Improving the world with software
Better software. Better questions.
Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays, page 6
147 essays in the archive
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XP2012: The Extreme Challenge
“Agile has crossed the chasm” we hear often. But has it really? In the last few years Agile has gone from being “the cousin in the corner that shouts and screams but no one wants to talk to” to being “the famous cousin who everyones wants to talk to”. It was not an easy transition, …
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Kanban in a networked process — Visualise the network!
It seems that the idea of a work-network instead of work-flow is catching on and I’d like to throw a bit more fuel in that fire! Knowledge work is not linear! This we have learned from the experiences with failed Waterfall projects. There are things we do over and over again, and there are things …
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Adapting to a different country and culture – a story
This is the story of Jerome (names changed to protect the innocent), and his adventures while changing countries for work. Jerome always wanted to work in another country. He had bought into the whole globalization/Cultural experimentation ideas of the 90’s. The economy was growing quite strongly, there was a strong need for IT professionals and …
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Dude! Where’s my manager? or Why you should attend LESS2011
Many teams start their agile transition from the “developer-side”. This is quite normal, developers (coders and testers) feel the pain more than others because they need to actually get the product/system finished. But by focusing on developers, aren’t we missing something? Aren’t we forgetting that many of the consequences we so detest come from un-informed …
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On rewarding and performance systems…
The ideas of “pay-for-performance”, and it’s twin sister “management by objectives” exist to try and increase the performance of a group and ultimately the whole company. The basic idea is: promise them a carrot and they’ll work more / better. But is that true? Can a company really perform better by promising people they will …
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LESS goes Stockholm for LESS2011, join us there in October
Last year I was involved in the organization of a unique conference. LESS2010 was a unique conference because it brought together different communities. We wanted to make sure that people with different points of view would discuss those points of view. The aim was to create a space for sharing ideas from different communities in …
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Agile is about customer delight
Today on twitter I got into an interesting conversation with @jeffpatton. The discussion was about whether Agile, as a family of methodologies and a value system is (or isn’t) directed at customer delight. @JeffPatton‘s point was that it is not. Here’s one of his replies to me on this subject: Later on during the day …
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You cannot transition to Agile. Stop and just embrace it!
I am writing this blog post to explore a concept. So bear with me, I’ll probably ask more questions than I’ll answer. Why do most Agile fail in our companies (or government organizations for that matter)? My view is that we cannot actually transition from a command and control management paradigm to Agile / Complex …
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Kicking up dust for the Agile Finland 2011-2012 season
A big moment for the Agile Finland community is approaching. On May 25th we’ll get together and select the new Agile Finland Board for the 2011-2012 season. There are many reasons why it is a big moment. In my opinion it is a big point in our history as a community. Agile Finland was started …
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ALE Network in active discussion in the Agile Finland mailing list
Last Friday looked to be normal day. Too much work, too little time. But then it got better.After I sent an email to the Agile Finland mailing list announcing the Helsinki event to discuss the ALE Network vision, a lot of replies came in. It was a very active discussion. Below is my (necessarily) short …
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What would a European Agile comunity look like? #ALEnetwork
Many of us have been involved in many different communities. Agile Finland for a start. But also other communities: our local kindergarten or school parent’s group, the school or kindergarten itself; the local neighbors; the apartment building executive board (“hallitus” in Finnish), etc. In fact, if we look back in history all of our history …
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My Agile adoption story, and why it matters to you
Every person has their own different story of how they found out about Agile and how they came to experiment and ultimately adopt it in their projects.Mine is also different than most, I started as a skeptic. I was one of those that said “it will never work”. But I did come around. Here’s the …
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