A couple of weeks ago I tweeted:

I'm not far from saying; if your #backlog contains features you've already failed. #impactMapping #userStoryMapping #agile #lean

— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) June 2, 2016

In this post I will explain what I meant. And also give a suggestion on how to do something better. I know it’s better - I’ve tested it many times. Just this last hour to be exact :)

I’ve written a few posts on Claudia now and as often I jumped almost too early on the boat - it turns out that there’s significant improvements to both Claudia herself and the entire ecosystem around the main tool.

The main tool Claudia:

automates and simplifies deployment workflows and error prone tasks, so you can focus on important problems and not have to worry about AWS service workflows

In this post I wanted to check out a new tool around Claudia that helps you to build bots for use in chats - specifically for this post in Slack.

AWS Lambda is really cool but it leaves one of those: Oh wow… now what am I going to use this for? feeling. It’s just code that scale infinity without you having to worry about it. It’s a very open playing field.

When I started to learn about lean I naturally heard a lot of Toyota stories - it’s pretty inevitable since the whole thinking comes from there. One thing that I learned about was translated as autonomation. I was pretty sure it was a mistranslation.

But the other week when one of my team members said:

What’s the big deal of many things going on? If I’m blocked on a few items I can equally well just start a few more.

(Not his exact words but still those lines of reasoning)

At that point I saw the time to implement some jidoka (as automation is called in Japanese) in our project

Just a short post on a little thought experiment I’ve been testing out.

I am right now in a big company trying to apply agile and lean practices for software development. We struggle because we meet the current organization that is not built to move in the way we want it to.

[Please fill out the rest of the story from your own experience while I wait]

[…]

[…]

… and now everyone wonders why things take so long and we are not getting more through the system.

[I’ve been through this many times]

I have a problem; I often have a hard time connecting our vision and overarching goals to the items that we are actually working on. I want to be able to pick up anything we do and understand why we are doing this now and how it will take us closer to our goal.

I’ve blogged about this before and in my time in Indonesia I even thought I had a great way of uncovering what those high-flying goals really means, by simply asking this question:

What can we measure to see progress to that goal?

But it turns out, understandably once I think about it, that question is too hard. The gap between the vision and the work is quite simply too big.

To me often the connection between vision and our work reminds me a lot of the business of the underpants gnomes in South...

I’m writing this post in a small crappy hotel room that will be my home for a few days. It’s quite the change after being station at the nice, beach-side hotel where Lean Kanban North America 2016 was held.

I was very honoured to take part in this event - first time for me at Lean Kanban Inc. conference (I think… ) and it was really something special.

I wanted to jot down a few thoughts and comments.

A few weeks back a team mate, developer and agile dude extraordinaire, said something profound:

I’m used to people coming to me with problems they need solved. Not solutions.

It was in a backlog grooming meeting and we were discussing if the item was ready for the development team to start to work on or not. It was. Well and ready. But the people writing the requirements felt that it was not worked through enough.

At the time I just giggled a little about this but it got me thinking and herein lies the heart in how the work with a backlog changes when you start to “do agile” or work in shorter releases.

I got a request by a nice man call Brandon Garlock to share some failure of mine. My contribution will be part of a:

collection of stories about experienced and established developers (such as yourself) and the failures, setbacks and hurdles they overcame over the course of their careers. It will serve as an educational guide, motivation and reference for burgeoning programmers as they learn their craft.

You can read more about the project at http://www.iamascrewup.com/

That sounds both fun, worthy and useful. And I’m very honored to be part of the story. Any experienced developer will tell you that the greatest learning came from overcoming, maybe not always doing, great hurdles.

I asked Brandon if I could share my story on this blog, as that how I mostly write stuff, and he kindly agreed.

This post could be summarized as you summarize an argument among kids; and then he said, so I replied, and then she went, and I’m like SAY WHAT?! but also hmmm… and then I went back home and asked a few friends and then I went Aah!

And then I learned something deeper of what I until that point only was a belief.

The last week I was in a lively and good discussion, again, about user stories and value. I think user stories often are misused as just another tool to write requirements in.

Also we discussed that flow is something that we really should strive for, but to what extent? Over value?!

As often, for me at least, it took a few days to think this through. That and some excellent help from some friends and tweeps.

The last couple of weeks an old “friend” has made its appearance: fear. This time it is a special kind of fear that I’ve seen many times in organizations that started their agile journey: the fear of forgetting important things.

In this post, I wanted to talk a little bit about that just as a concept and then give a few pointers and indicators on what you can do to get rid of that fear.

What’s with this fear really?

Often this particular fear manifests itself by very long lists of work not done, or backlogs that just go on and on. I’ve seen lists of more than 500 items, some of them more than 3 years old.

And yes - they are all important. Prioritized but important.

We don’t want to lose it

Often when I ask about why we should keep it there, the answer is...