Crisp's BlogPage 20

Here are the slides for my talk “Lean from the Trenches” at Øredev, Malmö. And here is the book/ebook, in case you want more details. There may also be some copies left at the conference bookstore. Thanks for attending!

Are you building a Lean Startup, and want fast results? Twitter Bootstrap could be the solution you’re looking for. Are you a “backend” programmer who would love to have a beautiful site, but you “don’t know frontend”? Twitter Bootstrap could be the solution you’re looking for. Are you just looking for a simple frontend that works? Twitter Bootstrap could be the solution you’re looking for. Nice rounded corners, customizable colors, margins that look good, padding that’s right, JavaScript that just works: that’s what Twitter Bootstrap offers.
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Introduction

I got into agile development during the late 90s when I read Kent Beck’s book about extreme programming (XP). It was mostly the technical aspects of XP that attracted me; I liked test driven development and continuous integration and I understood the benefit of continuously reviewing the code by doing pair programming. It took some time for me to turn my attention to what I mainly focus on today, and what I see is a cornerstone of agile, teamwork. Product development is in most cases a complex endeavor where you need a high level of collaboration and teamwork to reach required outcome. To succeed you have to make sure the participants build on each others strength and knowledge, and where they see differences as something valuable and important. But it is not certain that all working groups ends up as a true team. As a team coach you need to pay attention to building the team at the beginning. This post will describe a few tools that I have used in order to form teams.

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It’s pretty tough to explain to a 6 and an 8 year old what it is you do all day at work as a programmer. They take the computer programs they use for granted, and just assume that websites work because they’re supposed to work. Explaining that someone had to write “code” to cause a button press on the screen to do something is a bit too abstract. A simpler example though worked wonders! I was working on a little HTML5, Canvas application for a Crisp seminar a couple of years ago called Ball Bounce (a simplified pong-like game), and the girls were mesmerized by how changing a few characters in the editor made huge visual changes in the web browser. Finally a break-through! But JavaScript is not really an entry level language, and teaching kids about events is probably not the best start. So, what is an easy, visual program with instant gratification? Well, why not Logo?
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As JavaScript is transitioning from the dark ages as a language of ridicule to a respected language of it’s own, it is obvious that some of the rough edges need polishing.

There is no rougher edge than the global namespace issue and the difficulty providing encapsulation. Even for a seemingly trivial JavaScript application, it is no longer OK to just whip up some JavaScript files and assume that you can maintain the code base as it grows. The application now lives in the browser and the amount of code you need to maintain requires modularization.

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After years of programming in Java with frameworks like Spring, GWT, JBoss, Hibernate, Seam and other traditional stuff, I needed a new learning curve. My colleague Mats Strandberg invited me to create a new version of his code kata/hobby project SignUp.

SignUp has been built and rebuilt several times before, but for this incarnation (number 4 of the more prominent ones) we decided to use some stuff we haven’t used so much before: Scala, Play! Framework 2.0, Anorm, Twitter Bootstrap and Secure Social. We store the source code on GitHub and deploy on Heroku. In this article I’ll summarize some of the things I learned so far. Since I’m an IntelliJ IDEA user, there is some of that too…

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This is basically a 1 day product ownership course compressed into a 15 minute animated presentation.

Over a million views! Some call it “The best 15 minutes on the Internet” 🙂

There’s obviously more to product ownership than this, so see this is a high level summary.

• Here’s the complete drawing (.png format)
• Here’s a downloadable version of the video, in case you don’t want to stream (.mov format, 90 Mb)

Special thanks to Alistair Cockburn, Tom & Mary Poppendieck, Jeff Patton, Ron Jeffries, Jeff Sutherland, and Michael Dubakov for providing many of the models, metaphors, and ideas that I use in this presentation.

Translations: (see also the translation guide by Cédric Chevalerias)

• Chinese – simplified (subtitles)
• Chinese – traditional (subtitles)
• French(subtitles)
• French (voice)
• German (subtitles)
• German(voice)
• Italian (voice)
• Japanese (subtitles)
• Polish (voice)
• Portuguese – Portugal (voice)
• Portuguese – Brazil (voice)
• Russian (voice)
• Spanish (subtitles)

Below is a full transcript in english. But I recommend watching the video instead of reading the transcript. The video is 100% visual, the transcript is 0% visual…

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Hi! Just back from a great conference – LKCE 2012 –  and a great town – Vienna. A really cool thing was the illustrator who worked around the clock to visualize how he interpreted the difference presentations. He did a great job (see below). What would you do – learning from charts I challenge the

Building a well-functioning software delivery team is complicated. There are many factors to consider. Current team (if any), needed skills, available people, company politics etc.

There are some fundamentals that often (but not always) seem to work.

My fundamental principles for teams

• Static
• Cross-functional
• 5-9 people
• Co-located
• Dedicated team members (belong to only one team)

I find these principles to be a useful basis for discussion, when helping managers configure their teams.

The principles are goals, and one must realize that all cannot be achieved all of the time, nor instantly.

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For the past couple of years I’ve had to work with Jira. Really, it’s mostly been dreading working with Jira. At both projects I’ve had Greenhopper available, and that hasn’t really made things better. My frustrations have had to do with the complexity of setting up the right fields, to creating a new sprint to creating a new project, down to mundane things like problems with ranking. I don’t particularly enjoy spending hours just tidying up my data. I want to quickly organize so I have time to actually work. I also want to easily see how much work we’ve done, and how much we have to do. Cards and a physical board are great for this, but I end up with stacks of cards everywhere, and after several sprints I don’t know what to do with them anymore. Enter Trello!Continue reading

För några veckor sedan var jag på Crisp Hack Summit (en och en halv dag valfritt hackande) och då jag jobbar med Android-utveckling kände jag för att testa skriva en liten app som man kan kommunicera med via SMS. Det är ju inga större problem att kommunicera med en telefon om man har en fungerande IP-förbindelse, men om man inbart har 2G så blir det lite värre. Dagens prepaid abonemang har oftast en obegränsad mängd med SMS (åtminstone om man inte är tonåring) som man kan skicka. Så varför inte göra en app som när man skickar strängen “ping” svarar med “pong” 🙂
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Lite i skymundan pågår något av en revolution inifrån i IT-branschen, och då särskilt i företag med många programmerare. På gräsrotskonferenser, i nätfora och i management-litteratur äger vår tids kanske mest avancerade och levande diskussion om hur man bäst organiserar arbete rum. Om det skriver jag i en längre essä om hur programmerarna visar vägen

Today I decided to update my canned wicket test examples to the latest version of Wicket.

I still think Wicket is a really nice web framework for the following reasons, primarly.

1. Hot deploy from the Maven archetype. The quick start setup offered from the Wicket site gives you “change-and-reload” out of the box.
2. Unit testing framework built in. You test the logic of the web application without resorting to click simulation.
3. HTML separation. Allows you to work in a tight loop with an interaction designer that can use any HTML editor.
4. No need for JavaScript. Well, for the basic stuff at least. The examples here all use AJAX.

Here are the slides for my third(!) keynote at Agile Eastern Europe. The guy who was supposed to do the afternoon keynote couldn’t make it, so I was invited to jump up and do another one (talked about Spotify, but I don’t yet have permission to publish those slides, sorry). And then that one finished early, so I filled in the last 20 minutes with this short talk about Agile @ Home. Three keynotes in one day must be some kind of record 🙂

Thanks for listening, and glad to see that so many of you were so excited about the idea of using Agile outside of work 🙂

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Here are the slides for my keynote “Lean from the Trenches” at Agile Eastern Europe, Kiev. And here is the book/ebook, in case you want more details. Thanks for attending!

In April this year we had Christopher Avery at Crisp giving his two days workshop Creating Result Based Teams. I read Christopher’s book about creating effective teams a few years ago which I found very inspiring and it was loaded with a lot of wisdom about working with teams. I was therefore very excited to

Nu finns OH-bilderna tillgängliga för min presentation om User Story Mapping på NFI’s “Krav till System 2012” konferens på Slide Share.Konferensen den 9 oktober är fullbokad (200 personer) men en ny omgång planeras in januari på grund av att så många ville deltag. Håll koll på NFIs webbsida för mer info.Inom kort tänker jag skriva

I have been playing around with JavaFX on and off since it came out and I got really inspired by Per’s blog post about the analog clock. So I decided to spend my time at the Crisp Hack Summit trying to improve Per’s design both in code and visually.

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Septembernumret för tidskriften Personal och ledarskap har utvecklingssamtal som tema. Tidskriften är medlemstidning för Sveriges HR-förening och Sveriges ledande tidskrift inom personal och human resources. Inför numret blev jag intervjuad om den frågan eftersom jag som utvecklingschef på Atex Polopoly lade ner utvecklingssamtalen.

Artikeln finns här, men man måste man vara medlem för att komma åt den.

Eftersom texten är lite svår att komma åt bjuder jag på ett par citat från den, som inleds med ingressen:

Peter Antman, konsult på Crisp kallar utvecklingssamtal för ”Tjänstemännens tidsstudieman”. Som utvecklingschef tog han ett drastiskt grepp – och lade ner utvecklingssamtalet.

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On Tuesday Oct 2 Alistair Cockburn and I are hosting a free evening event at Crisp. I’ll be talking a bit about my current client Spotify, which has a cool scaling approach with “tribes”, “squads”, “guilds”, and “chapters”. Then Alistair will talk about whatever topic the participants choose. Then we’ll have discussions and finger food. Feel free to

Here’s an interview by InfoQ. I talked about my books, my travels, the agile manifesto translation project, coaching coaches, agile trends, and various other stuff. The interviewer (Craig Smith) had a great set of questions, and I’m pretty happy with my answers 🙂

I had recently a conversation with a business partner of mine, Erik Andrén at Macmann Berg. We were working on the material for the next workshop in a leadership program we have at a client. This time the workshop was about coaching, both in general terms but also from an agile perspective. Erik has a background as a therapist but is nowadays working as an organization and management consultant. At our meeting he described his view about coaching based on a therapy model he had used as a therapist, and we then had  a very interesting discussion about the model and the connection to continuous improvement of teams and organizations. This post discuss this connection since I believe we have a lot to learn from how therapists approaches patients when trying to help them create a better life for themselves.

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Backbones aren’t the usual fare for tech blogs, but if you’ve been following frontend development, then you’ll have heard of Backbone.js. From their site: Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions,views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.Continue reading

As some of you may remember, a year ago I took Q3 off to focus on building a JavaScript application. I learned a lot especially about Node.js. Yassal and I have a pet project called FeedMe that we have worked on over the years. FeedMe implements a shopping list for us to use when doing

On Oct 1-2 Alistair Cockburn is in Stockholm teaching Advanced Agile together with me. He has been here twice before and course reviews have been great! Alistair has a very pragmatic down-to-earth style, while maintaining the theoretical depth needed for an advanced course. He’s not only a Fun Guy, he’s the guy who (literally) wrote

We are doing a course called “Certified Scrum Developer”.  We are of course proud of being one of the few eligible by the Scrum Alliance to hold such a course. But what matters most to us is teaching some modern development practices. The certificate bit is more of a bonus.

Crisp had recently its fifth installment of a code camp, the “Crisp Hack Summit”. It is an occasion for everyone at Crisp to go bananas on some project of their liking. We took the chance to work on the technical platform for the CSD course.  We know from experience that you can loose a lot of valuable lecture time if  the technical environment decides to hassle. Murphy, will you be there?

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A while ago I was asked to become one of the Swedish country ambassadors for the Agile Testing Days 2012 conference. I said yes, because I think it’s a great conference. As country ambassador, I help in promoting the conference. I chose to do it, because I think it’s a good conference and I already recommend it to my friends.
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Here are the slides from my Ale2012 keynote: Everybody wants Change – but nobody likes to Be Changed.

Thanks for coming!

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What makes the difference between a star developer and a day coder? First of all, with a star developer I don’t mean star as in ”famous”, rather as in ”elite”.  And, a day coder is OK to be, no disrespect here. We need you as much as we need the elite.

My point here is that if you wish to hire a real star, you need to know what to look for.

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Jag har precis lagt upp min första kurs här på Crisp – Testning av webbapplikationer med Selenium WebDriver. I detta blogginlägg tänkte jag förklara lite mer ingående vad kursen är tänkt att lära ut. Mina kolleger har också kommit med värdefull feedback och frågor som säkert kan dyka upp igen.
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