Crisp's BlogPage 26

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.

  …or "how we learned the right process needed to solve our problems".

I presented at Lean & Kanban Europe yesterday. It was great to meet people from so many disciplines, Here are my slides.

Once upon a time all we had was java.util.Date and it was not good… then Sun introduced java.util.Calendar, and it got worse! How often do you sit at your keyboard and wonder how you can avoid writing date manipulation code just because you hate to look at the resulting mess? Maybe your project uses service or utility classes to hide the ugliness, but you know it’s still there. Well, stop hiding, there’s something better: Joda-Time!

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Here are the slides from Mary Poppendieck’s seminar "Social-Technical Systems" at Crisp. And here’s the video presentation on "The surprising truth about what motivates us". Mandatory for anyone involved in managing people or setting up incentive systems! Thanks for coming!

First week of September we had Christian visiting us and demonstrating how Danish National IT & Telecom agency have utlized Agile contracts in real projects. I took the time to ask some questions to Christian about Agile contracts.

I have had the pleasure to hold a lightning talk for the Agila Sverige conference in Stockholm about “Scaling Scrum in the Enterprise with Kanban”.The talk went well but the format (10 minutes) made it more like an elevator pitch. You can find an enhanced – somewhat longer – version of the slides used during

To: English readers, this blogpost is about the ideal team-room, and I might post a translated version later.
Alltför ofta underskattas vikten av den fysiska miljön för effektivt teamsamarbete.
En konsekvens av detta förutom dåligt teamsamarbete är ett enormt och ständigt otillfredställt behov av konferensrum.
Med ett bra team-rum rätt utrustat minimerar detta behov, samtidigt som man får effektiva team. 
I denna bloggpost går jag igenom vilka krav jag tycker man skall ställa på en bra teamarbetsmiljö och hur man uppfyller dem.

Here are the slides from my keynote "The Thinking Tool Called Agile" from the Lean/Agile/Scrum conference in Zurich. The Thinking Tool Called Agile – PDF The Thinking Tool Called Agile – Powerpoint The slides from the value stream workshop with Mary Poppendieck and myself will be up on the LAS site soon.

In this day and age with unstable economics, constant change in how to work with software, new languages and databases popping up from nowhere, it is important to cement yourself into your position at work.

Follow this guide and be sure of never being fired, no matter what.Continue reading

Here are the slides from my keynote at the Scrum Gathering in Cape Town. What to do when Scrum doesn’t work – PDF What to do when Scrum doesn’t work – Powerpoint What to do when Scrum doesn’t work – Article Positive atmosphere and lots of laughs, really enjoyed the audience! The whole topic felt

Here are the slides from my deep-dive workshop at the Scrum Gathering, Cape Town: Kanban for Scrum practitioners, PDF format Kanban for Scrum practitioners, Powerpoint format Thanks for attending! Lots of interesting questions and insights came up during the workshop. Sample slide:

Hi

There is much talk about designing Agile contracts. What is missing I feel is experience from the field. So I brought in Christian Vindinge Rasmussen @  Danish Ministry of IT and Telecom, who have used Agile contracts as a client to software project for four years. Enjoy!

www.crisp.se/agilecontracts

On Sep 16-17 Tom & Mary Poppendieck will once again come to Stockholm and teach a lean course with me. "Leading Lean Software Development" is aimed at leaders in organisations that are serious about succeeding with Lean software development. The course also includes an evening seminar on Sep 15. Save SEK 2000 by registering this

Here are the slides for my session Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both at Agile 2010, Orlando. Thanks for participating! Slides in PDF format – if you don’t have powerpoint Slides in Powerpoint format – if you want the animations  Translations: Japanese slides in Powerpoint format (thx Kiro Harada) For those who

There’s a Scala User Group in Gothenburg that had several meetings during this summer.  In one of the meetings the group solved a Kata named KataRomanNumerals (A Kata is a small problem that you do over and over again to learn) The KataRomanNumerals says you should write a function to convert from normal numbers to

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.

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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,