Crisp has the luxury of working with small, medium, big and very big companies. We help through providing education. We coach and mentor projects, teams and organizations adopt and master the agile way of working. Last week we at Crisp invited a couple of our clients to participate in a round table discussion regarding agile transformations. The unifying theme were the challenges surrounding large scale agile implementations.

We at Crisp offered a platform and forum to share and learn in a neutral and safe environment. Four companies attended. One to four participants from each company. The participants were directly involved, and in one way or the other, responsible for the agile transformation taking place in their respective company. The size of the department or company involved in the change varied from 300 – 1500 people.

Continue reading

A cross-functional team I was working with last year had three testers offshore in India. The rest of the team (about 15 people) was co-located here in Stockholm.

Some team members had a nagging feeling that they could go so much faster if the testers also moved to Stockholm so they went to their boss and asked. The reply was that testers are so much less expensive, by a factor 2.3, so it was not possible, unless they could settle with fewer testers.

So they decided to do an experiment for a few months. They moved one of the testers from India to Stockholm and dropped the other two testers (re-allocating the other two to other teams) to see how that would work.

Continue reading

Order the Evil Coach’s Fake Burndown Ruler ™ TODAY! With this brand new innovative plastic ruler you can now help your team create awesome Sprint Burndowns. Every day! Every sprint!

It’s fast, it’s cheap and as a bonus you get rid of some “waste”. The Evil Coach’s Fake Burndown Ruler ™ makes the daily estimation of remaining work unnecessary.

The Scrum Master no longer needs to do the painstaking exercise of manually adding up the hours on all the post-its. Simply hold up the ruler on your chart and draw you burndown! It’s that simple! If you are lucky, the Daily Scrum is over in less than 90 seconds.

Continue reading

The software industry is going through a shift of mindset.

Agile basically solved the problem of how to deliver software. Most any company that applies an agile method and mindset can get working software out the door. Now, the biggest waste in software development seems to be building the wrong product, or the wrong features.

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all” -Peter Drucker

This insight has given rise to methods and techniques such as Lean Startup, Impact Mapping, Story Mapping, Feature Injection, etc. But is there a common denominator, a set of underlying principles?

On Feb 11, Gojko Adzic organized a full-day meetup in London with people deeply engaged in this issue, people like Jeff Patton, Mary Poppendieck, Ingrid Domingues, Chris Matts and others who have been inventing and spreading techniques for dealing with the how-to-build-the-right-stuff issue.

It was a very inspiring day! We compared our different approaches and experiences, extracted the core principles, and (to our surprise) managed to condense it into this shared message:

Great results happen when:
1. People know why they are doing their work.
2. Organizations focus on outcomes and impacts rather than features.
3. Teams decide what to do next based on immediate and direct feedback from the use of their work.
4. Everyone cares.

There. So now just go do it! 🙂
Actually, if you want a more detailed description of each point see Gojko’s post.

Posts from the other participants:

• Gojko Adzic – The February Revolution
• Karl Scotland – Heuristics for building the Right Thing

Continue reading

Every organization needs to find it’s path, where to go next. Or it can choose just go “wherever” 🙂  But let’s imagine your want to grasp the state of your hope, dreams and future of your creative people to understand what opportunities to grasp and which to let go of. Let’s imagine you need to do that among a group of self going free radicals, working in different places that does not regularly meet. Wait- that sounds like Crisp 🙂  Let me share how we grasped our future vision.

Continue reading

Here are the slides from the Jfokus talk that Anders Ivarsson and I did on Scaling Agile @ Spotify.

Jez Humble posted a blog entry with the same title in 2010, but if you haven’t read the entry, or just want a quick explanation, here’s the short version: A continuous delivery pipeline automatically tests the application, but keeps the deployment decision as a manual step. A continuous deployment pipeline, on the other hand, will

I have had to deal with memory problems in Java applications a few times. A lot has been written about this already, but this time I ran into a slightly different issue that surprised some of my colleagues so I decided to write about it here. Contrary to popular belief, a big JVM heap size is not always better when it comes to performance.

The problem

I came to the customer site to help them with their performance problems of a fairly large J2EE-system Web Service/Hibernate/MySQL system. They had several customers running the system, but only the largest was experiencing problems. The application suddenly froze and stopped processing transactions. All sorts of hypotheses were discussed, but no one could really for sure say what the problem was. And there was little data to work on.

Continue reading

What will software development be like in the future? “Agile” as we know it, will not be around, nor will test-driven development, continuous delivery, or BDD-like methodologies. I’ve been pondering this for a while, and based on some observations and a dose of wishful thinking, I’ve arrived at the conclusion above. Do you agree?

Continue reading

It is important to collect all bugs, or TR for Trouble Report as some call it. You will learn that some of those creepy agilists have a tendancy to fix bugs immediatley instead of collecting them.

Continue reading

Continuous delivery is a hot topic. A lot of people are talking about it, but implementation in the real world is scarce. I lucked out at my last assignment when I was at SVT (Swedish Public Television) and got the chance to work on implementing a continuous delivery pipeline.

When I started, the project had delivered once and was gearing up for its second delivery. Representatives from each team met, and we decided to aim for an (at the time) aggressive schedule of one release per week! Our first “fast” release would go out in January, and we would continue from there.

It would be nice to say that this worked out well and we were continuously delivering from then on, but this blog entry is about our road to continuous delivery, so my story starts here!

Continue reading

After having worked with various legacy codebases one discovers certain recurring traits and patterns. The topic of today is the Custom Exception Hierarchy encountered in Java legacy code. This phenomenon is rather Java-specific because of that language’s checked exceptions.

So what is a Custom Exception Hierarchy? It’s an exception hierarchy, with some strangely named exception at its root, present throughout the entire codebase and used everywhere. The author(s) of such hierarchy obviously felt that exceptions like IllegalStateException or IllegalArgumentException, or the like weren’t sufficient for the sophisticated needs of their application, so they came up with a better suited hierarchy of checked exceptions.

Continue reading

Hi there, scouting the enemy, are we? This agile thing is spreading like the flu and the resources are starting to notice. Soon they’ll be out of control. We can’t have that, can we? Fret no more, this blog is here to rescue managers like you, who appreciate command and control. If you can’t win a war with a strategy, then it is not worth considering.

I will provide you with some handy tips to counter the agile movement before it gets out of hand. We don’t want to be fired, we want to be feared!

Continue reading

I gave a talk to a group of mechatronics students at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) today. The topic was agile software development with an emphasis on Scrum, and some information about Kanban and Lean Startup. Here are the slides: KTH-2013 Get in touch via my homepage if you have questions or comments!

At Spotify we recently did full-day retrospective with 65 people. The goal was to capture learnings from a large coordinated effort involving dozens of teams for over half a year. The teams had been doing sprint retrospectives during the project, but we also felt the need to get a larger group together and look at

On Feb 7-8 Tom & Mary Poppendieck will be in Stockholm, we are running a workshop called “Lean Mindset“. Mary and Tom are only here 1-2 times per year, so this a good opportunity! The workshop emphasizes research, case studies and exercises. You will learn what a lean mindset is, how other companies have exposed

Product development isn’t easy. In fact, most product development efforts fail, and the most common reason for failure is building the wrong product.

Spotify is a Swedish lean startup with an awesome track record of product delivery. The products are designed to be easy, personal, and fun. Even Metallica, long known as die-hard opponents to music streaming services, now say that Spotify is “by far the best streaming service” and are “stunned by the ease of it”.

Here’s the paradox though: Successful companies like Spotify only want to deliver products that people love. But they don’t know if people love it until they’ve delivered it. So how do they do it?

Check out the article “How Spotify Builds Products”

Continue reading

Finns nu i bokform på Leanpub

Detta är den tredje 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 6: Hitta rätt folk – släpp dem lös

 Lön är rättvis ersättning – inte belöning

Så här är alltså läget: Vi har lagt ner utvecklingssamtalen och allt arbete sker i team där deltagarna tar gemensamt ansvar för sitt arbete och resultat. Då reser sig förstås frågan: hur sätter man lön i en sådan organisation? Ingen enskild prestation, ja, egentligen inte ens ett enskilt (synligt) ansvar finns ju att bedöma och ersätta eller belöna. Och inte heller har vi ett samtal där medarbetarna (lite i hemlighet) kan bedömas. Svårt läge.

Tyvärr är det värre än så.

Continue reading

Finns nu i bokform på Leanpub

Detta är den andra 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 6: Hitta rätt folk – släpp dem lös

Lägg ner utvecklingssamtalen

Första gången jag hörde någon på allvar utmana utvecklingssamtal var på ett seminarie med Jeff Sutherland (Scrums fader). Jag tror det var 2007 eller möjligen 2008. Jag hade då erfarenhet av att sitta i bägge ändarna av utvecklingssamtal.

Som medarbetare kunde jag inte minnas ett enda sådant utvecklingssamtal som verkligen varit meningsfullt. Några hade möjligen varit harmlösa och trevliga samtal, men åtminstone ett par av dem hade varit direkt demotiverande och framförallt minskat mitt förtroende för samtalspartnern: min chef.

Continue reading

You know, every system has a software architecture and a software design. Whether you think about your system’s architecture or not, it will have one. Here is an example of two methods in a class I recently saw. It is not architecture, it is good old OOD, but it exemplifies what can happen if you

I guess you have heard about T-shaped people, that is, people with deep skills within one or a few areas combined with some knowledge in many areas.

Now it’s time to introduce U-shaped teams. That is, teams that are balanced and where teammates are helping each other. It’s a team where you might have a bad day and are allowed to fail without causing consequences. It’s where the teammates help you get back to normal and what’s more make you feel comfortably included in the team. Your team becomes your safety net and it’s the place where you can dare to be vulnerable. U-shaped teams are also good for productivity since safety means productivity. *

Continue reading

Finns nu i bokform på Leanpub

“Software developers…principal work is human communication to organize the users’ expressions of needs into formal procedure” Tom DeMarco, Peopleware

Detta är den första 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 6: Hitta rätt folk – släpp dem lös
Del 7: Kontor – låt teamen bestämma
Del 8: Tidredovisning – och andra onödiga system
Del 9: Bortom agile – unmanagement

Continuous investment

Våren 2011 slutade jag med utvecklingssamtal. Jag var då utvecklingschef på ett produktföretag och hade som alla andra chefer i Sverige (och den anglosaxiska världen) ett årligt återkommande samtal med var och en av mina medarbetare där jag – det ingår ju i själva grundidén om utvecklingssamtal – skulle hjälpa dem att utveckla sig i sitt arbete.

Min tanke var att göra som jag så ofta gjort när det handlar om (agil) organisationsförändring: gör ett experiment, mer eller mindre i det tysta, och se hur det går. Nu är just utvecklingssamtal lite svåra att lägga ner i det tysta, och då inte bara för att jag pratade om det på Agila Sverige det året – det var ju inte ett så diskret sätt att göra det på – och inte heller för att det ju blir uppenbart för de som blir av med den enda chansen på året att utvecklas (ironi), men framförallt eftersom det just är en av de ganska få väldefinierade processer som företag normal har. För att lägga ner utvecklingssamtal måste man (oftast) prata åtminstone med HR (och antagligen med ledningsgruppen, så var det i varje fall i mitt fall).

Continue reading

All teams have some sense of what is regarded as acceptable or good behavior within the team. Most people know that colleagues don’t appreciate it when you’re late. Perhaps you have a silent agreement regarding how you vote and make decisions. Some teams write down their behavior and collaborative “protocol”  in a Working Agreement.

You might think that common sense covers it and writing it down seems silly, but surprise – common sense is subjective and you will have different opinions about things. Great! Let’s discuss and find our common ground.

The act of discussing it and writing it down is also a strong team building activity and forges relationships between team members. Any new team, or any team for that matter, could benefit greatly from a one-hour workshop. It could be part of a retrospective or a stand-alone meeting.

Continue reading

Sammanfattar i min presentation från Meridiumdagen ett antal Agila kontrakt som är i bruk idag och vad man bör tänka på när man använder dem. ——————   For the English reader: What does Agile contracts really mean? –  I walk through a number of real contracts that are in use today (presentation was given in

If you prefer this as an article – you can download it here.

What is continuous improvement?

Continuous improvement always starts by observing previous results. That is our baseline for improvements forward on. We strive to improve steadily, a little at a time – 10% is great! But first step is always to accept the facts, regardless if we would have liked it to be better.  It is way too easy to sweep failed projects under the carpet rather than used as a baseline for improvements forward on. A mistake easily made is to base improvements on dream targets rather than previous results, it is hard to learn something from failure to meet those targets.

Continue reading

A couple of months have passed since I wrote the post “Responsibility the Agile way” and I have refined it since then. Here is the new and more slim version:

1) I promise to look for improvements, both opportunities and problems.

2) I promise to participate in implementing the improvements. I will at least communicate the improvement possibilities I have found.

Continue reading

Have not all of us been in a spot where we feel an urgent need to fix some quality such as performance or availability, which takes a change in the architecture for effect? And yet we are pushed to work on new features instead?

There is a chasm between the tech side and business side that has to be bridged before a sound dialogue about system architecture can take place.

Continue reading

(UPDATE: see Spotify Engineering Culture, two short animated videos showing how we work)

Dealing with multiple teams in a product development organization is always a challenge!

One of the most impressive examples I’ve seen so far is Spotify. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Spotify on and off ever since the company was founded, and it’s one of the few companies I’ve seen with a truly agile culture. Spotify has grown a lot lately and now has hundreds of developers divided into 30 agile teams spread over 4 cities in 3 timezones. So how is this managed?

Check out the article: Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters and Guilds. I wrote it together with Anders Ivarsson, one of the agile coaches that I’m working with (Spotify has a truly awesome group of coaches!).

Continue reading

Aaaaaah…  Nice. *Dumdi dum di dum*   .. what? Ah! I can walk around and pull from the other side!  *clever* 🙂   Darn! Not always easy being a kanban coach 🙂

Yuval Yeret (@yuvalyeret), Lean/Agile Coach extraordinaire, compiled a very practical list of avanced Kanban reading/watching materials. Reading the list I get a view of Kanban centered around continuous improvement towards a True North (as described by Toyota Kata’s Mike Rother). This is has also become my understanding of Kanban, especially when trying to motivate and