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...

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 has 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...

This is a small tribute to a great tool. Mostly for fun, but there are some great features in the latest release of SpecFlow. Check it out. You can get the tool from the Visual Studio Gallery, but be sure to uninstall any previous versions first.

For a more serious look at 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 how not only Vs2010 solutions open nicely in Vs2012, but also the new release of SpecFlow works fine for both.

Where was he now again? There was something about the feature file. He opens it and, thanks to the nice color coding of lines, Marcus is reminded of a step that he didn’t have a step definition for.

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