Speaking at SDC2009!

Together with Ola Ellnestam, I will host a session at the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2009: Start paying your technical debt! at 17.15 in the Development Process & Methodology track.

We will talk about how to get organized around paying back technical debt that requires several iterations of work, while still delivering value and without having a broken code base in the process.

Physical visible workspace is just more robust!

Did you ever end up feeling crippled with yet another “agile” story management tool?

You get what you measure

Yesterday I watched Grand Designs on TV where a couple restored an old 1600-century house. They found that at least one window was shut with bricks and concrete (or the equivalent used at that time), but when they opened it up the whole room changed and the light and the view the window provided was beautiful.

The reason for shutting the window, as Kevin McCloud told, was that long ago there was a window-tax (!!) in England, hence a lot of windows where shut this way.

You get what you measure.

Two steps to become agile

A lot of companies today wants to become “agile”. The $100.000.000 question is: How do you become agile?

Are you proud of what you do? Do you let others be?

Sometimes I get very proud of what I accomplish, at work or otherwise. This is a very rewarding feeling that last for years when looking back.

So I asked myself when am I proud of what I’ve done? What are the circumstances?

Elastic-, plastic- and fracture characteristics of code

I recently had a post about technical debt, and Jelena made a very insightful comment that it was like elastic, plastic and fracture characteristics of materials like steel. I started to comment on the comment, but eventually I thought it deserved its own post.

Choosing your IDE

The choice of development environment is not an easy one. I will try to give some advice that goes beyond technical specifications.

Where is software quality going?

Yesterday I was visiting Scania when their R&D department had a family-day where they demonstrated what they are working with. Scania, for those of you who don’t know, is famous for making high quality trucks and buses. What struck me when we went from room to room and hall to hall was that wherever we went, there was an automated testing rig!

“Manual processes are risks”

The other day I heard a person on my project say “Manual processes are risks”. Generally, if you do something that has a risk, you want to have a chance to gain something from taking the risk.

Microreleases

In my pet project Bumblebee, I started out planning releases in a traditional agile way; small batches of features I wanted. I was spending a lot of time moving features in and out of releases, even features that I still haven’t implemented. I also had some very long release cycles, with a maximum of some 4 months where I didn’t release anything, just because I wanted to finish the batch! All of this because of… yeah, why did I ever do that? I was mesmerized by “The Scrum” having me planning and committing to these batches of work that I rarely completed and changed all of the time. How wasteful!