Crisp's BlogPage 24

In my opinion, the Product Owner (PO) role is the most demanding one in Scrum, since the PO needs to have so many talents and you rarely find all of them in one single person, so in my current team we formed a PO team instead.

I am programmer and Scrum Master but has been offered to become Product Owner for the same part of the product I am currently working on. I decided to accept the offer and this is my live story, written as I go. Perhaps this will be of interest to you.

First of all, to me, this was not a decision I took lighthearted. However, I do have the fortune of peer coaching at Crisp and the offer came the same morning we had our last coaching. That was a timing like there was a meaning behind.

It is not supposed to be full-time either, so I need to choose what I shall do the rest of my day. It turned out that initially there was no choice. It was not possibly to find a Scrum Master to fill in my gap. The next sprint I will be both PO and SM. Hua!Continue reading

In my present team we have tried many formats for the product backlog and the best one so far is – PowerPoint!

Java is great and I have been doing it for years. Why should I care about things like Scala and Akka?

The short answer could be:

• Scala is the future
• Akka is the killer framework

Dagens Industri has written an article about my current client RPS – Rikspolisstyrelsen (the Swedish national police board). During the past 6 months I’ve been working with them to implement a Kanban-based software development process in a 60-person project. Our aim is to equip every police car with a laptop & mobile connection to the

What’s testability? And why does object-oriented code feel more testable? In this post I argue, somewhat informally, that making code object-oriented, or just by introducing more accurate abstractions, we decrease the domain-to-range ratio, thus making our code more testable.

Today we developers are high in demand, at least here in Sweden. My client is now persuading russians to immigrate only because there are not enough of skilled programmers. While there still are people that think one programmer is as good as another, give or take some experience, others have realized that there is a huge difference.Continue reading

It’s been two busy weeks. First attended and presented at Lean Software and Systems 2011 and the week after at Goto Copenhagen 2011. Lot’s of timezones.. but met inspiring people, had plenty of good discussions and and a great time.

Many great presentations and if you have the chance, go see Benjamin Mitchell present.  Also, the   "Kanban Primer Play" (by Arne Roock, Bernd Schiffer and Markus Andrezak) is great way of demonstration real lean and cooperative concepts revolving around a kanban board.

I held a talk about pitfalls implementing kanban. Here are my slides!

This is actually a true story that I am about to tell you. I heard it from a friend talking about his childhood a couple of weeks ago. When I listened to him, I could immediately compare it to many of the software projects I have seen.

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When we develop using agile principles we have learned to "do the simplest thing that can possibly work". What happens if we apply this thought to agile methodology itself?

In my experience the three most important components in a successful application of agile methods are:

• Joy
• WIP limit
• Regular retrospective

I’ll just start out by saying that I’m no Jira expert, in fact I don’t even have Jira admin privileges at my current project. I do however use Jira at least once a day. I manage versions, and create components. I also create stories and epics, and try to maintain sprint and product backlogs in

A short while ago we gathered 24 people to try out the GetKanban game.  Here you see Håkan Forss giving instructions to the teams.

I heard a question if Limited WIP Society was only for invited – absolutely not, that is a great misunderstanding. Maybe the name is somewhat misleading.. . It is open for anyone interested in applying Lean, Kanban or Theory of Constraint principles in software, sometimes due to in limitation in our facilities, we have to limit attendees but it is always on first come first serve basis.

We announce the events on the agilesweden list as well invite earlier attendees. If you are interested in the events, just email me and I’ll put you up on the invitation list. Hope to see you there next time!

Cheers
Mattias

Ps: David Anderson is holding a special Kanban Training for managers in Stockholm June 20-21. Check it out: http://www.crisp.se/kanbanformanagers

Ever had the problem that your dashboard turns up in your laptop display instead of your external display in Ubuntu? xrandr comes to your rescue!

Ever seen a cool feature in software and wondered, "wow – who got the time to do that?"

It happens from time to time that I meet business people who tell me how happy they are that after Agile their teams are now releasing software at a regular rythm. "Before they just never seemed to finish, there was always something left to do". 

While this is a great leap, let’s look at some of the dangers of extending this practice to all the features of your system.

For everyone who asks the question, how do we get started with Kanban. Here comes one way of kick starting a Kanban team.

På Crisp har vi skapat ett Google Spreadsheet där varje rad är en teknik eller metod, såsom TDD, Java, JUnit eller Kanban. Sedan har vi en kolumn för varje konsult, där man efter egen bedömning kan skriva siffran 0-5, där 0 betyder att man är helt okunnig, medan Har hört förkortningen, kanske läst en artikel

Here is a transcript of an interview in conjunction with my Scandev keynote. Det är många som har läst din bok "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" – hur kom det sig att du skrev den? – Det var inte planerat. Det bara råkade bli så. Jag hade feber en helg i 2006 och låg

Here are the slides from my two presentations at Agile Israel 2011. Thanks for attending! Keynote: Scrum and XP – beyond the trenches The Essence of Agile

Here are the slides for my ScanDev keynote "Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to be changed". Thanks for attending! Sample slides:

In this article, I will write an acceptance test in Fitnesse. The test will verify that the shopping cart at the Amazon website actually contains the book I’ve selected to purchase. Instead of using low-level Selenium primitives, I will invent my own domain-specific language using the following three sentences:

• The user search for a book with title "xxx" and adds the book to the shopping cart
• The shopping cart should contain a book with title "xxx" 
• The shopping cart should contain one item

Besides Lean & Agile, we also have experienced developers doing coaching, injecting themselves into teams to build skills "from within".  To avoid confusion (amongst ourselves) we have developed a custom terminology for our coaching work:

Seal		Seals dive deep down and stays down for a long while. They are faithful, they like problems and to stay with them until solved. Equipped with a great sense of smell, they can track bad code miles away and home in their buddies on the prey.
Duck		Ducks will swim along at the surface on the pond, tracking what goes on. Occasionally they take deep dives. Ducks are especially well equipped with improving teams engineering practices and removing complex obstacles. A duck will follow a team until new ducks evolve and can pollinate other areas.
Albatross		Albatrosses are quite noisy and you will find them talking passionately until new food is available.  They like to keep perspective on things. Albatrosses search for buddies at courses and training events. The secret inner wish for an albatross is to return to the pond and to play with the ducks.

.. what kind of coach are you? 🙂

Here are some fun workshops that I will be co-teaching during the next few months. Join us! For more info see www.crisp.se. Kanban Applied co-teaching with Mattias Skarin, March 22-23. Mattias is a colleague & lean/agile coach, he co-authored my book "Kanban and Scrum, making the most of both". (details & registration here) Certified ScrumMaster

At ScanAgile I had the pleasure of talking about options for a Scrum team, ways to pimp your process. A reminder that there always exists two solutions to every problem.

At ScanAgile I really enjoyed the continuous database deploy session with Peter Bell.
It always feels familiar visiting Finland 🙂

Anyway, here are the slides

Here are the slides for my keynote "Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to Be Changed" for AgileDays, Moscow. Really enjoying this conference – awesome people, awesome conversations :o) Sample slides:

It has been 10 years since the Agile Manifesto was written and although I have not been following the agile community for that long, I have been a developer in Scrum teams since 2007. In total, I have done system development for 30+ years so I have lived and breathed both waterfall and RUP before trying Scrum.

So what is on an agile developer’s mind these days? Here are my current reflections on three things today, Agile Development, Architecture and Acceptance Testing.

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I recently ran up against a large XML file and legacy code that manipulated it.. the code had mysteriously stopped working, there were no unit tests and the XML file was large and had no line breaks. What do you do in this situation? Loading the 30MB file in any kind of editor made the

Maybe you didn’t notice it but there has just been a minor earthquake in the software business. The king has lost his crown; it’s a major shift in the hierarchy.

Jag ber om ursäkt för det långa uppehållet sedan förra delen. Förklaringen stavas Valle. Valle är en hund, närmare bestämt en Lagotto Romagnolo. Valle är nu snart ett år gammal, så nu har jag “fritid” igen. Wohoo!

Denna gång skall det handla om något som så gott som alla webappar behöver, nämligen användarhantering och autenticering.

Handen på hjärtat, visst vore det skönt att kunna plugga in en färdig användarhantering, och kunna låta folk logga in med sina redan existerande Facebook/Google/Windows Live/Twitter/whatever-konton?

Om svaret är ja, läs vidare!

Here are the slides from my presentation "Scrum and XP – Beyond the trenches" at JFokus. Thanks for coming! To those of you that weren’t at the presentation, the purpose of the presentation was: Many of the solutions in ”Scrum and XP from the Trenches” turned out to be pretty much universally applicable However, I’ve

Detta är ett designmönster för hur man skriver ett enhetstest som utför samma test samtidigt i flera trådar.

Genom att utnyttja java.util.concurrent på ett smart sätt säkerställer man maximal samtidighet, vilken kan avslöja trådbuggar.

Kom ihåg: det går inte att bevisa att ett program är fritt från trådbuggar. Det handlar om att göra det sannolikt att det fungerar i en flertrådad miljö.

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