Crisp's BlogPage 16

Den 3:e december var jag inbjuden till nätverket Agile People i Göteborg för att tala om min bok Riv pyramiderna igen. Det var god uppsluting av människor som ville prata om hur HR påverkas av när en organisation börjar använda agila värden och principer från lean; och hur HR själv kan inspireras av ett iterativt

At my current project we use a Google spreadsheet to manage our backlogs. This works really well for storing and sharing the backlog, but it’s not very good for visualizing it. So we print out the stories on cards by copying and pasting each row into a document table cell and reformatting, adding extra labels, and manually inserting priority. Well, that’s what we did the first couple of times, until I found David Vujic’s fantastic Index Card Generator for Google spreadsheets (http://davidvujic.blogspot.se/2011/06/visa-vad-du-gor-eller-dude-wheres-my.html).

Except, we have multiple backlogs in one sheet, our column names aren’t the same, and we use a different layout for the cards. Here’s how we customized David’s script!Continue reading

Reign by terror has been long known. But dictators are too short lived I’m afraid. What a true master knows, is how to tame an organization so bad it fails to achieve.. anything, without officially saying no. Look at Berlusconi – a master in action!

Here’s the Evil Coach top ten of how to make sure every initiative fail – without ever having to say no!

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Here comes version 1.1 of “The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide”.The changes in this version are mostly corrections and clarifications. They reflect the way the Kick-start concept is currently evolving (for the better, of course) within Sandvik IT.Here are some noteworthy changes: The single biggest change is the renaming of the “Team Lead” into the “Flow Manager”

Igår hade jag äran att få gästa SAST Stockholm Q4, där jag fick hålla en presentation om utvecklartestning. Med handen på hjärtat, så blev det lite mycket information på få tidsenheter ibland. Dock brinner jag verkligen för ämnet och vill säga så mycket jag kan. Efter att ha checkat runt lite, gläds jag åt att

I det nya kapitlet “Hitta rätt folk – konsten att rekrytera” i boken Riv pyramiderna igen – agil HR from the ‘trenches'” skildrar jag hur vi skapade en för oss passande strategi och metod för att kunna rekrytera rätt folk till våra team. Här kan du läsa ett utdrag:

“Så vitt jag minns det kom förslaget till nästa initiativ från en diskussion om rekrytering med teamen. Minns jag rätt tyckte man att min utfrågning inte gav tillräcklig bra underlag för att verkligen förstå om kandidaterna var bra programmerare. Vi brukade förvisso be om arbetsprov, men många hade inga sådana av med tillräcklig verkshöjd och det var också svårt att utveckla någon form av rimliga kriterier som kunde användas att bedöma kodexempel av väldigt olika sort.
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I got the question “explain the difference between a feature team and a function team”. When I answered, I realized that many people uses the term without attaching an explaining what they mean. So here is how I define it.

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In september I had the great pleasure of speaking at the http://agileprague.com/ conference. It was the second time I attended and I was equally pleased with the event this year. Last time I just attended while my wife gave a talk, but this year I decided to share my thoughts on Test Driven Development. The talk was

We are 35 people at Crisp now, and we are a decentralized organized with no managers. So how do decisions get made? This article is a direct translation of our internal wiki page “Hur vi tar beslut på Crisp” (how we make decisions at Crisp).

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Here are the slides from my Session at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2013 (LKCE13).   The most unexpected question I got was from an elderly gentleman that said that he misunderstood the title of my talk, as he thought it had to do with lessons that I had learned working with people over 50 years

Viaplay broadcasts TV over the web and to wireless devices. No need to wait for another build.. they have the worlds fastest CI! Let me share with you how it works! 1. State normal – everything works We can code along or have another coffee. 2. Big trouble! Mainline is clearly broken! All hands on

Återigen har ni diskussionen om “working software over comprehensive documentation” verkligen betyder att man inte behöver dokumentera någonting alls. Eller diskussionen om det är ok att förlänga sprinten med några dagar för att hinna klart den sista fixen på den där storyn. Eller diskussionen om vad det egentligen innebär att vara “lean”. Känner du igen dig? Kan det vara så att alla har nytta av att ha samma grundförståelse av centrala begrepp i och runt “agile”? Läs vidare för ett enkelt sätt att skaffa den kunskapen!Continue reading

Getting started with ATDD Have you ever been in this situation? Then this article is for you – a concrete example of how to get started with acceptance-test driven development on an existing code base. Read on.

What happens when we apply kanban across the full value chain?  What if you are a traditional company, how far can you improve before organizational structures becomes your key constraint? Can you make great products in a multi team scenario without product owners and project managers? Let me share with you our learning of applying

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