Crisp's BlogPage 33

To get a self-organising team we need to get managements fingers out of the jam pot. The only way that can happen truly is if management have full trust for the team. If you face reality, trust is nothing you get for free it’s something you have to deserve. So how can we deserve trust?

I’ve survived my first Rocket Day. RD are our seminars at Crisp where we talk for half a day on a subject of choice. Mine was Test Driven Development with Wicket and Mockito.

I chosed to do a live coding performance as I liked to do a very down-to-earth, practical seminar.

The slides are currently in swedish but I will translat them to english. Later. 😉

However, most of you read swedish so I have published them here.

Clear roles is important in setting expectations. Not the limit (people can indeed master several roles at the same time) but bringing clearity is a way of saying "being a [product owner] this is what I expect from you".

There is a lot of stuff out there on what Scrum role do but very little about what is expected from Agile Leadership. This is the definitions I use.

When I started with Windows programming back in 1990-something, Install Shield was de-facto standard. It wasn’t too bad; installations were reasonably easy to create and quick to execute.

Then Windows Installer entered the arena. All the CPU power that Moore’s Law gave us was consumed by Windows Installer.

Even the simplest program takes ages to install. But in most cases, the flow is straight-forward; accept Express installation, accept Terms & Conditions and GO!

In my favourite setup, this game demonstrates the power of learning by trying over "paralysis by analysis". But it also reveals productivity increase and group dynamics of your team.

Excellent game for quick learning of lean principles. You can do it anywhere and anytime with 20 pennies, some mobile phones and a team of playful people.

In software development where the system persists data in a relational database, it is important to keep track of changes to the versions of the schema.

The importance comes from that you always have several database instances to keep track of. There is the production database, the database for system tests, the database for acceptance test, the database for performance test, the database for development team and the database each developer has.

All these will be at different versions and aligned with different versions of the code.

Here is InfoQ’s video recording of my 90 minute session "10 ways to Screw up with Scrum and XP" at Agile 2008 in Toronto. And here are the slides too. Too bad the slide animations and the audience participation doesn’t show up, and that you mostly see the back of my head (the camera was

In Agile2008 Enthiosys held an interesting walk-by excercise where attendees collaborated to build and price a product.

What’s interesting is that they got through all the steps just using the "Wizdom of the crowds" of the Agile2008 attendees. Also, the techniques used are valuable to check out.

Read full story at their blog..

One of the ancient mysteries of science is why toasted bread is less filling to eat than non-toasted bread.  A revolutionary scientific breakthrough was made this evening bringing us closer to the Answer,

See below for the full report.

At the Agile 2008 conference I was heavily involved in organizing and facilitating the Muzik Masti stage – a fully rigged music stage where people could jam together. It was a wild experiment but worked out really well! People jammed every evening and the final banquet party was a blast :o) Hmmm…. do I need

Here are the slides from my session "Bootstrapping Scrum and XP in a crisis" at Agile 2008 in Toronto.

Here are the slides from my session “Technical Debt – how not to ignore it” at Agile 2008 in Toronto. Translations: Portuguese (thanks Demetrius Nunes)

Here are the slides from my session “10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP” at Agile 2008 in Toronto. Glad that so many of you participated :o) Translations: Brazilian Portuguese (thanks Demetrius Nunes)

Just bumped into Kilim, an actors framework for Java. This could be really important! The most exciting thing I’ve seen in several months!

If you’re in Stockholm Sep 25-26 you might be interested in Deep Lean. It’s a 2 day in-depth course on Lean & Agile & Scrum (see the course agenda). The teachers are Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Jeff Sutherland, and myself. Mary and Tom coined the term Lean Software Development and Jeff invented Scrum (the most

The concept of backlogs and taskboards and self-organizing teams is useful in many domains :o) We had Ron & Chet over for BBQ in conjunction with a TDD training session in Stockholm. A great excuse to try an Agile BBQ! With 30 or so guests this saved me a lot of work as host. Just

Here’s a Japanese translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Thanks Shoichi Goto! A Spanish version of the book is also available. Korean, Portuguese, German, Chinese, French, and Slovak translations are underway. I’m impressed by the agile community! All translations will soon be listed on InfoQ. Feel free to email me (henrik.kniberg

Here’s a Chinese translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Thanks Jacky Li! A Spanish and Japanese version of the book is also available. Korean, Portuguese, German, French, and Slovak translations are underway. I’m impressed by the agile community! All translations will soon be listed on InfoQ. Feel free to email me

What can I say? I am dismayed and utterly embarrassed by the new Swedish law that will unleash previously unheard of snooping of internet traffic crossing our borders. The only decent way to now communicate by email with people within or outside Sweden is to use encryption. The law allows the Swedish agencies to share

When talking about Scrum to business people I very often get the question "How do I deal with fixed priced contracts when doing Scrum?"

It struck me today no one who ever asked me this, has come to the conclusion that doing fixed priced contracts could be wrong way to go altogether.

And that is a bit scary.

Here’s a draft version of the Spanish translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Good work Ángel Medinilla! Chinese, Korean, German, and Japanese translations are underway, I’ll let you know when they are done. UPDATE (June 10): Within 1 day of publishing this blog entry I received an offer to translate the

The slides from my speech (productive teams) are now available at: docs.google.com/Presentation

How do you do to make a team *really* productive ?
– Well you don´t, at least if you´re not a team-member.
From the outside you can only facilitate, provide the right circumstances for a team to be productive.
But if you are a team-member, well, then there is a lot you can do.
And the most important thing, in my opinion, is to have an positive attitude.

Here are top three tools for any Scrum project

Yesterday I held this Scala presentation at Javaforum in Gothenburg. About 140 persons attended the evening seminar. All in all I think my presentation went pretty well, but Niclas Nilsson pointed out afterwards that I got the definition of Duck Typing wrong. I have corrected this in my S5 slides, which are in Swedish. I’m

Steve Yegge, who works for Google (hehe), continues to push for dynamic languages, most notable JavaScript, in his latest blog, which is a transcript of an hour long speech. My god is he rambling, on and on, it requires a lot of speed reading to spot the interesting parts. He does, for example, point out

This last weekend I succumbed to internal pressure and signed up for a twitter account. I’ve looked at the whole Twitter bonanza for a while without really grokking what it could be used for. Meme spotting, perhaps. Getting to know what your closest friends are doing in real-time, perhaps. But what could you possibly say

mats@matslw25:/home/matsh$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}’ | sort -rn 102 cd 56 ls 50 exit 49 more 42 ll 33 mysql 22 ssh 17 ps 14 svn 12 sudo 12 ant 11 rm 9 kill 8 gedit 6 which 6 man 4 touch 4 mv 4 less 4 grep 4

Here are the slides from my session "10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP", from the JavaForum conference in Malmö. I’ve done this session at other conferences, but updated the slides a little bit each time. Interesting that so many people like to hear about how to get it all wrong :o)