Crisp's BlogPage 11

Do you, a developer, have a feeling that the user stories your product owner is but a list of ideas prioritized on gut feeling only? That the relationship between them and their purpose are vague? Impact Mapping is an agile conversational tool by Gojko Adzic that may be primarily for product owners but hey, a developer needs a purpose too!

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When refactoring legacy code, two problems seems to repeatedly occur. One is that the code is all tangled up with interdependencies and the other is that there is no specification of what the system is supposed to do.

Still we are asked to add features or fix problems without breaking anything. Everything in there should stay there.

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Edgeware is a cool hardware and software company helping operators to build efficient video content delivery networks. Read their blog about what we have been up to since August this year: Lean and Agile at Edgeware

UPDATE Dec 2016: Wrote an article about LEGO’s agile journey, see here. Includes all of the material below, plus explanations and updates.

Here are the slides for my Lean Tribe keynote Scaling Agile @ Lego – our journey so far.

Here’s also a more detailed version from a talk that Lars Roost and I did at GOTO conference in Copenhagen: is SAFe Evil (that talk was also recorded).

This is just a brief snapshot of a journey in progress, not a journey completed 🙂

Sample slides below.

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Our goal at the Crisp hack summit last weekend was to migrate our 2 year old shopping app written in Meteor to the latest version and to learn about Google’s material design. Our old app was built as a way for us to learn Meteor. The structure is less than ideal, and as we learn new things we add them to the app, but don’t revisit old parts. So we followed Dan North’s experiment rewriting the app from scratch. We also decided to use Materialize for the UI. We wanted to rewrite the app in 2 days, keeping all the functionality we currently have, but at the same time adding the UI and usability improvements that we really need.

We ended up completing the rewrite in 9 days: 2 hack days and then a couple of hours each day for the next week. Not too bad for a brand new app, but surprisingly longer than we would have guessed. Both Meteor and Materialize are pretty simple to get started with, but adding Materialize to Meteor proved to be challenging. Here are some highlights!

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Otroligt kul att se hur många som fick plats i ett konceptrum i Aula Magna under våra presentationer under SAST Q20! Vi pratade först om kontinuerlig förbättring och sedan om working agreements. Slides hittar du nedan. Kontinuerlig förbättring Working Agreements På Crisp har vi en hel del gratis material och guider, bland annat en Toyota

Are you thinking about electronic Kanban tools? Do you need transparency to end-to-end flow? Do you work across multiple sites? Tired of managing work states in Jira? Here’s a short video demonstrating visualisation, analytics and key features in Swift-Kanban & Leankit. Both combine “simple and flexible” with “enterprise ready”. I also mention an interesting runner up – Obeya. Some things I

How do you decide what to build next? Who comes up with the ideas? How do you decide in what order to implement them? How do you keep track of what you’re working on, and what you want to work on?

Here’s a behind the scenes look at how the Candy Crush Soda team comes up with ideas and decides what to build next!

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The other week I got the idea to create simple conversation cards. Each card represents an agile practice, a conversation topic or an abstract theory. Now I’ve drawn 96 cards. I simply couldn’t stop 🙂

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Last night our Lego Mindstorms robot “Robit” somehow managed to win the Robot Sumo competition at the GOTO conference in Copenhagen! (here’s also an article in Mälarö Tidning)

Pretty frickin’ amazing considering that this was a big software development conference with lots of super-experienced developers competing, and our robot was mostly built by two kids – David and Jenny Kniberg (11yrs and 10yrs old) – the only kids at the conference.  Their robot didn’t just win once – it outmaneuvered and outwrestled the competing robots in every match!

Here’s the final, Robit to the left:

So how could a newbie team win the competition so decisively?

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For  this year’s Stop Starting conference, we asked ourselves three questions: How do you develop awesome products? How do you bootstrap a successful mega project using Agile contracts? How do you use Agile and Lean thinking to turn a stagnant company around? We then picked the brains of people from real companies who have been

Can you develop new products from scratch in one day?

This challenge was taken on by the Medical HW manufacturer Optinova in August. Over the course of two days, we pushed the limits of “what is possible” by applying Agile in a HW environment.

Our hypothesis was that Agile would be a good fit in product development and innovation scenarios. And the result so far from the work that we have been doing with Optinova is promising.

Cross-functional teams, focus, rapid prototyping, close customer feedback and visual overview work just as well in hardware as in software. The training setup we used was as follows:

• Day 1 – Learn basic Agile practices and principles
• Day 2 – Applying them – developing three product ideas from scratch in one day, in a rapid prototyping workshop.

The result: All three participating teams managed to take an idea to working prototype in a day. One team went so far as submitting a bid to a real customer the following day based on their prototype. That’s high speed, even in software terms. But the most important thing wasn’t the result, it was the lessons learned. When we asked the participants if they wanted to continue to build products this way, the votes were unanimously in favor. If we can get it to work, this would help build a competitive and innovative company.Continue reading

TDD är en vana man behöver etablera. Första hindret är ofta när man återvänder efter kurs att omsätta teori i praktik. I detta avsnitt berätta jag om hur man isolerar en enhet så att man kan testa den. Del 6 är i serien “TDD på svenska” handlar alltså om detta och har precis nu publicerats

Vi har byggt en sajt där med goda exempel, för att inspirera företag, myndigheter och verksamheter på väg in i en upphandling att ta steget till Agila kontrakt. Check it out – agilakontrakt.se. Eller följ oss på twitter: @agilakontrakt. Turen har kommit till att berätta om Wunderkraut, som använt Agila kontrakt sedan 2010. Det intressanta är hur de i den ombytliga

Låt oss säga det direkt: att kombinera pm³ och någon agil metod, som t ex Scrum, är en dålig idé. Varför?

Därför att du kommer inte kunna dra nytta av det agila arbetssättet. pm³ är baserat på en helt annan världsbild. pm³ bygger på årsplaner och att verksamheten beställer från en leverantör, typiskt den egna IT-avdelningen.  Agilt har som en grundläggande värdering att reagera på förändringar i stället för att följa en plan. Det agila arbetssättet drivs proaktivt genom utforskande i motsats till att vara en mottagare av beställningar.

Vi har sett flera försök att implementera pm³ och de har ofta misslyckats på grund av att pm³ bygger på tankar om att verkligheten kan förutsägas 18 månader i förväg, att användarna vet vad de vill ha och att det är viktigt att ha en skarp linje mellan verksamhet och IT. Vi hävdar (och flera med oss törs vi lova) att inget av detta är varken sant eller bra.

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Designed as a 30-day action plan, this book will help you understand and implement Kanban – and start seeing results – in a month.

Analyze your current situation and define your goals and wider strategic aims, and begin developing a plan to help you and your team confidently work towards achieving them. Involve your team into driving cultural change, learn how to prioritize, and organize tasks and projects to efficiently use your time and resources.

Create your own value stream map to better understand your processes and identify improvement areas, and adapt and use the features, tips, and examples to overcome challenges you may face when implementing Kanban. Pick up this book and experience the full results of this vital Agile methodology-fast.

Who this book is written for

If you want to simplify your processes, improve collaboration, and manage projects successfully, this guide to Kanban is an essential companion. Continue reading

My new Kanban case book now ships from Amazon (as hardcover or in Kindle format). Learn how we: Improved the full value chain by using Enterprise Kanban. (Find out how we improved time to market and shifted focus from Sprints to Flow to deliver customer value in a traditional company.) Boosted engagement, teamwork, and flow in

One property of legacy code is inflation by irrelevant logging statements. Not only does this increase the size of a bulging code base, I’d also argue that it’s dead wrong.

Quite recently I’ve had the honor of making acquaintance with a piece of code that looked roughly like this:

if (LOGGER.isLoggable(Level.FINEST)) {
    LOGGER.log(Level.FINEST, "foo is now", foo.getValue());
}
boolean result = doSomeActualWork(foo);
if (LOGGER.isLoggable(Level.FINER)) {
    LOGGER.exiting(this.getClass().getName(), "bar", result);
}

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Should the Scrum Master role be full time or part time? What if there is not enough Scrum Master work to do? Can the Scrum Master also do other work in the team? Can the Scrum Master be Scrum Master for several teams?

There was a debate about this and Scrum Alliance created the Scrum Master Manifesto in 2011.

Even though this has been debated by many minds before, I still get asked what my views are on this topic.

I’ve done all kinds of variations on this role. I’ve been a dedicated Scrum Master for a single team. I have done the SM role and a developer role at the same time. I’ve been a Scrum Master for several teams at the same time. These alternatives have their own advantages and challenges. In this post I intend to describe my view and recommendations.

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Samarbete är en svår konst. De flesta organisationer har grava underskott på samarbete. Ännu saknas på många sätt förståelse för vilka mekanismer som driver och uppmuntrar samarbete. På Agila Sverige 2015 pratade jag om samarbetets mystik och gjorde några nedslag i en längre workshop om detta. Bland annat visar jag hur man kan spela ultimatumspelet i storpublik, hur apor reagerar på orättvisor och de fyra pelarna i samarbetets mekanik.

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Guess what – I’ve updated Scrum and XP from the Trenches!

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You know the saying “don’t shoot the messenger”? Well, that goes both ways – “don’t praise the messenger”. Well, OK, you can shoot or praise the messenger for the quality of the delivery – but not for the message content!

I’ve spent a few years working with Spotify and published a few things that have gained a surprizing amount of attention – especially the scaling agile article and spotify engineering culture video. This has come to be known as the “Spotify Model” in the agile world, although it wasn’t actually intended to be a generic framework or “model” at all. it’s just an example of how one company works. The reason why I shared this material is because my Spotify colleagues encouraged me to, and because, well, that’s what I do – help companies improve, by learning stuff and spreading knowledge.

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Just back from Hookedfest – a conference for product people. It’s refreshing to see and discuss product development from a market and product perspective, in contrast to the “what can we build” perspective we all to often resort to as engineers. It was interesting to see other speakers (for example the Google guy) share similar experiences on

I år hade jag äran att i anslutning till Agila Sverige (2015) släppa Riv pyramiderna igen som riktig bok med den mycket bättre titeln Tillsammans – så skapar du flyt och egenmakt med agile och lean (tack till Joakim Holm för att du övertalade mig att negativa titlar är dåliga).  Den hemliga undertiteln tycker jag

My new book – “Real World Kanban” is now available. Here’s the plot in a nutshell: What happens when Kanban is used in real projects? Kanban has few rules, but an infinite number of strategies. What seems easy in theory can become tangled in practice. So there’s nothing like learning from real world cases. Learn how

The key to product success is to discover and deliver the right product for the right customers—and to do it at the right time. That doesn’t change when you move to an agile way of working. In fact, appropriately applying the agile mindset amplifies the imperative of eliciting and specifying the right requirements. The goal is to deliver the highest value product needs (requirements) in as short a time as possible.
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Curious about how we developed Candy Crush Soda at King? Like any project we’ve had our challenges. We developed the game on a framework that had never been tested live, while programming in two languages simultaneously to support multiple operating systems. Adding to the challenge, we started working without a prototyped game idea, within an existing Saga format that comes with a long list of features that players are used to. The project, code-named Stritz, was born in the spring of 2013. We soft launched a year later, and hard launched in the fall of 2014. This is our story. 

My GraphWiki is now in a public beta 🙂 http://www.graphwiki.com/

At Crisp we often find ourselves discussing various, sometimes though topics, in really big groups. The way we govern ourselves (no managers) and the fact that we make big decisions by consensus or concent have driven a need for us to figure out how to have efficient and effective discussions in big groups. A couple

Yesterday me and Dave (11 yrs) spoke together for the first time! We did a public talk at Spotify about how to help kids learn to program. We’ve been experimenting a lot with that in my family (4 kids to experiment with… muahahaha), and wanted to share some learnings. Worked out better than we could have hoped, considering all the risky tech demos and live coding involved 🙂

Shared the stage with teacher Frida Monsén who talked about how to get this kind of stuff into schools. Thanks Helena Hjertén for organizing this, and Spotify for hosting & sponsoring. Here’s an article in Computer Sweden about this event and our little “mod club”.

Here are the slides! They are in Swedish though. Might do an English version of this talk some day 🙂

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