to come to our Agile Alliance Board Reception on wednesday evening!

We’ll host a winter holiday networking reception for Agile Alliance members, partners and friends. We’ll provide refreshments, a preview demo of the new website, and a quick review of the Agile Alliance Roadmap. You’ll bring lively ideas, questions, and a hearty appetite for Agile.

When: Wednesday December 16, 6:30 to 9:00-ish pm
Where: Atlanta Marriott Perimeter Center.

Please let us know if you plan to attend. Send an email with: Your Name, your Company/Affiliation, your Daytime Phone Number, and your “reply to” email address. To: admin@agilealliance.org.

Ever had this thrown at you?

"This production bug is unacceptable, it must never happen again!"

And that event, outside your systems control, formed a policy that affected all your every day life. Failure to distinguish between uncertainty under our control and uncertainty imposed by outside events is a bad management habit.

Instead;
"Manage the normal - treat exception as exceptional"

And have a happier life :)

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