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: […]

Amsterdam, Netherlands. February 19, 2016. Series of three lectures at the Vrije Universiteit on software requirements and estimation.

On February 19 I will be presenting a second 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 requirements, user stories, use cases, software estimation mainly. This will be the fifth consecutive year that I will present these lectures […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

November 12, 2010 – Microsoft TechEd Europe. How smart use cases can drive web development

[Session ARC205 at Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin] Use cases have been around for many years describing the requirements of software development projects. From a developer’s point of view, use cases are often seen as too abstract and too complex to develop code from. Until now, that is. During this interactive talk, speaker Sander Hoogendoorn will demonstrate how to […]

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 […]

Being Smart in enterprise agile

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 […]

De uiterste houdbaarheidsdatum van requirements

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 […]

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 […]

SDN Event (Houten, The Netherlands. June 2009)

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 […]

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. […]