Skip to the essays

Improving the world with software

Better software. Better questions.

Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.

Essays from June 2006

7 essays from June 2006

  1. Day 1 at XP 2006 conference, part 2

    During the morning session for today I attended the research paper session presentation on “Foundation and rationale for agile methods”. There were four papers: Distributed cognition account of mature XP teams: in this paper presentation the thing that struck me the most was the practice of “fluid pairing” as described by the presenter. In this …

    3 min read

  2. Day 1 at XP 2006 conference, part 3

    The last event for today was the keynote speech by Brian Hanly (acutally it was Sean Hanly who did the keynote, thanks Lasse for the correction), founder and director of Exoftware which is a major sponsor for the conference. His point in the talk was that Agile needs to cross the chasm of adoption from …

    2 min read

  3. Day 1 at XP 2006 Conference

    The day started today with a talk from Pekka Himanen about the Hacker Ethic. His introduction on how the Open Source development teams are able to produce so much and so high quality code was interesting as it was rooted on his Learning Philosophy and how interaction between people can make a team/community much more …

    1 min read

  4. Highlights of Sunday tutorials on XP 2006 conference

    Yesterday was my first actual day in the conference here in Oulu. The day started for me with the tutorial from Mary Poppendieck about Lean (Agile) Software Development. I had read her book and learned from it a lot. In the tutorial she touched on several interesting aspects that are not very obvious from the …

    1 min read

  5. XP 2006 conference starts

    Today started the XP 2006 conference here in Oulu. I have a lot of positive expectations regarding this conference. Reading the proceedings from last year’s conference I got a lot of great ideas to apply in my work, I expect that this year, being present will be even more productive.

    1 min read

  6. What “done” means and it’s importance.

    Today a colleague at work described his experience with one of the principles of Scrum: “Done means done”.This very simple phrase has very deep implications. One is that you are never really done until a feature is ready for release. Some teams will define that differently, but his team defined that “ready for release” meant …

    2 min read

  7. What is so hard in a retrospective? People.

    I’ve been doing retrospectives for a while at work. They have become so useful and part of my understanding of continuous improvement that I’ve started doing them at the end of every meeting or presentation I hold. The point being that I know I can improve, and it’s excellent that I have the opportunity to …

    2 min read

Keep the conversation going

The essays work best in company. Join the community to keep the questions coming.

The #NoEstimates book and its companion volumes

Chapter 1 · Free PDF

What if better planning started with a different question?

The first chapter of #NoEstimates argues that the “deliver on time” challenge is answered by a different question. Read it, and see whether it changes how you plan the next piece of work.

Free PDF of chapter 1. No purchase, no library access. How we handle your details