Agile beyond refinements

Even though the year is still young and still cold, I have already presented two training courses. One on microservices for a transportation company. And one on agile for teachers at a high school who want to adopt agile techniques to their classes. Although the topics were quite different, attendees at both courses had a similar background in doing agile: […]

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 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, […]

The changing interpretation of agile

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Scrumdamentalists and crusaders

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 […]

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 […]