Crisp's BlogPage 25

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.

Continue reading

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.

Nyfiken? Läs på…

Here follows a crash course how-to visualize the health of your CI server or live system. Buy a TellStick from Kjell & Company,  http://www.kjell.com/content/templates/shop_main_details.aspx?item=50200&path=&sms_ss=favorites&at_xt=4d336e97c742b49d,1. Buy a remote switch from Kjell & Company, http://www.kjell.com/content/templates/shop_main_details.aspx?item=50219&path=&sms_ss=favorites&at_xt=4d336ec00712cf8f,0. Buy your favorite lava lamp/warning light that will indicate the status of your project/live system. Install the TellStick software as described at

The Bun protocol ("Bullprotokollet" in Swedish) is a lightweight, decentralized request routing protocol. It is designed to be the simplest possible way to handle requests that are shared by a distributed group of people.

I introduced this to Crisp a few years ago because we had just create a lightweight recruitment process, and later when we were creating a lightweight sales process I saw many similarities. So I did an "extract to interface" refactoring and created this "Bun Protocol" :o)

• "Hmmm… we’re starting to get a lot of requests to teach training courses. How are we going to manage these?"
• "Let’s use the Bun Protocol for now!"
• "OK!"

We have used this protocol for all kinds of external client requests for years now, and it works surprisingly well, so I’d like to share it.

I have rounded up 10  (ahum..)  12 different kanban boards as used in operations, development, sales and marketing. Maybe it can help to spark some ideas.

I didn’t make the boards perfect, you need to think about what WIP limits and policies that fits you. After all, a system is best if it has been designed by the people who works in that context.

You can download it here

Hi there.

Just wanted to show you our latest widget: The TDD Pen.

You may think that it is an ordinary pen but it is not. When you hold this pen you immediately become a superb programmer. Not only will you write tests that cover all your code, you will also write bug-free code and refactor everything into stunning beauty!

You only have to figure out how to hold a pen in one hand and still type the keyboard without being embarrassingly slow. 🙂

Here are the slides for my session "Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both" at Øredev. Also includes the "extra" topics that didn’t fit into the timebox. Enjoy! There’s also a video recording of the whole session.

Here are the slides for my keynote at Øredev: "Software Development – an invisible proess (or The Power of Visualization)". Thanks for coming!

There are a lot of interesting experimentation going on within the kanban community regarding visualization. While I truly support this (seeing the problem is the key to understanding it’s nature) and find this promising and exciting, I doesn’t correspond all that well to the problems team’s I have helped have had to struggle with.

Let’s face it:

• What good do WIP limits do if there is no one ready to take a stand for them?
• What’s the added benefit if visualizing a problem that no one cares about solving?

So a question (going through my mind for quite a while) is: Shouldn’t we be expecting something from management, and if so, then what?

Here is the Russian translation of my book Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both. Thanks Mariia Yevgrashyna, Tanya Kobzar, Sergiy Movchan, Artjom Serdyuk, Borys Lebeda, Aleksey Solntsev, Alina Marusyk, Alexander Zhovnuvaty, Aleksey Goncharenko, Lina Shishkina, Roman Kononov, Tim Yevgrashyn, Yaroslav Gnatyuk, and Andrey Bibichev. If anyone else wants to make translations feel

Here are the slides from my seminar "Vad är ett agilt projekt" (What is an agile project) at PMI in Stockholm. I was happy to see so many participants, and impressed that you managed to stay awake & engaged despite the fact that it was an evening seminar with very comfortable chairs :o) "Vad är

We got some really cool workshops coming up during the next couple of months together with some of the "founding fathers" of Lean and Agile software development :o) David Anderson is the pioneer of Kanban in software development and author of the book Kanban – Successful evolutionary change for your technology business. Nov 8 –

Have you ever dealt with time reports? Filled them in? Approved them? Shuffled them around? Did it feel like well spent time? Can you imagine a world without time reports? Here’s the story about how we got rid of time reports at the company described in Scrum and XP from the Trenches. How we got

Ekonomen George Akerlof skrev 1970 en uppsats som beskrev informationsassymmetri i vad han kallade "Market For Lemons". Det exempel han använde var marknaden för begagnade bilar, där säljaren alltid vet mer om den bil som säljs än potentiella köpare. Säljaren vet oftast hur välskött den är, hur den körts, etc.

Köparen, däremot, har svårare att avgöra bilens kvaliteter. Visst, det finns ofta en servicehandbok han kan läsa, men hur är bilen körd? Buskörd av en yngling, eller av en försiktig 47-åring?

Detta skapar informationsassymmetri, vilket ger intressanta följder. Säljaren av en bra bil vill ha bra betalt, medan köparen sällan är villig att betala mer än för en bil som har genomsnittskvalitet. Detta gör att säljare av välskötta bilar missgynnas, vilket gör att de inte tycker det är lönt besväret. Kanske försöker de sälja bilen på annat sätt, exempelvis till en bekant som litar på kvaliteten. Detta betyder att de bästa bilarna sakta men säkert försvinner från den öppna marknaden, eftersom genomsnittspriset bara sjunker. Kvar blir bara dåliga bilar, och då har man fått en "Market For Lemons".

Denna terori om informationsassymetri gav Akerlof och två andra nobelpris i ekonomi 2001.

Men har detta någon som helst relevans för konsultmarknaden? Ja, jag menar det.

På mitt nuvarande uppdrag fick vi nyligen stora problem efter vi släppt senaste releasen. Jag försökte hjälpa till, men prestandaproblem är inte min starka sida. Det blev lätt att jag ville säga "Det där kan jag faktiskt inte".

Men vaddå "faktiskt"? Som om jag kunde allt annat, förutom prestandaproblem?

Here are the slides from my keynote “The Essence of Agile” from AgileEE 2010 in Kiev. Thanks for a great conference! Tbe Essence of Agile – PDF format The Essence of Agile – PPTX format Here’s a nice summary transcript of the session (thx Alexander Beletsky). Here is a video recording (minus the first 10

We have three interesting events coming up:

Kanban Training with David Anderson, Nov 8-9
– Learn how to introduce Kanban in your organisation from the source: David Anderson.

Kanban Coach Camp with David Anderson & Mattias Skarin, Nov 10-11
– As a kanban practitioner, evolve your skill in incremental improvement

Second generation Lean product development – as if economics matter, Don Reinertsen, Dec 2-3
– As a CEO or business owner, learn the principles and economics driving product development

We are especially pleased to welcome Don Reinertsen to Stockholm, he has been on our "people that we really have to bring to Stockholm" list for a long time! Don is author of one of our favorite books "Managing the Design Factory", and his teachings have been a key source of inspiration to other thought leaders such as Mary Poppendieck and David Anderson.

Don is keen on making us differentiate between Lean for manufacturing and Product development, and points out that understanding the economics involved helps us improve way beyond charters and improve our decision making. Be aware, you will not leave untouched.