Crisp's BlogPage 13

Wow, it’s been a crazy period. Sydney, Trondheim, Oslo, 10 talks in 2 weeks! Didn’t really plan to do that much, but one thing led to another. Fun, but exhausting! 4 internal talks at several large banks in Sydney Keynote at Scrum Australia, Sydney. Topic: “Scaling agile @ Spotify” (slides) Keynote at Trondheim Developer Conference.

In the agile community we use the acronym YAGNI to remind ourselves to stay away from building (however cool) stuff that no-one is asking for.

If used wisely, the YAGNI veto will help teams maintain velocity over time and let them focus on delivering true business value early and often.

Now when we start adopting Lean Startup principles, it’s time to learn a new acronym: YANIA!

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A while ago I was asked to help out create a checklist for a team, a checklist that could tell something about whether or not a user story was “good enough”. I opened PowerPoint and starting to ponder over how I could help. I immediately realized that a presentation would be boring, shown once and then forgotten, and not invite to curiosity. I put my laptop away and created a cube instead.

A couple of days later I showed it to a friend and colleague (Viktor Sessan, Agile Coach at Spotify), who were also very intrigued by the concept, and we started to talk about how to take this further.

This is the result 🙂 We believe that if you let an idea loose, and it is a good idea, great things will happen.

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Agile facilitators, be aware, now you are about to be replaced – by a cube. Just kidding. But have you ever felt that your meetings are not on track? Or that you have a hard time doing the elevator pitch for that backlog grooming meeting you would like your team to have? Or do you meeting often ends in thin air? Comes your rescue: The Agile Meeting Cube.

The Agile Meeting Cubes gives you purpose, expected outcome and a suggested checklist and possible tools to use for six classical Agile or Scrum Meetings:

• Release Planning
• Backlog grooming
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Standup
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective

Download it from conceptcubes.com and do the following:
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Här är mina slides om Agila kontrakt från Devlin 2014. Jag hoppas det skall inspirera fler företag och myndigheter att börja använda sig av dem, då de medför väsentligt lägre risk än traditionella kontrakt. (Använder du Agila kontrakt idag – tveka inte att höra av dig!) Vi har i Sverige dåliga practicies för upphandlingar och

Here are the slides for my talk “What is Scrum?” at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology). It was a guest talk at a course called Projektstyrning. Hoping to inspire young entrepreneurs to plant agile DNA in their companies from the very beginning. Last time I spoke at KTH was 6.5 years ago, that’s when I

One of the best exercises I know of on how to learn and practice User Story slicing techniques is the so called Elephant Carpaccio exercise. At Spotify it is something of a staple as it it is (often) used when introducing new employees (now a days). Facilitating the Elephant carpaccio exercise from Peter Antman The

Back in undergraduate school I had an artsy roommate who quickly dropped any intention of attending classes. Soon thereafter he picked up a line cook job at the local diner and took on a nocturnal lifestyle. That lifestyle led to a whole new set of friends who quickly helped him develop a recreational drug habit. To support his new found hobby, my roommate began dealing to his new found comrades and their acquaintances. The temptation of having all of that product around him turned out to be too much though and, soon enough, he was consuming more than he was selling leaving him increasingly in debt to his suppliers. This culminated in a day I’ll never forget. I had to take him to the pawn shop so he could trade his car (his last possession) for cash to get out of that debt. We rode home on the back of my motorcycle (which became our only means of transportation for the duration of our cohabitation).Continue reading

(Translations: French)

Many common organizational problems can be traced down to management of Priorities and WIP (work in progress). Doing this well at all levels in an organization can make a huge difference! I’ve experimented quite a lot with this, here are some practical guidelines:

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If you are working on an agile project, it is almost certain that you are using Stories to describe your backlog of work. It is another near-certainty that if you are using Stories, you write them down using this format:

“As a <user or stakeholder type>
I want <some software feature>
So that <some business value>”

As someone who cares about the state of agile practice, I want to offer some alternatives, so that agile teams remember that the point of the story is in the telling, not the template. The shared understanding comes from the conversation, not the card. By offering you different ways to ‘tell’ the story in its short written form, I hope you will be able to re-ignite a greater level of meaning, interest and engagement in your team’s discussions about the work they are doing to build great software that matters to people.

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Here’s part 2 of the short animated video describing Spotify’s engineering culture (also posted on Spotify’s blog). Check out part 1 first if you haven’t already seen it! This is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, so the video is somewhere between “How Things Are Today” and “How We Want Things To Be”. Here’s the whole drawing:

One of my biggest surprises when I first met the squads I where going to work with at Spotify was that none of them were using User Stories. At first I observed to see their alternative. Unfortunately there was none. Instead most of the work got done as big chunks of work (what I would tend to call Epics) that was sliced into a todo-list of tasks (named that way by the developers) and also divided according different platforms.

Squad focus on technical tasks

A typical board contained one or more business cases and lanes for each developer/platform with tasks that were executed upon. These big “busses” where on the board blocking other works for weeks, which of course meant there needed to exist one or more emergency lanes for all expedite work (in the long run, most work).

This is a setup that does not foster collaboration, focus on value and art-of-the-possible. From an agile fluence point of view I would say it is a way of working that does not even reach fluence level 1 (Christian and I will describe agile fluence in more depth in a follow up blog post). From my experience focusing on User Stories is a great way of fostering the above values, and reach fluence level 1.

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Crisp’s Youtube channel has made a new release – introducing Concepts. Concepts is used to let passionate people run with ideas, a different approach than that of traditional product ownership. If you do use in conjunction with a product owner, it allows that person to spend more time on the field with customers. Ps: The

(Download the cards & instructions as PDF or PPTX) At Spotify we’ve been experimenting a lot with various ways of visualizing the “health” of a squad, in order to help them improve and find systemic patterns across a tribe. Since a lot of people have been asking me about this, I wrote up an article

Here are the slides from my tech talk Agile @ Scale at Sony Mobile. Full house & very high level of engagement, I was impressed by this crowd! And thanks for the awesome recommendation on LinkedIn 🙂   Some sample pics below:  

(this post will be in Swedish since it is a response to Swedish legislation describing how to sell and buy software. If you still are interested, Google Translate is your best friend 🙂

LOU – Lagen om offentlig upphandling är fröet till många katastrofer för statliga och kommunala mjukvaruprojekt. Tänkt som ett verktyg för att hushålla väl med statliga medel, genom att konkurrensutsätta erbjudanden bidrar LOU tyvärr till att skapa dåliga förutsättningar för att lyckas med mjukvara.

Det knasiga med LOU är de felaktiga incitamenten: Om vi antar att de funktioner som är användbara är relativt okända i ett tidigt stadium av projektet så är default practice vid användandet av LOU att funktionerna skall specas i början och sedan skall billigast leverantör väljas. Det vanligaste sättet att jämföra leverantörer är att skapa en lång lista av den sammanlagda funktionaliten i deras produkter och sedan låta dem bjuda på minsta kostnad. Inte oväntat kommer vinnande leverantör efter kontraktet’s inskrivande att snabbt flytta på senior kompetens ur projektet till fördel för junior och vips befinner både kunden och leverantören i en långsam dödsdans där kundens användare blir förlorarna.

LOU innehåller dock ett antal möjligheter som du som upphandlare kan nyttja smart.

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Are you also sensing something is wrong with today´s organisations? If you have been working with Agile or Lean for a while you typically notice that the early wins and benefits on a smaller scale will very soon hit it´s limits. Maybe you have been struggling with getting expected results from your Agile and Lean transformation initiative. Or you feel it is going painfully slow. In this blog I am going to put some light on what is wrong and what to do about it. My intention for you is to better understand the friction we are sensing in today’s organisations and what is getting in the way from creating truly Agile Organisations.

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Here’s the thing. Suppose you introduce a change X to your workplace, and then business improves noticably. That doesn’t mean X caused the business to improve. Well, MAYBE it did. Or perhaps business improved for other reasons, and X was actually detrimental, and business would have improved even more without it. So did things work

As so many others I’m inspired by the book Lean Startup. The idea of experimenting with your business model and deliver just the bare stuff needed to validate (or actually try to refute) your business hypothesis is so enticing. But how do you do that when you are one of 50 or 100 teams? How do you do that when the teams are not even using User Stories? How do you do that when daily work is done on a Kanban board only showing tasks?

One part of a possible solution is to find a way of visualizing the business case. A popular approach has become setting up a business board, often called a Lean Canvas. I wanted to try something like that. But going trough all the different variants I could find, no one was good enough in itself. I wanted to get the same feeling as with User Stories: a simple formula that everyone can understand and use as soon as the formula is presented.

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Last week i quit my assignment at Spotify. I was there to help and act as a stand-in for Joakim Sundén while he was on paternity leave. He’s now back in the saddle as Agile Coach in the More Than Music Tribe.  I had the pleasure to work closely with the Agile Coach Christian Vikström on Spotify and together we have been coaching the Browse, Growth and Customer Support squads. A was also a member of the tribe management team, and together we did some new interesting stuff.

It’s has been fascinating and fantastic to work with such dedicated people and a product that has such a traction. Spotify is also really trying to build an awesome and agile organization and culture that can win and sustain in the long run. What is there to do at such a fantastic company? That’s a reasonable question. A lot I discovered. Spotify is shock full of super smart people, but many of them has not worked there for long, many of them has not worked long at all, teams have been newly formed and are under constant change. Simply put: even Spotify needs a lot of basic agile coaching.

When I now look back at what we did during these last 8 month I see a lot of tools and experiences that I think others also can find useful. During the next couple of month I will share them through this blog. Hope you will find them useful. Here’s the planned list:

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In this series of articles, I’ll be discussing the developer profession from different angles. The common denominator is that all articles will, in one way or another, be about professionalism. This first article is about the different factors and decisions behind every single line of code.

A while ago I spoke to a friend who is pretty much a professional singer. He explained singing to me in a very passionate way, saying that singing is like solving multiple parallel equations in real time. He told me that it’s quite obvious that every singer has to follow notes. What’s less obvious is that the singer also takes a multitude of micro decisions during every second of his/hers singing. He told me about tempo, intensity, interpretation of the composer, matching the expectations of the audience, synchronization with other singers, following the Kapellmeister, and a bunch of other factors. I was quite impressed.

A second later it struck me that this goes for programming as well, and I started to list all the equations a developer must solve while writing a single line of code. Here it is!

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Last week Jimmy Janlén and I held a shortened version of our course Training from the Back of the Room for our former colleagues at Spotify. Actually it is not “our” course, but Sharon Bowmans. It’s based on her books about how create a more engaging learning experience in the class room, especially when training adults.

“I really liked the whole setup of this course – a really well organised and inspiring day. Wow :-)”

Jimmy and I are certified trainers of this course. We use the techniques when we do training. But we have also experienced how useful they are in other coaching and facilitation situations, such as workshops and retrospectives. Almost any meeting can be made more engaging and with longer lasting result with the set of tools TBR provides.

We have chosen to call the shortened training Facilitating from the Back of the Room, since that is what we agile coaches do most. 16 persons from the Spotify Agile Guild showed up this beautiful day in a corner room on the 17:th floor in High Tech building with amazing views over Stockholm city. We have to admit we were a little nervous at first. Would this actually make sense to coaches? It did.

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When is a so-called requirement really required? And is it the “right” requirement? The answers depend on many facets: stakeholders, value, planning horizon, and so on. This article explores using options as a means to identify high-value requirements, at the last responsible moment.

My Requirement May Be Your Option

Product requirements are needs that must be satisfied to achieve a goal, solve a problem, or take advantage of an opportunity. The word “requirement” literally means something that is absolutely, positively, without question, necessary. Product requirements must be defined in sufficient detail for planning and development. But before going to that effort and expense, are you sure they are not only must-haves but also the right and relevant requirements?
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Borde du inte programmera snabbare? Varför tar det så lång tid att mata in kraven i datan? Har du hört den frågan förut? Del 5 är i serien “TDD på svenska” handlar alltså om detta och har precis nu publicerats på vår YouTube-kanal “Crisp Agile Academy”. Du hittar som vanligt de tidigare delarna i serien

Jimmy och Hasse håller på att skriva en ny bok. Den är på 20 sidor och i PIXI-format. På denna blog så tar vi tacksamt emot feedback från boken. Ifall du vill ha ett förhands exemplar skicka ett mejl till crispdiscover@crisp.se. Till den mejladressen kan du även ge feedback, eller använd kommenterings på denna sida.

Here are the slides for my talk What is an agile tester from the Colombo Agile Conference in Sri Lanka.

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Here are the slides for my keynote How do you know that your product works, from the Colombo Agile Conference in Sri Lanka.

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One of the key challenges for any organization moving to a Lean flow is learning to slice bigger things to small. If you practice this long enough this becomes second nature and you stop thinking about how you do it.  The good news is this skill can be taught and to show the dimensions available

At Agila Sverige 2014 I talked about consensus, what it is, why it is the basis for creating good and strong decisions that is often already implemented when the decision is finally made. I also talked about the hand signals we use at Crisp to manage our consensus decision process (read more about it here).

Here’s my slides, that contains more on howto facilitate consensus decision making:

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