Tools don't solve problems, thinking does
Posts on agile software development
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Web team, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Utrecht. A growing number of organization slowly migrate towards more agile approaches of their software development. When starting with agile, Scrum is still the most popular process around, with user stories as the preferred requirements technique. Although Scrum and user stories apply well to many web projects, when it comes to handling large, service-oriented projects, in […]
My talks in June 2009. June 3. Agile software development in everyday practice. Full-day seminar on doing agile projects for IT Works, Hotel Pullman, Diegem, Belgium. With guest speaker Stefaan van Royen, Mediamine. See www.itworks.be. June 9. Pragmatic .Net development. Full-day seminar on software architectures and patterns for .Net software development for Array Seminars, .NBC Nieuwegein. See www.arrayseminars.nl. June 15 […]
Smart use cases. Past present and future Keynote at Smart Use Case Conference, Capgemini Conference Center, Utrecht, Netherlands, May 28, 2008 Capgemini has organized an inspiring conference on the subjects of smart use cases. This event took place at Capgemini’s conference center in Utrecht. The large number of delegates witnessed talks on smart use cases, smart estimation, smart use cases […]
Tomorrow, June 26, I will be doing a talk at the SDN Event at Hotel Houten in Houten (see www.sdn.nl). This talk will be dealing with the many anti-patterns that surround agile software development. Unfortunately, the session description for my talk is not entirely up-to-date. So I’ll repeat it here. Better safe then sorry. Hope to meet you all tomorrow […]
About a week ago, someone (from the UK) send me an email with the following question: I like your article on Smart Use Cases. Before I throw my hat in the ring on this, could you tell me your feelings on User Stories as an alternative to Use Cases? To be quite honest, I’m not much in favor of using […]
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. […]
The months May and June are notorious for the number of talks – as Rick van der Lans describes: May and June are speaker’s season. Just to remind me not to forget any of my upcoming talks, here’s a list: May 12. Project estimation with smart use cases. At Capgemini, Utrecht. Presentation at internal software estimation seminar for Community of […]
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 […]
In most cases where a form of agile software development is applied, projects are challenged with difficult issues, such as a swaggering scope, unclear and incomplete requirements, unstable software architecture, are quickly approaching dead lines. Within these strict boundaries projects try to deliver high quality software at high productivity – or velocity. This is not an easy challenge. Delivering just […]
Smart is an easy to implement agile process, that is essentially smart use cases driven. Although Smart mixes very well with other agile processes and techniques, such as Scrum, XP and FDD, the process that takes a project through a little more ceremony than you might expect from a number of other agile processes. For instance, Smart suggests a number […]
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 […]
I started using Twitter – no, this is not another post about Twitter – to investigate if it could help me innovate. And guess what, it kind of helps. Since I started writing tweets around the agile SAP SOA project I’m coaching, people started showing interest, and asking questions. Last week I received to following email: Hi Sander, I have […]
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. […]
One of the characteristics of most traditional – linear, waterfall – styled organizations is the extremely rigid execution of their software development projects . “Our handbook says we need to fill in this form, so that’s what we do guys.” People is these projects live by the blind assumption that whoever invented or wrote down their software development process knew […]
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 […]
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. […]
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, […]
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 […]
It’s too bad there’s only 24 hours in a day. There are so many ideas in my head that I still have to write down, that I have to make a (short) list now to keep my head from exploding. So here it is: White paper on how to do agile SAP projects using smart use cases. Article on applying […]
The general idea around (Smart) estimation is to be able to express project effort at any given time before or during a project. Doing so, you should be aware of something which is called the Cone of Uncertainty. This simple but valuable graph demonstrates that estimates will get better as the project progresses, but also that when estimating a project […]
This is the video from Parlays.com that presents the talk I gave at the last JavaPolis conference in Antwerp, Belgium. During the talk I ask myself the question how everybody in their own role can attribute to making our project fail, as it is far too complicated to make your projects succeed. The talk presents popular anti-patterns I’ve gathered over […]
Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing: 2009 will not only be known as the year the financial crisis hits in hard, it will also be known as the year everything turned agile. Please allow me to explain. The times when banks, insurance companies, car industries and the likes could start up multi-million software development projects of titanic ambition, with […]
On January 13 from 14:30 – 16:00 the Hogeschool Utrecht organizes a guest lecture by Sander Hoogendoorn, Principal Technology Officer at Capgemini. When asked who to invite for presenting a guest lecture, the students of the Hogeschool specifically requested for Sander. His lecture will be titled Implementing smart use cases in agile projects. Process, techniques, architecture and patterns. During this […]
Suppose that while getting the groceries for the weekend, I decide to buy some steaks. I’m not sure yet whether it will be tournedos or regular steaks, but meat it is. So I go to my local butcher shop and lay down my requirements. The prices for tournedos and steak are known, they can be viewed from the examples on […]
Alhoewel ik het liefst code schrijf, heb ik een zwak voor het schatten van projecten. En dan niet een academische functiepuntenanalyse, maar elke pragmatische aanpak verdient mijn steun. Tijdens mijn loopbaan heb ik aardig wat schattingen gemaakt en gezien. Van tenenkrommend tot waar-halen-ze-die-getallen-vandaan? Waarom rekenen veel organisaties voor projectmanagement een toeslag van 20%? Waarom geen 14.81%? Zouden schriftgeleerden in die […]
Earlier this week I presented a talk at the inspiring Software Developers Conference 2008 in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands. My talk had an inspiring, or at least intriguing title: How to keep our jobs. Why? Well, let me share some thoughts on the productivity of software development projects. A 100-fold Recent research by Gartner shows that the productivity of software development […]
Finally, after some experimenting we’ve got it. My team managed to put out the broadcast of my talk on everything and the kitchen sink on YouTube, and moreover, link from that. See the results here. Introduction The introduction part with some jokes in it. Software architecture, design patterns and smart use cases in code A brief introduction into software architecture […]
On LinkedIn I stumbled over this interesting question (posed by Tony Bruce). Well, I clearly and loudly have to disagree. Having guided several organizations from waterfall to agile, but also from chaos to agile I would definitively say that it is easier to transform a company without rigid methodology to agile, than to convert a waterfall styled company to agile. […]
Maybe you recognize the following situation: you are asked to estimate a new project. So you dive into the – often incomplete and unclear – specifications. After trying to understand the specifications and hopefully having a lot of meetings with the customer and end users you create an neat Excel spread sheet with a work breakdown structure, and some formulas […]
On May 28th, Capgemini organizes a free conference on the topic of smart use cases at Capgemini’s Conference Building in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Smart use cases represent a far more structured and equal-granular technique for modeling requirements than “regular” use cases do, based on Alistair Cockburn’s model of levels of use cases. In this model smart use cases comprise the […]
Het is half vier ‘s middags als mijn vliegtuig in een zachte motregen landt op het vliegveld van Seattle Tacoma. Omdat ik deel uitmaak van de Visual Studio Advisory Board ben ik op weg naar de campus van Microsoft in Redmond, het overbekende slaperige voorstadje van Seattle. Maar behalve dat Seattle de reuzen Microsoft en Boeing huisvest, kent ook koffieconcern […]
Vanmorgen bracht ik met mijn jongste zoontje Boet – net drie – een bezoek aan de dichtstbijzijnde kinderboerderij. Zijn eerste bezoek aan een kinderboerderij. Een openbaring. Toen ik hem na afloop, vlak voor zijn middagdutje vroeg of hij het leuk had gevonden in de kinderboerderij, antwoordde hij heel gedecideerd: “Ik vond het niet leuk in de kinderboerderij. Er waren geen […]
Omdat de grijzende stewardessen van Air Canada op de nachtvlucht van Honolulu naar Sydney nu eenmaal niet de Volkskrant rondbrengen, besluit ik genoegen te nemen met de Herald Tribune. Direct valt mijn oog op een bericht linksonder op de voorpagina. Het artikel wordt geflankeerd door een foto van een Indiër in strak pak, met dito stropdas en dito kantoor op […]
In a blog post my former collegue Anko – who is a tester – states that “… in discussions with testers … there seems to be only one belief: the fact that structured testing can only be done based on detailed, documented specifications and test execution-after-all-coding-is-done.” As Anko is very familiar with agile testing he knows better than this, and […]
The big question in agile projects is when to start with the design and test design for a specific work item – in my case a smart use case? In traditional waterfall styled methodologies, analysis and design for the full project will be finished even before the first line of code is ever written. In agile projects, and in our […]
Vlak voor mijn zomervakatie werd ik gebeld door collega Rob, een business consultant. “Jij moet eens met de CIO van mijn klant praten,” zegt hij. “Die is bezig om zijn hele IT-organisatie te herstructureren.” Even is het stil. Rob bouwt de spanning genadeloos op. “Hij past daarbij de lean principles van Toyota toe,” vervolgt hij, ”en die sluiten volgens mij […]
Being in a hotel room a lot sure helps you keep up with televsion shows you would otherwise skip withour remorse, for instance talk shows. Zapping through the channels I stumbled upon a stupifying interview with the Australian actor Dominic Purcell who plays one of the main characters in the television series Prison Break, that, to be quite honest, I’ve […]