Crisp's BlogPage 22

This a picture of me used on our front web page. If you don’t see it there, try reloading.

What’s the matter with me on the picture?  What am I trying to say?

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I was invited by Agilenetið to come to Iceland and do a talk. That didn’t fit my travel schedule, so we instead decided to do an experimental “remote seminar”. That is, with me on a video link instead of physically in Iceland. I’ve done webinars before, and usually miss the interactivity. I wanted it to “feel” like I was there, discussing and interacting with the participants.

Here’s what we learned:

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While reading a blog post by my Crisp colleague Anders Laestadius I remembered a meeting type I tried a few years ago. We called it “Pomodoro meeting” since it was timeboxed to 25 minutes, just as the time management technique Pomodoro.

This is how it was conducted:

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Starting from scratch, this video demos how to quickly get to a fully agile project setup with continuous deployment. Everything is in the cloud – GIT repo, Jenkins, MongoDB, and the app server. The system deploys automatically with every successful commit. The app itself is minimal, but does have a simple web interface and a

I got a number of questions recently in how we at Crisp work with changes. So I decided to write it down. Here’s how we think and coach change 🙂 Cheers /Mattias

Here are the slides from my metrics talk “Agila mätetal i praktiken” at Dataföreningen in Stockholm. Lots of very engaged and experienced participants, lots of interesting discussions, thanks for coming!

The Let’s Test conference (“A European conference on context-driven testing – for testers, by testers”) kicked off today in Sweden. I know, I’m not a tester, so why was I at the conference? Certainly it wasn’t the “context-driven” that drew me, since before I heard of the conference I didn’t really know what that was. The “for testers, by testers” wasn’t so inviting to me as a developer, even though as a member of an agile team I write unit and regression tests, and participate in functional and exploratory testing.

It was actually Scott Barber’s tutorial description that got me to sign up:Continue reading

Here are annotated slides from my lighting talk Agile@Home at Agila Sverige 2012. Have you tried a BBQ board? Or a travel spike? Or a homework burnup chart? How about Limiting WIP in the kitchen, or the closet? How about agile party planning? There are plenty of ways that Agile and Lean practices and ideas

The safety belt is off.  Focus is intense.  Standup?  Tdd?   Rubbish!  Crisp hack day! 🙂

I got the chance to meet Luke, the founder of innovation games this week. I find his view refreshing – humans are basically creative. We need to provide the platform for ideas to emerge. Some of my reflections after listening to the stories: It’s serious play, these games shape the outcome of of real products

I gave a presentation called ”Being good at waiting – Using Selenium to test Ajax-intensive pages” in an unconf session at the Selenium Conference in London.

The audience was great! Thanks everybody! I certainly didn’t know everything there’s to know about the subject, and that resulted in an interactive session where people from the audience would share their experience and answer some questions. That was so cool 🙂
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  Just finished my session at SDC 2012 where I’m arguing for less hierarchy and economically aligned decision rules that  enables local teams to do tradeoffs.  Mary Poppendieck commented it as “traditional product management”.  Maybe that’s where we are heading 🙂 Anyway, here are the slides

Today at Crisp, we had a short discussion about effective meetings where I described what I think are needed in order to have successful meetings. Meetings, like work meetings, are used to produce some kind of result, achieve a agreed on decision or solve a problem. The discussion got me thinking about how often we are overloaded with meetings where many of them give little value back to the project and organization.

Paul Graham describes two different schedules, the manager and the makers schedule, where the former is run by managers working through the day participating in a lot of different meetings, and the latter is run by the workers, the developers and project participants, working through the day developing new versions of the product they are accountable for producing. These two schedules have their place in an organization, but we may get in trouble when the two schedules meet each other, which they do now and then during a normal working day.

Meetings cost quite a lot, and it is often not obvious for the managers working under the manager schedule how big that cost really is. I believe we need some kind of structure, an agreement between the meeting participants and the organizer of what they need to prepare and do before the meeting, in order to guarantee that it will be as efficient as possible. This to ensure that the organization get some kind of ROI from having the meeting.

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Not long ago I met with a manager who during a discussion ruled out the possibility of success of a solution. I was a bit surprised and afterwards asked why that was not doable. It turned out one of the reasons was the managers fear the team would kick off with unrealistic expectations and leave 

I’m now back in Sweden after a 6 month Big Family Trip. It has been an incredible adventure, I’m so glad we pulled it off!

We have travelled around the world through eight countries. Denmark, China, Japan, Thailand, New Zealand, Peru, Brazil, and the British Virgin Islands in the West Indies. All in all, most things worked out better than we could have imagined.

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The basic premise of Node.js is that I/O is expensive and that, since I/O is expensive, we can’t block waiting for it to complete.

Many traditional Web Servers typically adopt a one thread per request approach, and any I/O (database, web service, file system call…) during the request blocks that thread of execution. This is inefficient in many ways because when the thread is blocked waiting for I/O to complete, it can’t respond to other requests.

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Do you do Scrum? I would guess that 90% of Swedish programmers would answer yes.
Do you have retrospectives? Again most developers’ answer is, yes.
Will you empty the impediment backlog before the next retrospective? Silence.

This post is for those of you who remain silent after the last question.

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I am currently working as a Scrum Master for multiple teams at Projectplace in Stockholm, Sweden. One of those teams is the Mobile Team. They are developing Action Boards for both iOS (iPad) and Android platforms. These Action Boards are also available in the Customer Preview of the Projectplace web service. Both Web Team and Mobile Team share the same API’s. The iPad app is planned to be released in 2-3 Sprints from now.
This case study can be written from many perspectives, but in this article I am going to focus on how we are working with the challenges of having a distributed Scrum team.

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I have been reading Gamestorming lately and found that I’ve practiced many of the games and followed most of the principles of game design already. However, there are a lot of new things in that book that I’d like to try. Today I tried drawing a Visual Agenda for the first time. I think it was well

I just finished working on a short presentation that I will give this week about agile and lean development. In the presentation I display a few quotes by Deming regarding management and the system perspective managers should have in their work. One of the quotes is the famous one stating that 94% of all improvement possibilities are in the system and only 6% by special cause (in other words, only 6% are caused by the individuals).

“I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this: 94% belongs to the system (responsibility of management), 6% special”

This got me thinking about the 1-on-1 and performance review meetings that I have used at previous job positions, and of which I have written about before in this blog.

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Last month market the launch of the Kanban Accreditation scheme.  Let’s give our view including why we have chosen to engage ourselves as members of the advisory board.

Why the Kanban accreditation scheme?
Kanban is a word that needs meaning. So what meaning do we want people to connect with the word? This matters (to us..) . Stumbling upon about kanban classes declaring it will help you “resource optimize”  it makes me think there is a need. (To any unfamiliar reader.. kanban helps you improve flow, quite a different thing..)

Any accredited class will contain some core messages that we care to share. The best way we could think of to make sure that messages is good was to engage ourselves in the process 🙂

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My mother’s sister is past 80 and still running her own company. Naturally, I do her IT-support since -95 when she realised that it was important to utilise a computer for her business.
The other day I was installing an invoice program for her. She has been using an Excel template, designed by my wife. But new regulations on VAT made her go for specialised software. She choose a well established product. It turned into a lesson for me.
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Mercurial is my first serious foray into distributed version control systems (dvcs). When I started gathering my notes for this entry I knew that this would be a really negative review of Mercurial. The first version control system I actually liked was Perforce. Several years later I encountered Subversion, it took a while to adjust but eventually I grew really fond of it. For the past 3 months, I’ve been using Mercurial… definitely not impressed. Or so I thought, but as I looked through my cons, I saw pros all over the place. So here are my [not-so-negative-after-all] thoughts on using Mercurial!

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Surprisingly often an organization exposes itself to a multitude of risks by not knowing enough about its systems, infrastructure, and applications. This doesn’t manifest itself as a lack of “enterprise architecture” documents (while some could help). The implications are far more down-to-earth. Does any of this sound familiar?

• Upgrading both hardware and software is unproportionally difficult and the outcome isn’t predictable
• There exist tasks that must be performed by a specific person
• There exist artifacts that everybody thinks need to be there, but no one dares to touch, delete, or upgrade
• Introduction of new employees is difficult

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Have you ever wondered why Spring MVC supports @RequestParam but not @RequestAttribute? There are probably plenty of philosophical reasons for this – good or bad. But if your hands are tied and you’re stuck with, let’s say a CMS, that insists on passing context as request attributes what are you going to do? As usual,

Every organization has its culture that you can see when you observe people at their daily work. This observed culture should be aligned with, or congruent to, the official organizational culture. In reality there is often a gap between the intended culture and the real observed one. For example, management might say that quality is above everything else, while pushing  to release new versions of low quality product riddled with defects. Or an organization touts its focus on learning and removing impediments, while the reality is the complete opposite. This post discusses the impact and importance of cultural alignment.

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Great retrospectives are amazing, they have a way of really getting a team to work together and to energize them ahead of a new challenge. But even a great retrospective becomes boring and routine after a while. Luckily, there are a lot of us at Crisp working with different teams, so we got together this evening for a peer to peer exchange about retrospectives. We each got to pitch retrospective exercises and games that we’d like to try, or that we wanted to share. We ended up discussing and trying out 9 of them. Here’s a summary  in case you’d like to try some of them out at your next retrospective!

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Continuous improvement is a central part of both agile and lean; it’s the way to increase the productivity and ensure that the organization delivers an ever increasing level of value to the customers and the organization. Lean is derived from Toyota and the Toyota Way, which has inspired a lot of companies in the western world in their quest to increase their productivity as well. But we often focuse on the techniques and practices and do not see the more fundamental parts of the Toyota system that enable their very high level of improvement each year.

I worked at a company that tried to implement the Toyota Way and reach the same level of continuous improvment with what I believe to be the wrong focus. My company estblished a goal to reach seven improvements per employee in average per year. A goal that was inspired from a report that stated that Toyota implemented 1,000,000 improvements per year, which of course, is very high. This is one of many aspects that show why Toyota has managed to grow they way they have done during the last 50 years.

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I’ve published another book! This one’s called “Lean from the Trenches“. It is about how we scaled a 60-person project by combing techniques from Kanban, Scrum, and XP. I chose this title because it really it illustrates how to put Lean principles into practice in a software project, especially the notion of an end-to-end Kanban

Hi Brazil! I’m happy to say that I’ll be visiting you in a few weeks. I’ll be involved in two public events together with Samuel Crescêncio: Feb 10: Public seminar about Lean & Agile (in Florianopolis). More info coming soon. Feb 13-14:  Certified ScrumMaster course in São Paulo. The course will be in English, but Samuel