Individuals and interactions or processes and tools?

As the developer cheerfully runs over to work with Sue in the deployment team, with an extra cup of coffee, he is stopped by Charlie, the manager of the deployment team.

-Hey, where are you going?
-To see Sue about the deployment, the developer answered.
-Have you written a ticket?
-What? No, I’m gonna talk to Sue and we’ll do the deployment together as usual.
-Sorry, Charlie said, we have implemented a ticketing system last week, and you need a ticket. We can’t have developers running all over the place disturbing our team all the time!

True story.

Codekvast is a tool for detecting Truly Dead Code in your Java application. Truly Dead Code is code that is in production, but has not been used for a significant time. Codekvast has been lurking in the spare-time realm for too long. Now the project has eventually been granted some full-time development effort, with the initial

The other week I got the idea to create simple conversation cards. Each card represents an agile practice, a conversation topic or an abstract theory. Now I’ve drawn 96 cards. I simply couldn’t stop 🙂

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Last week i quit my assignment at Spotify. I was there to help and act as a stand-in for Joakim Sundén while he was on paternity leave. He’s now back in the saddle as Agile Coach in the More Than Music Tribe.  I had the pleasure to work closely with the Agile Coach Christian Vikström on Spotify and together we have been coaching the Browse, Growth and Customer Support squads. A was also a member of the tribe management team, and together we did some new interesting stuff.

It’s has been fascinating and fantastic to work with such dedicated people and a product that has such a traction. Spotify is also really trying to build an awesome and agile organization and culture that can win and sustain in the long run. What is there to do at such a fantastic company? That’s a reasonable question. A lot I discovered. Spotify is shock full of super smart people, but many of them has not worked there for long, many of them has not worked long at all, teams have been newly formed and are under constant change. Simply put: even Spotify needs a lot of basic agile coaching.

When I now look back at what we did during these last 8 month I see a lot of tools and experiences that I think others also can find useful. During the next couple of month I will share them through this blog. Hope you will find them useful. Here’s the planned list:

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The Gist

• ToDo has a flow. It knows about cycle times and about being DONE. Trello does not.
• ToDo has Planning Poker Estimates. Trello does not have any estimates.
• ToDo has automatic burn up charts. Trello does not.
• ToDo has swim lanes which groups cards by your dimensions. Trello does not.
• ToDo has Work-In-Progress limits. Trello does not.
• ToDo has upgrade possibilities to the full tool set of Projectplace. Trello has a bunch of plugins from different vendors of various quality.

Already convinced? Sign up for ToDo by Projectplace! Want to know more? Read on.

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At my current project we use a Google spreadsheet to manage our backlogs. This works really well for storing and sharing the backlog, but it’s not very good for visualizing it. So we print out the stories on cards by copying and pasting each row into a document table cell and reformatting, adding extra labels, and manually inserting priority. Well, that’s what we did the first couple of times, until I found David Vujic’s fantastic Index Card Generator for Google spreadsheets (http://davidvujic.blogspot.se/2011/06/visa-vad-du-gor-eller-dude-wheres-my.html).

Except, we have multiple backlogs in one sheet, our column names aren’t the same, and we use a different layout for the cards. Here’s how we customized David’s script!Continue reading

MongoDB är en schemalös, dokumentorienterad databas som har fått stor popularitet i den agila världen bland annat därför att man inte behöver underhålla något databasschema.

MongoDBs schemalöshet gör att många leds att tro att Continuous Delivery blir en promenad i parken, eftersom det ju inte behövs några datamigreringar när man driftsätter en ny version av koden!

Rent teoretiskt är detta sant, men är ett sluttande plan in i Land of Crappy Code™ !

För att slippa onödig komplexitet i form av varierande utseende på lagrade domänobjekt beroende på deras ålder, rekommenderar jag att man utför regelrätta datamigreringar även när man använder MongoDB!

Jag rekommenderar även att datamigreringen är en del av applikationen — till skillnad från skript som skall köras vid sidan av innan applikationsstart — helt enkelt för att eliminera risken för misstag.

Jag har i mitt sidoprojekt Varmfront.nu utvecklat en kompakt liten lösning som i MongoDB implementerar det som Flyway gör för SQL.

Mönstret bygger på Spring Data for MongoDB och Spring JavaConfig, och migreringarna är skrivna i Java. That’s right folks, no XML here 😀

Läs vidare, så får du se hur man kan göra!

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This is MIKE, The Daily Meeting Microphone. MIKE is a concept. An idea.  Captured on a poster. If you like it; Click the image below (or click here to download the powerpoint). Print it on A3 format. Put it on the wall next to your team wall or in the office corridor. Done 🙂 If

OK, nothing beats face to face. But suppose you’re not in the same location – because you’re on the phone or a skype call – and you still want to write and draw together. Or you’re on a distributed team and want a simple shared workspace, just like you would if you were in the same

This a picture of me used on our front web page. If you don’t see it there, try reloading.

What’s the matter with me on the picture?  What am I trying to say?

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Here is a detailed example of a fairly typical 2-tier Kanban board, for teams that know the basics of Kanban and are taking their first steps towards implementing it in practice. Translations: German Japanese Turkish It is sort of like a code example, or a condensed Kanban patterns repository. Print it out and use it

For those of you interested in Lean problem solving techniques, Tom Poppendieck and I have created an A3 problem solving example and template. Feel free to use as you please.

Check out Scrum Checklist version 2.0!

Cross-functional team doesn’t mean everybody has to know everything – this seems to be a common misinterpretation though. Cross-functional just means that the team as a whole has all skills needed to build the product, and that each team member is willing to do more than just their own thing. Are you unsure if your

Here’s a great list of agile tools on Mike Cohn’s User Stories site! Primarily for product backlog and user story management. Only problem is that there are way too few reviews so far. Are you using an agile tool? Go submit a review now and spread the link to your friends! Let’s help build this

Here are top three tools for any Scrum project

NOTE – this checklist is deprecated. The latest version is here.

Here’s a first draft of a simple checklist for those of you that are doing Scrum (or believe so…).

Many people use a spreadsheet to house their Scrum Product Backlog. That works quite fine. However, during sprint planning meetings it is usually much more effective to use physical index cards. See my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches for the reasoning behind this. Here’s a simple tool that generates printable index cards in

An agile coach should never leave home without his Agile Toolkit! Mine is much sloppier. The pretty one above belongs to my co-coach David Barnholdt.

For those of you that do Scrum, here’s a simple tool that generates printable index cards in A5 format directly from your Excel-based product backlog.