Tools don't solve problems, thinking does
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
It’s a mildly sunny April morning in 2002 when I park my car outside of a huge government agency office in a small suburban city near Utrecht. I am invited for a brainstorm session with the agency’s enterprise architects. Although I do not consider myself an enterprise architect, and explained that upfront, they were eager to discuss their architecture with […]
Suppose you are in the IT department of a (very) large organization and have been developing systems for your organization for quite some years. Chances are that you will have a landscape of systems great and small that all serve a particular purpose, or that have served a particular purpose. Systems that were built in a variety of languages, such […]
Despite misunderstanding and resistance of his space-flight loving people president Barack Obama recently aborted the Constellation space program. The Constellation program targets at putting humans on the moon again, for the first time since 1972, with the ultimate goal of possibly planning a manned trip to Mars in 2025. Although I had never heard of the program, after reading the […]
This post was originally written to be published as a chapter in an upcoming book on IT architecture. The book will be presented at the Landelijk Architectuur Congres 2009 in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. This post will likely also be published in two parts in Software Release Magazine. Ondanks dat ik inmiddels al zo’n twintig jaar in dit vakgebied rondloop, blijven […]
This post was originally written to be published as a chapter in an upcoming book on IT architecture. The book will be presented at the Landelijk Architectuur Congres 2009 in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. This post will likely also be published in two parts in Software Release Magazine. Ondanks dat ik inmiddels al zo’n twintig jaar in dit vakgebied rondloop, blijven […]
For as long as I’ve been in this business, I’ve heard a lot of manager, project managers, architects and other non-coders compare software development to construction. In this metaphor the architect creates the design and hands it over to the contractor, who does the work. In this metaphor the creative parts ends with the architect handing over the design to […]
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 […]
De voorpagina van de Computable van 20 maart is opgesierd met een prachtige foto van een uit een witte limousine stappend bruidje in een even witte bruidsjurk en prachtige borsten. Nieuwsgierig geworden naar het bijbehorende artikel, kom ik al snel tot de teleurstellende conclusie dat dit weer eens gaat over het mislukken van de gemeentelijke basisadministratie, dat ondertussen toch wel […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dat is schrikken! Als gevolg van de immer toenemende vraag naar software, en het dalen van het aantal studenten die sodtware development willen leren, moet de productiviteit van ontwikkelaars stijgen. Om precies te zijn: honderd keer. Althans, dat voorspelt Gartner. Honderd keer. Dat is niet mis. Nu houdt ik me al zo’n twintig jaar bezig met het vernieuwen van software […]
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. […]
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 […]