Tools don't solve problems, thinking does
Posts on agile software development
Having coached many teams, projects and organizations on both software architecture and agile, one of the questions I’ve been asked a lot over the past fifteen years is: what is agile architecture? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this question. There is no simple truth out there. What agile architecture really is considered to be is different from organization […]
In September I will run a masterclass on microservices at Luxoft in Moscow, Russia, see www.luxoft-training.ru/master-class/sander. In preparation of this masterclass, here’s a short Q & A on microservices. Is it worth applying microservices? Q: In your article Microservices. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly you described different aspects of development. Readers may think that using a microservices architecture […]
At this event, organised by the Avans Hogeschool in Breda in the Netherlands I will do the opening keynote, most likely with my talk Microservices. The good, the bad and the ugly. Micro-services and micro-services architecture are the next hype in software development. Websites and blogs are full of introducing posts, the first books are being written and the first […]
During a lively evening in a room full of project managers, I tried to explain how agile is changing the role of project management in software development, and I even went as far as to to claim that the project metaphor isn’t really well suited for software development. My talk was titled Challenging The Future of Agile. I look back […]
DevWeek is the UK’s leading developer conference returns with more content than ever before, featuring more than 100 breakout sessions and 23 full-day workshops. Last year I did the keynote, this year I did two sessions. The first session was titled Individuals and interactions over proce$$e$ and fools and the second was a hands-on coding session titled Introducing and extending […]
This open one-day intense hands-on workshop is the first in a series of training courses in the Agile Academy, organized by PMI Chapter Poland. This is a full day workshop presenting a real-life introduction to agile, Scrum and Kanban. During this highly interactive and successful one-day workshop participants experience why waterfall won’t work and what it means to be in […]
On June 5, 2015 I will present a full-day masterclass on microservice architecture in the series of Software Architecture Day in Iasi, Rumania. The development and maintenance of monoliths presents organizations with increasing challenges, resulting in high costs and a slow time-to-market. More and more organizations are therefore attempting to componentize their applications. The latest and greatest paradigm microservices finally […]
Earlier last week I was trying to refactor around two thousands lines of code, optimistically being convinced that the component could offer the exact same functionality in less than two hundred lines. My refactoring was an intuitive step-by-step process that involved creativity and a lot of concentration. Happily working on my code I slowly got into the zone, a happy […]
Great open training session at the famous IT security firm Fox-IT.
Over the past fifteen to twenty years I’ve been invited numerous times to help organization move from traditional to iterative and agile software development. Without exception whenever I have a first board room meeting at any organization, I start the conversation with the same questions: why do you want to move to agile? What is it you are trying to […]
Quite frequently people in agile (and non-agile) projects or at conferences and workshops come up to me and ask me what tooling they should use. “Which online agile dashboard tooling do you recommend us?”, “What is the best code repository?” or even “We are doing a Scrum project. Are we allowed to use a UML modeling tools such as Enterprise […]
Recently we’ve introduced Tags for work items on www.speedbird9.com . You can add tags either from the menu when you create an item in Work Items | New, or from the Edit Work Item feature. Tags are replacing Labels because we’ve received many requests for allowing multiple Labels or Tags with work items, whereas it was only possible to add […]
There is an intriguing question that pops up frequently in organizations developing software in projects: when is a project successful? For sure, one of the most (mis)used resources on the subject is the Standish Group. In their frequently renewed CHAOS Report they define a project successful if it delivers on time, on budget, and with all planned features. For a […]
www.speedbird9.com is an free open online agile and Kanban board, that allows you to monitor the progress in your projects – whether they are IT projects or not. Many people have asked us to implement the notion of due dates for work items. And recently we have done so. You can now easily set the due date on the page […]
One of the key and often very much underestimated assets of working in agile teams, whether working on products or projects, is the idea of sustainable pace. In my view, sustainable pace targets at making sure that, even under time pressure, which is not rare in software development, the team remains it’s cool. For those of you who have been […]
Many organizations turn towards agile to escape failing traditional software development. Due to this increase in popularity, many newcomers enter the field. Without the necessary real-life experience but proudly waving certificates from two days of training. During a challenging talk I did at the CodeMotion conference in Madrid, in October 2013, I tried to show what happens to projects that […]
While writing this post, I am on an airplane to Helsinki. Nice sunny city. And lucky for me it is about 50 degrees Celsius warmer than the last time I visited it. In Helsinki I will have look at a couple of projects that use a distributed agile approach, but fail to deliver on-time and on-budget. When I get back […]
In my previous post, I explored how offshore Agile software development offers many benefits over more traditional, Waterfall style approaches, but only if some of the obvious difficulties in communication, overheads and language issues are addressed. So how do organizations overcome those difficulties to make offshore Agile work? Over many years at Capgemini, we have gained experience with distributed Agile […]
Due to the ever-rising demand for seasoned software developers in the nineties, offshore software development became a compelling alternative to in-house development for many organizations. Despite the cultural, language and time differences and the geographical distance involved, more and more projects were executed with offshore development and testing, benefiting from lower rates of cost and the high availability of people, […]
For as long as I can remember I have been evangelizing, promoting, practicing, coaching, and training agile. For me as a developer the goals for applying agile approaches and techniques are pretty clear. I want to make better software. Higher quality, better suited for use, and possibly also faster. And from my own empirical evidence I can certainly state agile […]
Het besparen van kosten is een veelgenoemde aanleiding voor Business Intelligence (BI) projecten. Zo wilde een bekende overheidsinstantie weten hoe effectief de bestrijding van uitkeringsfraude was. Het onderzoeken van mogelijke fraude kost de instantie geld, maar het vinden van fraudeurs levert echter direct geld op. En dus ging zoekt de instantie naar de optimale verhouding tussen het aantallen onderzoeken en […]
Believe it or not, but I have a confession to make. I’m currently in a pure waterfall project. It’s my first in many, many years and despite the fact that I love the technology, I don’t like our way or working it a bit. During the first phase of this project we are trying to deliver twenty functional work items. […]
After a series of very disappointing games the Dutch national football team was eliminated during the preliminary rounds of the European Championships. Comments weren’t mild. The most heard comments largely focused on the lack of team spirit and mental fitness. Not uncommon to Dutch national football teams. Earlier this week an interesting broadcast of the Dutch sports program Studio Sport […]
Over the years I have noticed a lot of agile anti-patterns during projects. Wrongly used agile approaches, dogmatic use of agile approaches, agile-in-name-only. Recently I have presented a talk at a number of agile and software development conferences that demonstrates patterns of agile misuse. These conferences include Agile Open Holland (Dieren), Camp Digital (Manchester), GIDS (Bangalore), ACCU (Oxford) and Jazoon […]
It must have been about twenty five years ago. I was working for a large international consultancy firm. One of the reliable ones. The ones that you would think that had everything worked out. But I guess this was merely the product of my imagination. At one time two colleagues and I were working on an estimate for a bid […]
Without any doubt agile is the biggest evolution in software development approaches since the introduction of waterfall back in the early seventies. And yes. Agile is an evolution rather than a revolution. The best practices and techniques in agile didn’t just pop-up. Rather they emerged from years of hard-working, real-life experience in succeeding and failing in projects. So working in […]
Er is een anti-patroon op het gebied van agile dat me nauw aan het hart gaat. En dat is de institutionalisering van agile. In de afgelopen vijftien jaar heb ik met veel plezier en inzet organisaties en projecten gecoacht op weg om agile worden. In die vijftien jaar heb ik ongelooflijk veel geleerd, over software ontwikkeling, over programmeren, over processen, […]
On November 3, 2011 I presented the keynote of the Agile Open Holland Conference in Dieren. During this challenging talk I discussed the current state of affairs in agile organizations and projects and the effects of the recent strong rise in popularity of agile approaches. Let’s put it mildly: there’s a lot of work to be done. Death by dogma […]
To all the dear people in the agile community and to the faint-hearted: this will not be an easy blog post. There was a time when being a software developer was a decent craft, requiring decent craftsmanship and yes also a lot of creativity, some communication, some collaboration. Still it was a decent craft. The waterfall-ish methodologies we used weren’t […]
After having promoted agile and iterative approaches to software development projects for over a decade, I finally find that, like Bob Dylan says, the times they are a-changing. And for the better. Many small and large organizations and enterprises are now turning towards agile approaches, often to compensate for years and years of failing projects. You might suggest that all’s […]
as the Channel 9 website says: using real-life code examples Sander will demonstrate how to model, generate and build smart use cases and introduce the positive impact smart use cases have on your layered software architecture. Anyway, here’s the video for my DevDays 2011 session:
Not all agile processes and approaches recognize the role of testing explicitly, other than stressing the importance of unit testing. However in short iterative projects, testing is key from day one. On of the agile approaches that does explicitly describes the role of testing – and of having testers on-board – is the agile process Smart. One of the characteristics […]
Om kosten te besparen, een veelgenoemde aanleiding voor Business Intelligence (BI) projecten, wilde een bekende overheidsinstantie weten hoe effectief de bestrijding van uitkeringsfraude was. Hierbij speelde een interessant fenomeen. Het onderzoeken van mogelijke fraude kost de instantie geld, maar het vinden van fraudeurs levert daarentegen direct geld op. En dus ging men op zoek naar de optimale verhouding tussen het […]
To cut to the chase, those of you who have worked on enterprise or service oriented projects before already know this. These types of projects are characterized by a large number of organizational, functional and technically complicating factors. Enterprise software development projects are surrounded by a large number of complicating characteristics and challenges: Many different stakeholders. Projects have many different […]
As agile is becoming more and more mainstream, organization are starting to do enterprise software development project using well-known but fairly basic lightweight agile processes. In many projects this has lead to surprisingly bad result, baffling the agile Certified Pokémon Trainers who are coaching these projects. The presentation below shows a number of accelerators or technique that projects can […]
Vorige week gaf ik – voor de zoveelste keer – training in het identificeren en modelleren van smart use cases. Dit keer bevond ik me in de hippe ruimtes van Meeting Plaza Utrecht, boven het altijd sfeervolle Hoog Catharijne. Tijdens de goed verzorgde lunch werd het onderwerp al snel bepaald door de uiterste houdbaarheidsdatum. Van levensmiddelen, maar meer nog, van […]
Again doing a lot of talks this spring on a wide range of subjects, from new technology, via enterprise agile to model driven development, but also about smart use cases, domain driven design, UML, and software architectures, design patterns, frameworks and .NET. This season’s highlights? Not a difficult choice: doing talks both at Microsoft DevDays and TechEd North America is […]
The Accelerated Delivery Platform’s (ADP) Agile Dashboard is a pragmatic and publicly available tool (free) for managing project progress online. The Agile Dashboard was originally intended to manage progress for our agile projects, but these day it is used in a much broader perspective. As the ADP Core Team receives a lot of questions about it, it’s time to present […]
Agile – in all it’s variations – becomes an increasingly popular process for realizing software. The roles testers and testing plays in these projects is challenging and new. Testers are no longer considered code-killers, but can play – and are expected to play – a very pro-active role in agile projects. Although all agile process agree on the importance of […]
IT Works, Hotel Pullman Brussels Airport, Diegem, Belgium (www.itworks.be) Although agile software development approaches, principles and techniques are slowly becoming more mainstream, it is still necessary to promote them for the larger part of the IT community and organizations. Together with my Belgian guest speaker Stefaan van Royen (now of BoonDoggle), who can talk very lively on implementing Scrum and […]