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Detta är den femte posten i en serie om agil HR “from the trenches”.

Del 1: Continuous investment
Del 2: Lägg ner utvecklingssamtalen
Del 3: Lön är rättvis ersättning – inte belöning
Del 4: Släng titlarna
Del 5: Ny kunskap – ett gemensamt ansvar, avsnitt 1
Del 5: Kompetens i det dagliga arbetet, avsnitt 2
Del 6: Hitta rätt folk – släpp dem lös

Ny kunskap – ett gemensamt ansvar, avsnitt 1

Att vandra runt i gamla industriområden ger en märklig känsla av hur tillfälligt mycket är. I ena ögonblicket en plats full av meningsskapande aktivitet, i nästa, rostande maskiner i regnet.

I den yrkesvärld där jag varit verksam sedan slutet av 90-talet, nämligen mjukvarubranchen, är det en känsla som är lätt att känna igen när man arbetar med äldre kod. Ofta räcker det att gå tillbaka till något man själv skrivit för ett par år sedan för att få den där upplevelsen av något otidsenligt och främmande, som egentligen sedan länge borde vara övergivet. Den som inte kontinuerligt utvecklar sitt yrkeskunnande i denna bransch riskerar snabbt att bli likt en rostande maskin.
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Two weeks ago I attended a conference in Belgium, DARE. The conference was really great. I met so many fun people and carried with me so many thoughts and learnings back home. I held a keynote, “Scaling Agile @ Spotify”, talking about how Spotify staying agile, lean and fast, while growing.  I also talked about how

This is MIKE, The Daily Meeting Microphone. MIKE is a concept. An idea.  Captured on a poster. If you like it; Click the image below (or click here to download the powerpoint). Print it on A3 format. Put it on the wall next to your team wall or in the office corridor. Done 🙂 If

Sometimes a continuous integration/delivery scenario is more complex than just building a system in a multi-stage pipeline. The system may consist of several subsystems, or just complex components, each of which requires a build pipeline of their own. Once all systems pass through their respective build pipelines they are integrated together and subjected to a joint deployment and further testing. When facing such a scenario, I decided to build the simplest possible thing that would work and get the job done.

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Just got back from DARE conference in Belgium.  I don’t know how Maarten makes it happen, but I always leave with more ideas than I had when I came. I ran a session on visualization – highlighting our brains limited capacity capture and record knowledge (and what to think of when using visualization). An amazingly

Let me introduce a tool I’ve found useful – Concepts. Concepts  is a one page specification, in A3 format that represents a product idea of feature. It is enough to enable a prepared conversation with the engineers developing the product. Think of it as a “flexible minimum specification”. The idea The concept owner is a

Added a visualization combining architecture with progress follow up for more complex product development scenarios. You’ll find the complete collection of boards here! Cheers Mattias

Sisyphus, artistry, cult of quality, weaving, broken windows and all the other stuff you have to care about if you want to build high quality software. Here’s my speech on how we did it at Atex Polopoly, held at the SmartBear MeetUI user conference May 23 2013. And here’s the slides: Build Quality In: Stop

I ended my talk on the SoapUI user gathering MeetUI singing the stop the line song. Now it has ended up on youtube. Here’s the text: I keep a close watch on these tests of mine I keep my Jenkins open all the time I see a defect coming down the line Becuse you’re mine,

Good news: Alistair Cockburn is in Stockholm June 17-18! We’ll be teaching Advanced Agile, a workshop for those of you who already have agile training and experience, and want to dig deeper! Register here if you are interested. Alistair is a very inspiring fellow! He wrote the original book Agile Software Development and was one of the people

During the conference Agila Sverige 2013, I – the Evil Coach – made my first public appearance. I gave a lightning talk on how to maximize the team’s performance. The room was filled to the brim. The talk ended with standing ovations which were immediately followed by an early termination of the conference since no one could possibly

Bug lists have the potential to consume a lot of your organizations effort. Bugs drive re prioritization, dispatching, reporting, followup –  even though they might be of one time nature and random occurrence. Whenever I encounter a huge bug list is to I ask which of these the organization will fix the upcoming release and

My lightning talk about Software Development and Tragedy of the commons (“Kollektivt kodägarskap och allmänningens tragedi – eller hur blir min kodbas inte utfiskad) from Agila Sverige 2013

And here is the video recording from the event. My presentation begins 12 minutes and 10 seconds into the film.

Here’s the (almost word by word) english transcript of the speech:
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Improvement Theme is a tool in the form of a poster that works as a conveyor belt for continuous improvements once the Retrospective is over.

I’ve been reading a little bit about Toyota Kata and seen great presentations on the concept. In order to make it practical and useful for me I found myself tweaking it and packaging it in a concept I’ve come to call Improvement Theme. I’ve tried this concept a couple of times now and found it to be a good tool to extend improvements beyond the Retrospective and bringing it into the daily work. In this article I describe how to create the poster and how to use it as a tool for continuous improvements.

The Improvement Theme is a poster. I’ve been using magic charts since they are easily moved between the room in which the retrospective is held and the teams wall.

The charter consists of five areas.
1. Name of the Improvement Theme
2. Now/Problem – Description of the current situation
3. Definition of Awesome – How would we like it to be?
4. Next Target Condition – X weeks from now, what has changed?
5. First Steps – 3 slots for three post-its that describe the first (next) actions we will take?

It’s a living document, preferable put up next to the scrum/kanban wall. Once or twice a week the team reviews the theme and agrees upon new actions as they get completed.

When X weeks has passed the team does a review of the theme itself. If they want to continue on the same theme they identify a new “Next target condition”. Otherwise they create a new Improvement Theme poster.

Here follows an extensive description of how I’ve been using the concept as a tool for improvement and a more in-depth description of the different aspects of the poster.

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What is quality? Why do it energize us so much? Can we measure it? In a new Smartbear blogpost I trace the philosophical history of quality, and what that might mean for us. Socrates started his quest to find out what knowledge is by taking on the lurking trap of the relativists, Protagoras and Heraclitus.

When introducing agile thinking I usually show the Norstrom Inovation Lab video as best agile example. Though, to make some of the points come across I also show a typical example of a failed traditional project. I have long searched for a short video illustrating a failed project and accidentally found this gem when watching the whole

Last friday, I had the day off. Again.

This was just one of several days that I have had off, not counting weekends and vacations. So am I just a slacker that don’t work 5 five days a week? No, on the contrary! This makes me a better programmer. How? Read on.

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Nowadays, when explaining the concept of Agile values and techniques I always start by showing a short and brilliant video from Norstrom Inovation Lab. The video shows how a team successfully delivers an iPad app withing a week. It all starts with an idea:  “Our customers often use their phones to take pictures of themselves when trying

Nyligen så hjälpte jag till med att planera och facilitera en affärsplanering hos en kund. Då jag tycker både utfallet och genomförandet var väldigt bra så kommer här en beskrivning av vad vi gjorde och de olika övningar vi hade. Det var en relativt stor grupp som samlats föra att genomföra den årliga affärsplaneringen, vilket syftade till att utifrån företagets övergripande mål finna vad denna avdelning skall göra under året som kommer. Alla som varit med på dessa tillställningar vet att de kan vara rätt tunga och inte alltid kopplade till medarbetarnas vardag. Jag känner dock att detta tillfälle bröt traditionen, mycket på grund av att de aktuella cheferna fokuserade på att jobba kring det positiva och möjligheter i stället för problem och hinder.

Det var en grupp på 30 personer fördelade i två olika linjegrupper, och huvudmålet var att finna förändringsåtgärder för året som kommer. På vägen mot det målet, en väg som var lika viktig som slutmålet i sig, jobbade gruppen kring sin historia, arbetade fram en mission och sedan en framtidsbild om var de vill vara fem år framåt i tiden.

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Agilist these days don’t recognize the true value of proper design.  It takes a master to understand the subtle details that make your IT department’s self confidence melt away faster than ice in Schwarzenegger’s pants. It’s all about design. Interior design.

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A few weeks ago Daniel Sundman wrote a blog entry about how to test drive JavaScript with Grunt. Today we’ll talk about how to run your Jasmine Grunt setup using Gradle!

There are no standard plugins for Grunt in Gradle, but it’s easy to add all the code manually. After all, this is Gradle not Maven 😉

We’ll assume that node and grunt-cli are already installed see (Test Driving JavaScript with Grunt).

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Jag intervjuas om utvecklings- och lönesamtal i tidningen Chef. “Det blev konstigt att sitta en gång om året och bestämma vilka mål mina medarbetare skulle ha på lång sikt, när vi arbetade helt annorlunda i vardagen. Därför bestämde jag mig för att lägga ner utvecklingssamtalen.” Läs resten av artikeln på Chef.se

Here’s the eBook collecting my articles on building the quality in by stoping the line: Stop The Line – Why it’s crucial to include a human touch to your automated processes

Christoper Avery, a leading authority on applying personal and shared responsibility for agility and performance, returns to Crisp in Stockholm April 29-30, 2013 to teach his public workshop Creating Results-Based Teams. Space is limited. Register now.

This classic blog post was originally posted on Christopher Avery’s popular Leadership Gift blog on November 1, 2010 — you can find it here.

The retrospective is a meeting in agile approaches that occurs at the end of an iteration in which the team reserves time and attention to discuss what worked well and what team members wish to improve.

The basic process for an iteration retrospective is to gather the team for an hour (more or less as required by the length of the iteration), ask the team to generate two lists (what worked well and what the team would like to improve), and then prioritize items on the list.

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Few coaches and many teams. How does that work? In the Kanban Kick-start Field Guide you mention that you have kick-started more than 50 teams. How do you keep track of the teams and their status? For our Kanban-coach team, each team really is a work item and, unsurprisingly, we try to see and understand

The number one factor of power is the fear factor. Fear is essential to keep the resources kissing your feet.

There are of course many ways to invoke fear and I will give you my pro tip here: fire the worst 10% every year. “Worst” here refers to obedience, not performance, hell no. Firing a well paid performer cuts salary costs more, so that is just a bonus.

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Can you run a conference where every presenter has to present using code? Why not! Meet ITAKE (Bucharest, ay 30-31). A coders delight. Our friends in Eastern Europe, Mozaic are trying out a new conference format where each presenter has to present using code.  Gotta love initatives like that 🙂      

The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide is now available! What is it?The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide is a practical guide to help you kick-start your team into using the Kanban method. It gathers the experience from introducing Kanban to 50+ teams at Sandvik IT. Who wrote it?The Field Guide was written by two lean/agile coaches, Christophe

Hi! Here are my slides Stop Starting, Start Finishing from Aggro Pekuliar. Thanks for attending! And what a cool conference, nice to hang out with a bunch of non-techies for a change 🙂

Christoper Avery, a leading authority on applying personal and shared responsibility for agility and performance, returns to Crisp in Stockholm April 29-30, 2013 to teach his public workshop Creating Results-Based Teams. Space is limited. Register now.

This classic blog post was originally posted on Christopher Avery’s popular Leadership Gift blog on February 9, 2011 — you can find it here.

Why is it so hard to build a well-functioning team?

Often it is because we’re looking in the wrong place for answers.

The most important game may be the one you aren’t even seeing.

I’ll share a critical secret for success. The primary problem lies in what you are (or are not) paying attention to. When it comes to working with smart people in shared-responsibility situations, all too often I catch myself getting caught up in the wrong game — a pointless game. I bet you do, too.

When I start paying attention to the truly important game, my ability skyrockets. And yes, you can solve this problem for yourself as well.

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