The other day I got my hands on the Scrum Guide 2011. It’s a updated version of how Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland looks at Scrum, it’s practices and state today. It’s well worth a read – especially if you haven’t read up on Scrum in a while. And let me here in the outset of this post also state that I have use Scrum a lot and it helped me and my teams a lot as well. I like Scrum to be short – but (had to be one right) I think that some situations doesn’t fit perfectly with Scrum. After that short side note, let’s get back to the real thing. After I read the article I had an opportunity to sit down with Morgan Ahlström, a fellow lean / agile coach here at Avega Group. We started to discuss about the things we read in the document...

This is the third post in a short series on how Morgan and me went about to introduce Kanban and some Lean thinking to two support teams of the Avega Group office. You can read post 1 and post 2 before this to get the complete picture. With this post I wanted to do some reflections on how the introduction of Kanban took hold for the teams and also what Morgan and me learned in the process. We are used to do this for IT-projects and teams working with system development or maintenance. Reflection on the result for the teams First week The immediate and positive responses from the group was reactions like: “This is very clear and shows us what we are doing” “I can see dependencies between our tasks. And on the ones where we wait for others” “We have greater understanding for what we do. And other...

This is really an age-old BDD question that pops up from time to time. Just now I got a question from an ex-colleague about it. A bit rephrased it something like this: Should I test through the GUI all the way down to the database? How do you handle test-data in and test executing speed in those cases? Many of us first got exposed to BDD tests through web applications and the way that we could test through the actual web page. We use tools like Watin, Selenium and other automation tools to accomplish that. We structure our automation code with page wrappers to get manageable automation code that can be re-used in our step definitions. For some BDD even implies automation (which is not at all the case). On the “other” side we try to go through the whole stack and go through all the of the application and...

This is the second post in a small series on how we helped some parts of the Avega Group office to use Kanban to manage their workflow. In the first post we introduced the teams that we coached to a foundations for why you want to limit your work-in-process, what benefits that could give them and some key elements of Kanban and Lean. As a final exercise we helped them to create a simple Kanban board for each team. We stressed the fact that the boards not is complete (at any time!) but should change and this is just a suggestion. Together with the teams we created a simple board, containing the following columns and policies: Inbox – their to do list for a horizon that feel comfortable. We didn’t limit the number of items here, but suggested that they may think about that. Also we told them that the...

I have recently returned from parental leave and got to experience office tempo first-hand. Was not prepared for that, but it also had me look around and I saw two teams at Avega Group that was under a lot of stress (they said) and seemed to handle a lot of task simultaneously. Being dunked deeply in the Kanban-pool it made the hair on my neck stand up and I shivered to my bones. WIP is bad you know… Being a Avega Coach I have some time to spend at the office, so I teamed up with Morgan, a fellow Lean/Agile coach here at Avega Group – and we decided to see if we could do anything about it. In doing so we had to sharpen our arguments and think a bit different. They are not creating systems you know. Both Morgan and I have experiences mostly with software development teams,...

There’s been a lot of buzz around Specification by example lately. At least in my networks and close to me. I hear it almost everyday at the office. A couple of days ago I was asked to do an introduction to the subject to a group of interested people. Striking also is that most people I hear talking about it is not developers (anymore) but rather business/requirements people and testers. One question that I often get asked and that puzzles me is: But who writes the specifications? Business people, developers or testers? Maybe not exactly like that but something close too that. Actually I think the underlying intent is something else and has to do with ownership… I have also discussed the topic with a few of my Twitter contacts that are involved in a project using Specification by example. In this post I’ll give my view on this –...

I got a question from 3 colleagues on what Twitter is and how we should use it. I don’t claim to be an expert but I use it quite a lot everyday. So here is my introduction to Twitter – with my own opinions on how to use it. There are other introductions, like this by Scott Hanselmann, of course – but since they asked I might as well put it up here. What is it? From Wikipedia we learn that: Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as “tweets.” So you send short messages (tweets) that is picked up by anyone who follows you. You can follow a number of people to subscribe to their updates. Everything is public (almost see DM below) and can be viewed by anyone by...

Right away – this blog post is mostly for me. I have not been dabbling enough with the “dynamic” keyword to say that I know it. This is what and how I understand it now. So, if you care to read this… please be gentle with your comments. I love to see them and learn that I was wrong – I’m most certainly am. dynamic keyword Since .NET 4.0 we have a new keyword – dynamic. If you read the MSDN documentation you’ll learn that: The dynamic type enables the operations in which it occurs to bypass compile-time type checking. Instead, these operations are resolved at run time. Ok, but what useful is that? I mean you could write this, you probably shouldn’t but you could: ``` 1: // Any object can be typed dynamic ``` ``` 2: // The dynamic keyword just means that ``` ``` 3: // the...

I’m loving NuGet and it’s totally changed the way I look on brining in external dependencies to my projects. I’ve written about that before. But sometimes you want to install several packages into a project. For example, when you install SpecFlow into a project you also have to install a test framework such as NUnit or MsTest. And maybe an assertion framework or a mocking framework. But this package will contain your (or your company) preferences and maybe not be suitable to publish to NuGet.org for everyone to download. In this post I’ll show you how to easily create a  local package where you can setup the dependencies you want. And how to use it in your solution. Strategy Our sneaky plan is to basically create a package that only has dependencies. No code. And then store it in a local NuGet Repository. Install NuGet Package Explorer This will to...

I have started to use dark theme for Visual Studio. You know about the site where you can get great themes, right? http://studiostyl.es/. I’m using the Son of Obsidian theme right now, but do check out Coding Instinct Theme by my colleague Torkel . However – one thing that really bugs me was that the mouse pointer when in text edit mode (as it is in the code editor) goes to dark grey in the standard theme for Windows 7 (and XP and Vista, I understand). That was a very complicated sentence but basically – my mouse pointer cannot be seen in the code editor. Very annoying. I found the solution deep in a discussion here. “for cursor, select a windows black mouse scheme in control panel.”. That means the following – I didn’t even know you could do this: Open Control panel Open Appearance and Personalization Open Personalization Finally...