Crisp's BlogPage 26

June and July have been busy months. I’d like to share a few highlights from other speakers in USI 2010 in Paris and the Lean Software and Systems gathering in London on which I had the honor of presenting.

Long term sustainable releases with 99% backward compatibility [USI 2010]
 
In "The challenges of long-term software quality in open source" Jürgen Höller  described how they worked in the Spring team to achieve 99% backward compatibility  by avoiding revolution and using evolution, even when radical new features are fit in. During the last seven years the Spring team have absorbed 4 major JDK’s and 4 generations of J2EE.  I was sure this was possible and Jürgens team shows it is. A challenge to all of us the next time we want to restart from scratch 🙂

Learning to Learn – becoming a Lean startup [Lean SSC]

In this presentation Damon Morgan shows how they as a company now have reached a level where they continuously do set based engineering of business ideas. He showed using their Quote web page how experimenting with not so obvious changes lead to a jump in business leads. I noted another experience which I have seen –  when you get flow going, estimation is redundant.

Using Kanban to get knowledge and continuously improve [Lean SSC]

Benjamin Mitchell blew me away with his presentation. I had some seriously great laughs 🙂 But there are some serious learnings as well. Benjamin has done some great efforts in experimenting with statistical process control in software. For example, he could demonstrate that a bulk part of the product portfolio wasn’t generating value to cover the complexity it brought by.  But what does help if there isn’t a thinking process in the organization capable of absorbing these learnings? I will highlights his takeaways,  which we all can improve on:

• THINK for yourself in your context
• Get KNOWLEDGE by studying your process as a system, end to end from the customer’s point of view
• RUN EXPERIMENTS  to learn while you work

…  If you have the chance, go see him.:)

Unit testing of the GUI is not the same as unit testing through the GUI. We are interested in the logic of the GUI rather than the placement and order of the GUI widgets on screen.

Testing the logic makes the tests less sensitive to changes in presentation but introduces the problem of JavaScript dependent features. AJAX is in the vogue so we wish to be able to do testing of that too without being forced to start a browser. There is some support for AJAX in Wicket that may be reached using the test framework that is part of Wicket. However, it is not straightforward to use and there are some pitfalls.

Here are three examples of avoiding those, one for each of the check box, drop down and radio group controls.Continue reading

Jeff Sutherland often talks about ready-ready. It sounded clear the first time I heard it. But I have recently got a deeper understanding of the concept. Here is my new understanding and why I think it’s important for successful development.

A customer once described the effect I was having on the organization as a “vitamin bomb”. It is a pretty cool comment to get in term of performance appraisal, though it was not quite what I was expecting (“more efficient” or “pleased customers” would have been sufficient). What was I doing as an agile coach

  At the NDC 2010 conference I ran a workshop demonstrating the  principles behind Kanban (showing there is more too it than a visual workspace..) . My approach was to do it using a set of games.

Anyway, here are the slides

Ps:  A great conference for an old MSoft geek 🙂

Here are the slides from my Kanban & Value Stream Mapping workshop at Agile Spain 2010 in Madrid. Thanks for participating!

Here are the slides from my keynote "The Essence of Agile" at Agile Spain 2010, Madrid. Basically a whole week’s course compressed into a one hour lecture, worked out even better than I had hoped :o) Impressed by the turnup, 300 people is good for being the first agile conference in Spain!

In an earlier post, I had attached slides from a presentation on JavaFX that contained some code examples. I discovered that at least one of them, the ball game, stopped working when I switched to JavaFX 1.3.

I would say it is a quite subtle difference.

What happened was that the onKeyPressed and onKeyReleased were not called. My immediate reaction was that it was due to some bug in JavaFX but yesterday I realized what had happened.

Continue reading

The next Limited WIP Society meeting (Stockholm, Sweden) will be focused on experiences from the trenches. Six speakers testing Kanban will do 10min lightning talks, sharing their top 3 experiences.

When: Monday May 31:st 18.00 – 20.00
Where: Avega’s office, Stockholm

How do I join? mattias.skarin( at )crisp.se

Yesterday I held a presentation on the subject "Agile and Architecture" at EDB. They have an internal competence network which meet

regularly and discuss agile processes and methods.

My point in this presentation was that every system has an architecture that determines the qualities of it. Given a set of functions, different architectures will give these functions different qualities, such as performance and cost of maintenance.

This is still true, no matter if you do waterfall, RUP or Scrum.

It was a blast meeting the Agile community in Estonia. What a vibe!
More to come on that subject .)

Anyway, here are my slides:  "Mind over matter"

Cheers

My book "Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both" is now available in Japanese. Good work Hiroki Kondo & Midori Daida!

Working at different clients, I often see the need to have many Scrum teams working together towards a common goal – be it a large project or initiative.The issue with having many Scrum teams quickly becomes a question of how do you keep the coherence – the actual control over the project. So many issues,

This week, we have Mary Poppendieck with us. She held an evening seminar which inspired me to think about the differences between Lean and traditional project management. I also am inspired by the questions I get from my spouse on this.

I thought that it would be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison between the two. I am no process expert, I am just a programmer who has been the subject of 30 years of different processes. I have seen DOD 2167, RUP, PROPS, PEJL, XP, Scrum and a few others. So this is just my humble opinion.

See also what Henrik Kniberg wrote earlier in his blog.Continue reading

This other day, I stumbled upon an article by John Seddon  – "Rethinking Lean Service" which had been laying around in my disk space for a while.

It struck me how these principles can be deployed using a Kanban system:

• design against customer demand : create the kanban board starting with the demand
• focus on value creation over cost elimination: set highest priority in completing work before accepting new. Use WIP limits to ensure that is happening.
• know the actual time it takes to complete the transaction as "one stop" : learn the cycle time of flow and use this to plan resources rather than spent time

Maybe Kanban is well suited for services?

If you enter the Crisp office you will see these two A3 papers on the wall (click picture for bigger version)

Here is an english translation of these pictures.

The first picture is titled "What is Crisp?". It defines our purpose.
The second picture is titled "Crisp strategy". It defines how the company works and why.

Read on if you are curious about how and why we created these simple A3 pictures, and why it has had such a strong impact on our company.

Next week is full of interesting and fun events! Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck, and Jeff Sutherland are doing the following events with me in Stockholm: Monday – Tuesday: Certified ScrumMaster course Tuesday evening: Introduction to Lean Software Development Wednesday: Deep Lean The events are all fully booked but you can still register and get on

Me and Henrik’s book have now been translated to french.

Through the admirable effort of Claude Aubry, Frédéric Faure, Antoine Vernois and Fabrice Aimetti, you can read it here:

http://henrik-kniberg.developpez.com/mattias-skarin/livre/scrum-kanban/

Mary Poppendieck used this definition in our Leading Lean Software Development course a few months ago. Very nice and concise definition of lean. What is Lean? Deliver continually increasing customer value Expending continually decreasing effort In the shortest possible timeframe With the highest possible quality A journey, not a destination.

(see bigger version here)

How do you go about converting a development team from Scrum to Kanban? Can we benefit from incremental improvements in projects under high pressure?

Here is a case study of a team who transformed from Scrum to Kanban and managed to save a derailing project. I hope it can inspire others to experiment and improve.

Some of the things I learned:

• Incremental improvement  works, even under high pressure
• Key problems are typically cross functional. The better you are in building a cross functional momentum – the faster you’ll overcome them
• Kanban works as a tool for incremental improvement
• Quality over speed – always more important than the tool

(… and I have a far way to go until I can order a proper cup of tea and a croissant 🙂

Anyway, here’s the link:

Converting a Scrum team to Kanban

I am currently, after going overland from Scala Days in Lausanne by hitching, train and boat across the English Channel, in London for the NoSQL Europe conference today and tomorrow. I will try to blog from every session. It might be a bit incoherent and inconsistent, but it’s all I can offer. You can also

On behalf of the Agile Alliance I’m happy to announce that the Agile Manifesto is now open for translation! So far it has been translated to Swedish and Japanese, more translations are underway. See the Agile Manifesto Translation Program for more info & how to contribute.

Nu finns Agila Manifestet på svenska! Detta dokument skrevs 2001 av 17 experter inom mjukvaruutveckling och startade en ny epok inom branchen. Författarna bakom detta formade samtidigt organisation Agile Alliance med visionen “We support those who explore and apply Agile principles and practices to make the software industry productive, humane, and sustainable.” Som styrelseledamot i

The other day I held a three-hour workshop, an introduction to JavaFX for some colleagues. The great thing about doing it, is that it forced me to answer the question: why is it necessary to create a new language just for GUI?

(Sorry to international readers. This is a comment to a notice in a Swedish magazine. That’s why I write his in Swedish)
I dagens Computer Sweden skriver Lars Danielsson om två stora Agila projekt och vad de har gemensamt. Som insider kan jag avslöja fler saker de har gemensamt.

Is this years final series in the Swedish hockey league, there is one team that standing out from the crowd. They are more stable, persistent and thorough in every part of their game than the other teams.

Today I stumbled over this comment from one of the players. It highlights a mindset I have seen in both software and sports team that basically felt unstoppable.

"If I am going to think about this victory on the way home? No. I am only going to think about the details that is going to make us better in the next game" 
           – Jimmie Ölvestad

Join me in this exclusive 3-day workshop where experienced Agile/Kanban practitioners, coaches & project managers share knowledge. The workshop is led by David Anderson and limited to 8 participants. Click here for more info & registration. Only 2 seats left!

The TDD Tetrahedron has reached version 1.0.

As I write this, we have a course on advanced TDD with Robert C Martin as teacher.  I took the opportunity to introduce the first version to the participants.
 
Uncle Bob and the TDD Tetrahedron.

Guess what. Toyota uses the waterfall method for software development – and now they’re trying to figure out how to go Lean.

Surprised? So was I!

Read on…