This is the final post in my series on the problem that a lot of people sees meetings as not being real work. I think this has to do with the meetings being bad and badly conducted. So we need to improve on the quality of the meetings to make them more interesting feel worthwhile. In these blog posts (I and II) I have applied the Switch Framework on how to make meetings better and more interesting to attend. In the previous two posts we’ve talked about reasoning with the Rider (our logical side) and tried to get the Elephant (our lazy, subconsious part) over to our side. In this post we’re trying to smooth the path that they are walking down to make the change journey even easier to take. Let’s go! Tweak the environment The reasoning under this heading is that if you change the situation, the context we...

This is the second post in my series where I try to apply the Switch framework to the problem of people thinking that meetings aren’t not proper work. Read the first post here. When we left of we had done some reasoning with the Rider of the Elephant to try to appeal to the logical side of things; we tried to find people holding great meetings and copy them, make checklists for good meetings and best practices that we could follow and even pointed to a bright and wonderful future where every meeting was great. This post talks to the Elephant - the subconsious that is run by primal forces, it’s lazy and rather just do what is fun. We need a totally different approach here. Keep in mind the size of the Elephant - it will go the other way if it wants to. Find the feeling The first thing...

Who’s up for a meeting? Whoopie - another meeting! Experienced that? No - didn’t think so either. Most of us hate meetings, and sadly not without reason many times. But a thing that really bugs me is when this culture is classifying meetings as non-work. In our business there seems to be lot of people (cough developers cough) that think that the only real work is pushing down the keys on a keyboard. Preferably writing code. This can take strange expressions sometimes; we seems to think that writing long, emails and sending them back and forth is work but not sitting in a meeting and clear stuff out instead. Strange indeed. And furthermore - we want to meet more. We want to have a lot of frequent face-to-face interactions. This is in the core of agile and common sense. In fact - it’s my best tips to becoming more agile....

I have a confession to make; i think i’m turning into a data-guy. No, not a computer-guy - I’ve been that a long time. Rather it’s that boring dude that keep asking for numbers, measurements and saying “yes, but how do you KNOW that” all the time. But I’m on a program to recovery from some of the boredom-parts. It’s called Simplicity and Visualisation. To be a little more serious I think that collecting data and then do small experiments based upon them rather than you feelings is the way to make controlled, continuous improvements. This is all very Toyota Kata (or rather Kanban Kata or even the scientific method) like but that’s exactly where I’m aiming. Establish a target condition or goal Make sure you really know where you stand today. Gather data to be sure Take small experimental steps towards the goal Measure and evaluate against your goal based on the numbers In this post...

When team transition from an iteration-based (i.e. Scrum) to a more flow-based (i.e. Kanban) approach to software development they often stand 3 big risks; no planning, no retrospectives and no celebrations. Which, when you look at it, just leaves work work work. Exactly - I wouldn’t want that either. In this post I’ll show you a little trick I picked up to handle the last one; no celebrations. I know I’ve stolen it from somewhere, but for the life of me I cannot remember where. Please enlighten me and I’ll attribute you accordingly. [UPDATE] I picked this thing up from Joakim Sundén (see comments). Yet another thing he has thought me. Thanks dude! In iteration based approaches to software development there’s a natural end point, goal for the current work; the end of the sprint or iteration. That’s one of the really great things about Scrum I think. The little...

Yes, it’s this is another “hey this is a cool feature of Visual Studio 2012” post. If you know all about the new Test Explorer and how to get NUnit, xUnit and by association SpecFlow to work with it - you can stop reading here. For me it took awhile to get up and running. I don’t remember where I first read about it but I remember that I was happy to read that Visual Studio 2012 comes with a new Test Explorer. What’s really cool about it is that it’s no longer limited to just MsTest tests, but can run NUnit, xUnit … you name it. This means that my SpecFlow tests can be run from the new Test Explorer as well. You know, all SpecFlow actually does is translating the Gherkin lines you write into unit tests of your framework of choice. It should just work. So they said… Imagine my disappointment when...

Sweden is a great country! We even have laws that states that everybody has the right to five (5!) weeks vacation every year. Many people even have 6 or more. And most of us take at least 3-4 of them in a row during the summer - the best time to be in Sweden. That's all good but what happens at the offices do you think? Well that's easy to figure out. There's no-one there. And since not everyone have vacation at the exact same time (normally) this can go on for about 2 months or more. This of course poses a problem for teams that want to work close together. Even if you don't have 7 weeks vacation in your country you may find the reasoning in this post interesting. I learned a lot when I thought about this (and from brilliant people I talked to). At the last...

This is a small tribute to a great tool. Mostly for fun but there are some great stuff in the latest release of SpecFlow. Check it out. And get the tool from the Visual Studio Gallery, but be sure to uninstall any previous versions first. For more serious look on some of the code features, head over to Vagif Abilov’s excellent post. Marcus enters the office. He boots up the computer and opens Visual Studio 2012. With a smile he thinks about that not only Vs2010 solutions opens nicely in Vs2012 but also the new release of SpecFlow works fine for both. Where was he now again. There were something about the feature file. He opens it and due to the nice color coding of lines, Marcus is reminded of one of the steps that he didn’t had written a step definition for. “Then the result should be 120”… “This...

I just ended my biggest coaching assignment in my career. So far. It started in January and aimed to roll out agile in a organization of 120 (and then some) people – 60 on the business side and 60 on the IT-side. I first thought of writing about how it all went down and what we did, but I then realized that I would reveal way too much about the customer and it’s organization. So instead I’ll write about a couple of things that I’ve experienced and thought of. Hopefully you can learn something from this - i know I did learn a lot. Let me first state that not everything in this article is based from experience from this one client. If you read this and work there; not all of this happened at your place. Know this - it’s the same at a lot of places where I’ve...

I got an email from a colleague a couple of weeks back. We were members of the same team for awhile this last autumn. He (and the rest of the team) are great programmers - way better than me. I had some difficulties to keep in step with them, but to some extent that had to do with F# being the language of choice. A first for me! We had a lot of discussions about TDD and if it’s feasible or pay off. This project made me realize that TDD done backwards (writing unit tests after the production code) is not only NOT TDD but also doesn’t pay off.  But as I am dunked deeply in the BDD pool I suggested that we’ve take a look at that and get started that way. I never got through there… So I was very happy when he wrote me an email with a link to an article that...