Crisp's BlogPage 14

(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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– “All kod är en skuld!”
– “Den bästa koden är den kod man inte skriver!”
– “Snabbaste sättet att få upp testtäckningen är att ta bort död kod!”

Jag tror att alla är överens om att det är bra att hålla sin kodbas så liten och kompakt som möjligt. Byggtider hålls korta, testsviter går fort att genomföra, driftsättningar går fort, statisk kodanalys går fort, nya teammedlemmar kommer snabbt in i koden, risken för buggar och sårbarheter hålls nere och så vidare. Kort sagt, man blir mer lättrörlig!

Så alla utvecklingsteam borde ägna tid åt att inte bara skriva ny kod, utan också att faktiskt städa efter sig. Men det är lättare sagt än gjort…
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Varje produkt börjar med en idé. Det första man behöver göra är att validera den idén och det görs bäst genom att bygga det minsta möjliga som förklarar den idén och gör idén mätbar. Låt oss kalla det den minsta mätbara förhandstitten.

När man mäter så får man data för att kunna avgöra om idén var bra eller inte. Det vi lär oss av att mäta och utvärdera idén kan vi sedan nyttja för att ta nästa steg, såsom en detalj av idén eller en ny idé baserad på den förra, som vi också behöver mäta och utvärdera. Vi vill validera problemet, målgruppen och möjliga lösningar för att vara säkra på att inget lämnas åt slumpen. Detta blir en lärandeprocess baserad på riktiga resultat.Continue reading

Had a great day at Stop Starting Start Finishing – Lean Kanban Nordic. It is cool to see how far companies have come in applying Lean in software, especially experimenting with how to tie together the full value chain. Saku Tuominen really challenged us to think make innovation actionable and not put it into a

I tisdags hade jag glädjen att få komma tillbaka till Lantmäteriet i Gävle och återigen hålla ett seminarie. Denna gång var titeln ”Agil Testning – Will automation replace the tester”? Lite vilseledande då ämnet jag täckte var långt mycket vidare än så. Under två timmar pratade bland annat jag om: Contexten som agil testning lever

I assume you are familiar with the old truth that competition spurs motivation and fear; two tremendously powerful mental states. Let me introduce my new concept that leverages both: Competivation.

It comes in two flavors, external competivation and internal competivation. They complement each other and will boost efficiency, and keep everyone on their toes at all times.

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At my current assignment, I needed to get my fellow developers up to speed with Wicket. So I put together a one day course that taught them enough to join in on the work of a current application. Everything is publicly available on GitHub here:  https://github.com/perty/wicket-kurs.

You get a starting plate for a complete web application with database backend accessed through Spring Data JPA. Also, there is a Power Point presentation that guides you through the exercises. Very little is spent on Wicket philosophy and concepts to the benefit of hands on coding.

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Lotta Olsson and I will present Sandvik IT’s Kanban journey at the Lean Kanban Nordic 2014 conference in Stockholm (a.k.a. “Stop Starting, Start Finishing” conference). Lotta is currently managing the Operational Excellence Support (OpX) unit within Sandvik IT. The OpX is the ‘home’ of Kanban, ITIL and other processes and tools designed to improve the

Here are the slides for my talk “Focus” at Projektnäring. Great group, lots of energy in the room. Had lots of great conversations with people. Thanks for attending!

Sample pics:

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A fundamental component for fluid operations is an organization’s ability to solve problems and make decisions. Any change or transformation cannot move faster than it’s ability to make decisions and communicate these. This is key if we realize that living with changes is the future status quo of operations.

Many years ago when I was still at University I got to meat a leader at production facility at Volvo, he asked us,

“How long time does it take from when the management team has made a decision and a worker on the shop floor grasps what this means?”

“Three years”.

Without a doubt, this is way to slow for product development and software. But it puts a finger on the starting point for a normal, traditional company, before any lean or agile transformation begins. So, in order to succeed with a transformation that will challenge existing (often plan based structures) we need a better decision & communication process.

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Just back from Mix IT in Lyon. A bit rare to visit a French conference so was cool to meet people from the French community and see what they are up to. Some reflections: Saw a cool presentation on Prioritizing portfolios using Cost of Delay by Özlem Yüce. No doubt mr Don had an idea

På Agila Sverige 2012 höll jag min första ignite i form av en Majakovski- och Bob Dylan-inspirerad Spoken World performance om hur vi på Polopoly skapade kvalitet genom extremt fokus på automatiserade tester och en stoppa-bandet-kultur. Förra veckan fyllde konsultbolaget Adaptiv 5 år och firade genom att låte en utvald skara Agila Sverige-talare reprisera sina

Being nominated to the Brickell Key Award 2014 has its advantages. One is to travel all the way to San Francisco to attend a ceremony during the Lean Kanban North America Conference. Another is to be interviewed like a rock-start. Here is the result of the interview. Thanks Lean Kanban University and Irina Dzhambazova for

Idag fick jag gästa SweNug och prata om testbarhet för utvecklare. Presentationen finns på Slideshare.

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One of the most common questions we get is whether to estimate in time or points. It seems like points are used only “to avoid thinking about time” and they are essentially the same. Wrong.

Let us give you the travel metaphor to give you an idea about how we are thinking.

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This years Lean Kanban Nordic conference will be something extra. The focus in on improving the full value chain, from concept to cash. You will get an unique opportunities to listen and discuss with practitioners sharing their experience of how they have improved their companies using Lean thinking. For example, learn:

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Yesterday we had one of our regularly occurring so called Agile Lunch & Learn in the tribe at Spotify I currently work. We wanted to make the lunch about why it is often better not to work and focus on flow than to maximize your work and focus on resource efficiency. I searched for something in the Crisp bag of games. Pass the pennies – more about big batches. Kanban  tothpicks – to many rounds and variables. Folding envelopes – again more batches. Eventually I found the Lean Dot game.

What a find! This game will be with me for a long time. The best flow game there is, with extremply simple props: post-it notes and colored dots. You can run it  in an hour and get tons of experiences and stuff to discuss, such as:

• Why it’s better to slow down
• Adapt to bottlenecks
• Batch sizes
• Little’s law illustrated
• Waste and inventory
• Customer collaboration
• In process testing
• And more, and more, and more…

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