Building better software faster

On January 10 I presented my first talk of the year 2017 at the annual kick-off at insurance software vendor ANVA in Amersfoort, the Netherlands.   The main topic is building better software faster and covers agile, (beyond) Scrum, Kanban, continuous delivery and microservices.   Building Better Software Faster from Sander Hoogendoorn

Rome, Italy. April 22, 2016. Agile, Scrum, XP, Kanban and Continuous Delivery in practice

Since the introduction of the waterfall model in 1970 as an approach for software development projects, a lot has evolved. In the 1990’s similar ideas around iterative and Agile software development where introduced simultaneously in more and more organizations and projects, resulting in the Agile Manifesto. During this one day workshop, Sander Hoogendoorn, independent consultant and author of the highly […]

Amsterdam, Netherlands. February 12, 2016. Series of three lectures at the Vrije Universiteit on (modern) software development approaches

On February 12 I will be presenting a series of three lectures for the post-doctorate year of IT Auditing at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, covering all aspects of modern software development. These three lectures will focus on waterfall, agile, Scrum, Kanban and continuous delivery. This will be the fifth consecutive year that I will present these lectures at the […]

The Hague, Netherlands. December 16, 2015. Introduction to agile, Scrum, Kanban and continuous delivery (Siemens, in-house)

This open one-day on workshop will present a real-life introduction to waterfall, agile, Scrum, Kanban and even continuous delivery. Participants experience why waterfall won’t work and what it means to be in an agile project, independent of which agile approach to use. I will walk through a lot of topics during the day and will also do a number of […]

Software Quality Days (Vienna, Austria. January 2016. Keynote)

Will do on of two keynotes at the Software Quality Days in Vienna, Austria. Topic will be around quality in agile software development. I will also do a half day masterclass on smart use cases. Noteworthy is that Scott Ambler will do the other keynote. Software Quality Days: http://2016.software-quality-days.com/en/ Keynotes: http://2016.software-quality-days.com/en/conference/keynotes/ My masterclass on smart use cases: http://2016.software-quality-days.com/en/conference/conference-program/

Future of Project Management. PMI Chapter Event (Breda, Netherlands. April 2015)

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 (London, UK. March 2015)

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 […]

Krakow, Poland. June 18, 2015. Introduction to agile, Scrum, and Kanban (open workshop)

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 […]

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 doesn’t deal with x

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 […]

Offshore Agile Software Development: A Practical Guide to Making It Work

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 […]

Offshore Agile Software Development: Does It Work?

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, […]

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 […]

Flower-Power Agile Fluffiness

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 […]