The purpose of this article is…
Actually, there is no purpose. There never is. I just write because I feel like it. Then I read the article and make up a purpose afterwards, and start eliminating anything in the article that doesn’t fit that purpose. But I won’t do that this time. Read on and you’ll understand why. By the way, this text is blue because it’s my second iteration. Black text is the original, first iteration. Here it is:

Let me tell you about my creative process. Every writer has a creative process. Otherwise they wouldn’t get anything written; well, at least not anything creative 🙂Continue reading

I just got interviewed by Joseph Dager at Business901 before the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference in Hamburg. You’ll find the podcast here (includes downloadable as mp3 and available through Itunes) See you in Hamburg!

På ett bräde blev boken Riv pyramiderna igen dubbelt så tjock (222 sidor) med det nya kapitlet “En organisation utan huvud – en agil odyssé“. I den gör vi en historisk, praktiskt och teoretisk resa från apache-indianerna, över Ford, Toyota, Lean, Scrum, Agile, flödeseffektivitet, Hegel, Kant, hur det påverkade oss och mycket mer. Slutstation:en massiv

Technical Debt is usually referred to as something Bad. One of my other articles The Solution to Technical Debt certainly implies that, and most other articles and books on the topic are all about how to get rid of technical debt.

But is debt always bad? When can debt be good? How can we use technical debt as tool, and distinguish between Good and Bad debt?

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Whenever you have a domain object, data transfer object, parameter object or any other object that can’t be instantiated with constructor parameters only, you need to create a builder for its class.

The great thing about Java is that it is strongly (statically) typed so a builder can give you compiler errors if you forget to set the compulsory parameters. If you use the builder in this pattern, you also get a very fluent interface that imposes order on the parameters. When using the builder, your IDE will suggest the next parameter to set.

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It’s a busy week! But could not resist beautiful Utrecht region and Lean Kanban Netherlands with focus “Modern management methods”. Here are my slides from the A3 Workshop, where my goal was to let the participants experience some of the upsides and downsides of using A3 in problem solving knowledge work  (hint: you will need

Met a great crowd in Kiev at Agile Eastern Europe. I’d love to stay longer! Here are the slides on my presentation on Visualization – what’s my brain got to do with it.

Just back from Paris (gotta love that town, many good memories there 🙂 I did my first presentation on Concepts.  Here are the slides. /Mattias

Most of you have a relational database involved in your persistence. As soon as your first version has been set in use, you can’t change the database schema as easy anymore or you might lose valuable production data.

At the same time, continuous delivery demands that there should be as few manual steps as possible. See here for motivation on continuous delivery.

You no longer have a few database instance, there are numerous for different levels of testing and every developer nowadays run a personal database. To keep track of all database instances and keep them updated becomes a steep task.

To tackle this, we started using Flyway as a tool to manage our database scripts. Our applications migrates the database automatically on startup so we get a hands-free solution that will guarantee that the code and database schema is in sync.

Here is a technical recipe for accomplishing this when using Flyway in combination with Spring.
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Here are the slides for my keynote “Culture > Process” at the Paris Scrum Gathering. Amazing level of enthusiasm in the room, seems like this kind of stuff was exacty what people were looking for. Happy to see the ideas take such strong hold!

• Video recording part 1 (starts at 0:30)
• Video recording part 2

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I dagarna fick jag bokomslaget till boken Riv pyramiderna igen – Agil HR ‘from the trenches’ jag håller på att skriva på Leanpub. Jag är otroligt nöjd med det. Omslaget är gjort av Lisa Zachrisson. Så här skriver hon om tankarna bakom formgivningen: Jag tyckte att titeln skulle vara stor då det fungerar bra när

Not happy with your last pay raise? Time to pay attention! Bosses don’t pay attention to what you do, they pay attention to how much you do.  Nothing beats a bosses bragging rights of saying “my evil coach works 24/7. All I see from you is empty desks and Nintendo”. If you want a raise,

Last Thursday I gave a two hour talk on Agile Testing, “Will automation kill the tester?”, for Dataföreningens network for test and requirements in Stockholm. I talked about testing in agile contexts, the agile tester, busted (and approved) some myths on agile testing, and gave examples – lots of them. How different companies, project and

Here comes a new post from Ellen Gottesdiener who comes to Stockholm to hold her highly appreciated course Agile Requirements Analysis and Planning for Product Success.

In a recent interview in the New York Times, Panera Bread co-CEO Ronald M. Shaich talks about the importance of de­veloping an organization’s “discovery muscle” as well as its “delivery muscle.” Most companies have worked hard to perfect delivery—how they get work done—he says, because delivery “feels rational, people feel much safer with it, and you can analyze it.” But discovery—the activities you undertake to define or change your product, service, or market—is about “leaps of faith. It’s about trusting yourself. It’s about innova­tion.” The key, Shaich says, is for the discovery muscle to be at least as strong as the delivery muscle.

He took the words right out of our mouths. This need for balance between discovery and delivery applies in spades to software development. Our new book, Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis, explicitly makes the case for equally balancing your commitment to these key ac­tivities. We define the relationship between them: In lean/agile software development, discovery and delivery are interwoven, interdependent, continuous activities (see figure 1). Each feeds the other.

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Som frilansande konsult kan man ju oftast inte utforma sina egna uppdrag, utan man får ta det som kommer i ens väg.

Har man tur kan man välja mellan två eller kanske till och med tre olika uppdrag. Har man haft bra beläggning under en tid och lyckats samla i ladorna kan man stå över tills det kommer något bättre i ens väg. Men till slut har man inget val alls utan måste ta vilket uppdrag som helst eftersom skattmas och bolåneinstitut skall ha sitt.

Nu är det inte så illa för mig, men jag tar mig i alla fall friheten att utforma mitt drömuppdrag. Om många vet vad jag drömmer om är ju chansen att det slår in större, eller hur?

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What’s this? An alien invasion? A publicity stunt? A way of sneaking Crisp into your cereals? You make the call. We Go Lean at breakfast, lunch and dinner! 🙂 This picture was forwarded by Troy Magennis, a Monte Carlo pioneer. PS: Troy is coming to Stockholm to show us how to use Monte Carlo to

In May this year I was interviewed at the SmartBear MeetUI user conference in Stockholm about my background as a journalist, Linux and open source, software development in general and testing more specifically. Here’s a post containing the video and interviews with the other speakers at the conference. Interview with Peter Antman

Idag publicerade jag den första versionen av min nya bok Riv pyramiderna igen – Agil HR ‘from the trenches’. Boken tar sin utgångspunkt in min blogserie om Agil HR, som härmed fortsätter i bokform på Leanpub. Jag räknar med att den är cirka 50 – 70 procent klar och kommer färdigställas under hösten. Köp nu,

Yesterday I spent a very inspiring day with a big swedish bank, doing agile intros with 1200 people. We had developers, designers, testers, C-level execs, project leads, pretty much every role represented. The CEO opened with words about why they are determined to go all-out agile, and we had a speaker from another even bigger company describe their ongoing agile journey and amazing results so far. Very interesting. And best of all – no roadmap or other fake attempts at pretending that we know what the journey is going to look like. It was clear that this is a bumpy ride and that change will have to evolve gradually from bottom as well as from top.

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Yesterday we ended our second two-week sprint and on the demo, besides showing the system, we could do some bragging about test coverage using our Sonar dashboard.  We also could show Fitnesse tests at system level that implements the specification by example technique, or like some say, executable requirements.

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Inledning

Nu för tiden använder nog de flesta Javaprojekt någon sorts dependencyhanterare i sina byggen.

Den tid då man checkade in sina tredjepartsbibliotek i versionshanteringen är förbi. Nu låter man Maven (eller Ivy eller Gradle) läsa en incheckad förteckning, hämta hem jarfilerna ifrån de centrala förråd som finns därute och sätta upp class path.

En sak som dessa verktyg dock inte hjälper till med är att hålla koll på att man inte ligger kvar på gamla versioner. Att köra på gamla versioner kan ses som en sorts teknisk skuld, eftersom det blir värre och värre att uppgradera ju fler versioner man har missat.

Det är dock ett mödosamt och tråkigt manuellt arbete att kolla hur bra man ligger till.

Jag har därför utvecklat en Gradle-task som automatiserar detta!

(Se där, ännu en anledning att byta till Gradle!)

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The Elephant Carpaccio exercise is a great way for software people to practice & learn how to break stories into really thin vertical slices. It also leads to interesting discussions about quality and tech practices. The exercise was invented by Alistair Cockburn. We’ve co-facilitated it a bunch of times and encourage people to run it

What is the purpose of the @Ignore annotation in unit testing?

Either a test will be green and everything is fine or it is red so you fix it before commit. So if there is an ignored test, it is the same thing as dead code and we know what to do with that: delete it! Keep the code clean!Continue reading

MongoDB är en schemalös, dokumentorienterad databas som har fått stor popularitet i den agila världen bland annat därför att man inte behöver underhålla något databasschema.

MongoDBs schemalöshet gör att många leds att tro att Continuous Delivery blir en promenad i parken, eftersom det ju inte behövs några datamigreringar när man driftsätter en ny version av koden!

Rent teoretiskt är detta sant, men är ett sluttande plan in i Land of Crappy Code™ !

För att slippa onödig komplexitet i form av varierande utseende på lagrade domänobjekt beroende på deras ålder, rekommenderar jag att man utför regelrätta datamigreringar även när man använder MongoDB!

Jag rekommenderar även att datamigreringen är en del av applikationen — till skillnad från skript som skall köras vid sidan av innan applikationsstart — helt enkelt för att eliminera risken för misstag.

Jag har i mitt sidoprojekt Varmfront.nu utvecklat en kompakt liten lösning som i MongoDB implementerar det som Flyway gör för SQL.

Mönstret bygger på Spring Data for MongoDB och Spring JavaConfig, och migreringarna är skrivna i Java. That’s right folks, no XML here 😀

Läs vidare, så får du se hur man kan göra!

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(related article: Good and Bad Technical Debt – and how TDD helps)
(Translations: Russian)

Are you in a software development team, trying to be agile? Next time the team gets together, ask:

How do we feel about the quality of our code?

Everyone rates it on a scale of 1-5, where 5 means “It’s great, I’m proud of it!” and 1 means “Total crap”. Compare. If you see mostly 4s and 5s, and nothing under 3, then never mind the rest of this article.

If you see great variation, like some 5s and some 1s, then you need to explore this. Are the different ratings for different parts of the code? If so, why is the quality so different? Are the different ratings for the same code? If so, what do the different individuals actually mean by quality?

Most likely, however, you will see a bunch of 2s or worse, and very few 4s and 5s. The term for this is Technical Debt, although for the purpose of this article I’ll simply call it Crappy Code.

Congratulations, you have just revealed a serious problem! You have even quantified it. And it took you only a minute. Anyone can do this, you don’t have to be Agile Coach or Scrum Master. Go ahead, make it crystal clear – graph the results on a whiteboard, put it up on the wall. Visualizing a problem is a big step towards solving it!

Don’t worry, you aren’t alone, this is a very common problem. <rant>However, it’s also a very stupid, unnecessary problem so I’m baffled by why it is so common.</rant>

Now you need to ask yourselves some tough questions.

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Ellen Gottesdiener is an internationally recognized leader in the collaborative space where agile requirements + product + project management converge. She coaches, trains, and presents to thousands of people globally and has facilitated hundreds of discovery and planning workshops across diverse industries.
She will hold her popular workshop in Stockholm 25-27 September 2013.

It’s the Goal, Not the Role:The Value of Business Analysis in Scrum

In agile development, what happens to the traditional business analyst? Consider Scrum, currently the most popular agile method. In Scrum, there is no “business analyst” role. In fact, there is not an explicit role for tester, project manager, architect, developer, data administrator, user experience designer, customer support representative, or product trainer. Instead, Scrum has three roles: the product owner, the Scrum Master, and the delivery team. Their collective goal is to deliver high‐valued product needs continually. So, where and how can a business analyst contribute?

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I tend to focus a lot on Kanban and Teams. The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide has 1098 occurrences of the term team, and I even write about Kanban teams. But, as David Anderson reminded me recently on Twitter, there is no concept of team in Kanban, and as such there are no “Kanban teams”! So why

Johan Nordin and I plan to attend the Lean Kanban Central Europe (LKCE) conference this year again. Due to a busy fall it will unfortunatly be our only chance to meet everyone from the community. Here is the abstract of the paper that we have submited to LKCE13, entitled “Lessons learned from coaching 50+ kanban

An unconference is like a normal conference but with no predefined agenda, no predefined list of speakers, no slides, and…er… actually it’s not very much like a normal conference at all! It’s more like an alternative to a conference. If the purpose of a conference is to collaborate and communicate, then an unconference will often fulfill the

Finns nu i bokform på Leanpub

Kompetens i det dagliga arbetet

Detta är avsnitt två i delen om Ny kunskap - ett gemensamt ansvar i serien Agil HR from the trenches

Kompetensspridning via team

Låt oss börja med att ställa några ledande frågor:

1. Arbetar ni i team som innehåller alla kompetenser som krävs för att leverera slutprodukten?
2. Är det tillåtet (och helst uppmuntrat) att jobba tillsammans med en uppgift (till exempel parprogrammera)?
3. Får team arbeta med saker då och då som de inte kan innan (ny domän, ny teknologi)?
4. Kan man (kanske inom rimliga gränser) själv välja vilket team (och därmed område) man vill arbeta i?

Om du svarar ja på alla dess frågor kan du antagligen gå vidare till nästa avsnitt direkt. Om du svarar nej på samtliga, då skulle jag gissa att du både har stora utmaningar att alls leverera saker och att få till utveckling av yrkeskunskap på jobbet. Det kommer också vara ytterst svårt, eller omöjligt, att kompensera den sorts evigt pågående kompetensutveckling som uppstår ur att organisera arbetet på ovanstående sätt med andra former av åtgärder.
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