Agile anti-patterns at CodeMotion Madrid

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 […]

Agile business intelligence

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 […]

Agile anti-patterns. Yes you agile projects can and will fail too

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 […]

Evolving agile

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 […]

Agile Open Holland (Dieren, Netherlands. November 2011. Keynote)

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 […]

The explicit role of testing and testers in agile projects

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 […]

Een introductie in agile business intelligence [in Dutch]

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 […]

Antwerp, Belgium. November 25-26, 2010. Pragmatic modeling using UML (IT Works)

[Two day hands-on workshop at IT Works, Hotel Crowne Plaza, Antwerp. ] On November 25 and 26 I will present the 32th edition of an intense two-day workshop on the pragmatic use of UML modeling techniques (and beyond) with lots of hands-on exercises. Participants modeling activity diagrams with smart use cases During this workshops we will go through the following […]

A recipe for enterprise agile. Mixing Scrum and Smart

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 […]

Spring 2010 speaking engagements

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 […]

Introducing our Agile Dashboard

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 […]

Beyond agile testing. Or: how to become a pro-active tester

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 […]

Questions on smart use cases. Part I – Estimating user-goal and sub-function level use cases

As you might have heard from me before (endlessly), smart use cases are a fairly straightforward reqirements technique that we have introduced in many different types of projects. Of course, Java, .NET, BI projects apply smart use cases, but this year I have also been involved in service oriented projects, where smart use cases where used to model not only […]

December 1, 2009. Talk “An introduction to agile SAP SOA”

Customer presentation, Eindhoven. After Twan van den Broek (of Ciber) and I succesfully applied a great mix of agile software development processes and techniques, including Scrum, Smart, smart use cases, smart estimation in probably the first agile SAP SOA projects in the Netherlands, we’ve held several talks on the subject at conferences and seminars, including an agile conference, the SOA […]

Amsterdam, The Netherlands. October 26, 2009. Software development methodologies and techniques through the years (Vrije Universiteit)

Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Earlier this year I was invited by prof. Arno Oosterhaven to do a series of lectures on software development at the post-doctoral program IT Auditor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. The audience of IT Auditors is very mixed, ranging from accountants to actual software developers, which makes it difficult to address all interests of the students. […]

Diegem, Belgium. December 10, 2009. Agile development in everyday practice (IT Works)

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 […]

October 22, 2009. Talk. “Mission impossible? Applying Agile to the World of SOA and ERP”

International SOA Symposium, World Trade Center, Rotterdam. (www.soasymposium.com) On October 22 and 23, 2009 the second international SOA Symposium will take place at the World Trade Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Just coming out of a highly successful agile SAP service oriented project (likely the first in it’s type in the Netherlands or even a wider area), Twan van den […]

Hilversum, The Netherlands. October 15, 2009. Agile software development in everyday practice (Array Seminars)

Array Seminars, Hotel Amrath Lapershoek, Hilversum (www.arrayseminars.nl) 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 Smart, I’ve […]

Checking for reusable services using smart use cases

In any project, and especially in projects that run under a tight schedule – as most projects do these days, it is helpful to list all elements that can possibly be (re)used to crank up your project, such as guidelines, documentation templates, existing components, (web) services, frameworks. This can best be done early on in the project, traditional or agile. […]

Measuring agile progress in smart use case points

Smart use cases serve as a very good unit of work in agile projects. The agile process Smart relies on smart use cases, from start to end. Moreover, the progress in Smart projects is measured and managed using these use cases, and the associated straightforward estimation technique smart estimation. First cut smart use cases A first cut smart use case […]

Implementing smart use cases. Guest lecture at Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen

In the second half of last year, I did a guest lecture at the Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen (HAN) in Arnhem on an invitation by lecturer Rody Middelkoop. I’m sorry but I can’t remember the exact date – only that I had an upcoming flue. Although if was a Friday afternoon, the audience was good, about 60-70 lecturers and students. I […]

Mission impossible? Applying agile to the world of SAP enterprise resource planning

Early in March Twan van den Broek, SAP solution architect at TopForce, got in touch with me if I would be interested to coach an agile SAP project at a very large logistics organization. We have been using accelerators from our agile Accelerated Delivery Platform in SAP project before, including smart use cases, smart estimation and Tobago MDA, our model […]

Agile and Scrum anti-patterns. Wildcard proposal DevDays 2009

After a dozen years of promoting and evangelizing agile software development in the current years of economic unpredictability a breakthrough in applying agile processes and techniques is emerging. But with the rising popularity of Scrum, MSF Agile, OpenUP, Smart, XP, Lean, FDD and the likes, it’s not only success stories any more. Similar to failing traditional waterfall projects there patterns […]

Software estimation. Do I apply user stories or smart use cases?

The process of creating a sound estimate for your project will take some time in any agile project. You will have to define what work to do in the project. In general this work can be split up into two parts: Project related work. There’s project related work, such as creating a project proposal or setting up your development environment. […]

Outline for new pragmatic book on smart use cases

We (my team and I and a lot of people that contributed from projects) have been working on the concept of smart use cases on and off over the last ten years. I think it was back in 1998 that we coincidentally started modeling use cases at bit different than was custom, in a workflow oriented project. We not only […]

Identifying, modeling and testing smart use cases

This morning I proposed a second talk for the EuroSTAR 2009 Conference in Stockholm. Sounds ok, doesn’t it? See EuroSTAR Conference 2009. Many organizations rely on the concept of use cases to model and describe functional requirements. However, there are many different ways of identifying and modeling use cases. Use case documents range from a mere two-pager up to book-length. […]

Agile testing in everyday practice

This morning I proposed the following talk for the EuroSTAR 2009 Conference in Stockholm. Sounds ok, doesn’t it? See EuroSTAR Conference 2009. In the current economic situation pressure rises on software development projects. Shorter time-to-market and cost cutting do not contribute to the quality of the project. More and more organizations now turn to applying agile processes, such as Scrum, […]

Project management in agile Smart projects

Projects that are run using the agile methodology Smart are split up into short iterations. There are a different types of iterations defined in Smart. These are Propose, Scope, Realize, Finalize and Manage, guiding a project from the first proposal to application management. Each of these iteration types follow a straightforward iteration cycle: plan the activities (Plan), perform the activities […]