I’m turning 40 years old today. This is a letter to Marcus 60 years old. Or maybe a new version of my 20 year old self, if I ever invent a time traveling machine.

If you’re not me you can still read it of course. But then think of that wrote this to myself. It’s pretty self-focused. Don’t think badly of me for that. Instead write one of these for yourself. Very inspiring actually!

Dear Marcus (future and past),

today 2012-10-09 you turned 40 years old. You are in a place of your life that you wouldn’t dream of and never planned to. I thought I’ll sum it up for you if you ever forget it (chances are!).

The main point is that there is not “but…” in your description. Everything is like it is and there’s no ominous but that throw it all over end.

You have Elin in your...

This is the second post on my top 5 ways of making sure that your agile change initiative succeeds. But this is not ideas made up in my head (MY GOD - the horrors…) but things that I’ve tried and failed miserably with. Over and over. And learned a lot from.

This is the list - in order of importance:

1. Get a great “Or else”-reason for doing this change
2. Sit together (this post)
3. Let them change how they work
4. Support the initiative
5. Use visualized data to improve

2 - Sit Together

Now that I’ve got your attention from the last scary post… We turn to a much much simpler thing. But it’s still super-important, entering number 2 on my top 5 change tricks.

Are you ready? Pens out? Here we go:

Sit together!

There. You read it here first. I’m...

This is a topic I rant talk about quite a lot nowadays it seems. I feel like an old LP with a scratch (just that analogy probably dates me pretty good I guess). But I do it because I see it missing from a lot of agile change initiatives, big and small. And they are then doomed to fail.

Just to be sure - I make no claim of being the inventor of this; I’ve picked it up here and there and everywhere. Not even sure where anymore. Half Lean, half agile, half right-shifting and half the Kanban Method I guess. For whatever I’ve learned I’m eternally grateful. What I’m saying is this; if anything strikes you as good it was probably invented elsewhere. If it’s bad - it’s probably me.

In this post, I wanted to quickly write down some ways of making sure that...

At my current client I am assigned 3 teams. Two of them have everything set up for a great team; they are seated together, they have a full time product owner, they have a great spirit and are all around great guys. These teams have a electronic board with GreenHopper on Jira.

Then there’s another team. They also have all the things they need to succeed with a full time product owner, great spirit and a clear vision and goal. Awesome developers. Their product owner is seated in Germany and we are in Sweden. They have opted for a physical board.

I’m all for physical boards whenever possible so I really wanted them to succeed with that board. In doing so I have been setting up one end of the technologies to get a remote worker included a agile team.

It will never be the same thing as...

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 to the problem 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, subconscious 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...

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...

I have a confession to make; I think I’m turning into a data guy. No, not a computer guy - I’ve been that for a long time. Rather, it’s that boring dude who keeps asking for numbers, measurements, and saying “yes, but how do you KNOW that” all the time. But I’m on a program to recover from some of the boredom parts. It’s called Simplicity and Visualization.

To be a little more serious, I think that collecting data and then doing small experiments based upon them rather than relying on your 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...

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 visualization.

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...

When teams transition from an iteration-based (i.e., Scrum) to a more flow-based (i.e., Kanban) approach to software development, they often face three 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 taught me. Thanks, dude!

In iteration-based approaches to software development, there’s a natural endpoint, a 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, 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 a while 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...