This blogpost completes the model that I use to build up a mental image of a new crisis situation when I encounter one. I use it to structure and prioritize the thousands of pieces of new information that I need to process in order to get a good picture of what I’m dealing with. In fact it is a tool to get a fast and useful insight in the current crisis situation that will help me to consolidate all the different inputs into a combined and useful image of what’s going on. This image helps me to communicate with the stakeholders and to define the actions needed.

In my previous post the fundamentals of the model have been explained.
In this post the rest of the mental image usage is described.

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There are not a lot of companies who publish any of the source code online. And why would they: documentation takes time, you need to package it some way and the only thing that can happen is that somebody secretly becomes rich from your work. Worse yet, the company may loose face when security bugs are discovered.

In the meantime, we developers know all know to look at open source involvement when we look at hiring. We know that if you publish code online you are willing to be open for suggestions and criticism from the outside world. Further more, if you are able to get patches accepted, you know how to work with a team you have not worked with yet and how difficult it can be to do it right. Working openly will set you open to opinion, and if you think your code is good, why should you not?

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A while ago my colleague Olav Maassen asked a question on our company mailing list about the best book to read to learn OSx development. His question made me think not about the best book but about how I learned new programming languages in the past.  Read more

Some of you may know that I like to add drawings to support my posts.
This time the drawing itself is the subject of the post and you can actually use it. So please take a look at it and put it to use as you see fit. If you like it (or hate it…) or if you want to share your experiences using it please leave a comment.

You can download it here (PDF):
Xebia Scrum Process Overview

Or copy it from here

Lots of groups struggle with product features in the discovery phase of their products and services. Here is a relatively easy and quick exercise to make sense out of a mess of stories.
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My brother is a projectmanger in construction. He builds complex stuff and I admire him for that. During the build, he transforms large sums of money and a set of mandates into a set of sellable real-estate features (sellable…did I really just write this in the midst of our crisis?). When his projects finish, the deliverable is a tangible end-product that people can use for living, working or to generally enjoy.
In Dutch language we have the saying that something “stands like a house” when it is well built or well organized. So in that sense, when we change organizations into high performing highly adaptable entities, could we say change agents are builders as well?

Let’s take a closer look at this comparison and see if it makes any sense.
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This is a true story of a company. At the first of January this year ago this company was a great idea and a few pictures. It had been like that for a while. At the first of April it was a company with a production website doing actual business with actual clients. The 12 weeks in between that have been awesome, nerve-wrecking and scary at the same time. We’ve had to let go of some really cool features and we’ve found out things about the business case that we definitely didn’t know when we said we could build it in such a short time. At the beginning of the project I invented the term “Oh shit erlebnis” and I’ve had a few since then.

Because we were working in short iterations (1 week Sprints), we had awesome focus and we could deal with most discrepancies between dreams and reality quickly.

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Do you think that you do TDD well because you have been doing it for years now? That is what I thought until I did an exercise called “TDD as if you mean it” and it put my feet back on the ground!

At two different TDD workshops I have tried to build an application following the rules of “TDD as if you mean it”. The first time was in Amsterdam at a Coderetreat and the second time at an XKE session at Xebia. Although I am practicing TDD for a while now, the result of the exercises in both sessions were that I had few tests, even less production code and an application that did not work.

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No really….. you don’t. Well, maybe you do, but the boardroom certainly doesn’t. They have never heard about agile, let alone what it is all about. Is this something that will help us solve our problems or just a new IT buzzword?
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Net als in 2010 heeft Xebia in 2011 het jaarlijks onderzoek naar de de status van Agile in Nederland uitgevoerd. Met ook dit jaar weer opvallende resultaten. Zo zegt bijna 90 procent van de bedrijven die met Agile werken sterk verbeterde resultaten te realiseren bij hun (ICT) projecten. De vraagt die direct bij mij opkomt bij dit soort hoge percentages is waarom niet iedereen met Agile aan de slag gaat.

Daarnaast ervaart 83 procent van de Nederlandse bedrijven die Agile werken hebben geadopteerd, meer werkplezier en 85 procent meer teammotivatie. Dit percentage is aanzienlijk hoger dan vorig jaar, toen gaf driekwart van de respondenten aan meer werkplezier en teammotivatie te ervaren. Dus de mensen die Agile werken varen er wel bij, naar mijn mening een van de belangrijkste redenen voor het succes van Agile. Dit komt ook veelal tot uiting in een lager ziekteverzuim en grotere loyaliteit naar de werkgever toe.
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