Posted by mvanbenthem mid-afternoon: January 27th, 2012
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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Posted by Wilfred Springer in the late afternoon: February 21st, 2011
Setting souls ablaze
Let’s start by fast-forwarding to the end of the talk. Right before the very end of the talk, Michael quotes Alexander de Sainte-Exupéry:
“If you want to build a flotilla of ships, you don’t sit around talking about carpentry (more…)
Posted by Wilfred Springer in the early evening: April 8th, 2010
Tonight, I stared at the http://blogs.sun.com/ site and realized that the entries I once wrote would soon have an Oracle logo on top. That’s just not right. They can’t just make me become one their bloggers. It’s unfair!
Well, anyway. While staring at the rebranded front page, I wonder how they made the transition. I remember that – in the past – Sun went over a couple of rebranding efforts. Rather than actually changing the CSS classes in use, they would actually redefine those classes. But since most of the classes were for one sole purpose only – to set the color – they used the names of these colors as the names of the CSS classes (more…)
Posted by Wilfred Springer in the late evening: February 6th, 2010
I’m proud to say that – during the six years of employment at the company formerly known as Sun Microsystems – I wrote all my documents in DocBook. Of course there was the occasional warning that we were all expected to use StarOffice, but by making sure the DocBook generated output resembled the printed material produced by HQ, it never turned into a big argument. And since my entire DocBook chain was built from open source, I had to use Apache FOP.
Apache FOP has a long history (more…)
Posted by Wilfred Springer at around evening time: January 11th, 2010
There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to validate an XML document against a schema, so I figured I would roll my own library for it. Now, with that library, validating against a schema all of a sudden becomes easy. In the past, I hardly ever considered validating a document against a schema in my tests, but now I find myself doing it all over the place.
Anyway, I will just give a brief introduction. (And there really isn’t that much to talk about.)
First of all, let’s assume that you have a File reference to an XML file (xml) and a File reference to a RelaxNG schema file (schema) (more…)
Posted by Wilfred Springer at around evening time: November 11th, 2009
It was actually quite a while ago since I looked at Spring ME, but then Davide Cerbo mentioned that he had presented Spring ME on Android at a Rome Spring meeting. Way cool! It triggered me thinking about the things that – according to the document I once wrote about it – were not implemented yet.
Posted by Nancy Sharma around lunchtime: April 27th, 2009
After the GIDS 2008 last year, me and one of my colleague at Xebia expressed our interest in attending Developer Summit this year. Great Indian Developer Summit(GIDS) took place from 23-25 April 2009 at Bangalore , India.
Our journey started with witnessing a huge chaos at the airport. Their systems had gone down so everything was haywire. We joked of representing Xebia here as well to present them a better software solution 
@Bangalore , India
The first day saw a huge number of people. A lot of buzz and enthusiasm among the delegates. Big sponsors like Microsoft, Adobe , Red hat , JBoss , IBM , Yahoo , Sony Ericsson were associated with this event. Everyday there were five parallel tracks going on at five different halls.
In this blog I would briefly cover the highlights. (more…)
Posted by Nancy Sharma just before lunchtime: August 25th, 2008
My initial 100 days @ Xebia?
I’ll say it takes something “extra” to be here. It calls for the people with perseverance and “ready to take on any challenge” kinda attitude . (more…)
Posted by Guido Schoonheim in the late afternoon: August 21st, 2008
Agile 2008
At Agile2008 in Toronto Jeff Sutherland and myself presented our article outlining how to achieve hyperproductivity in distributed Scrum when working in an offshore situation. InfoQ recorded our presentation and will publish it online in November as the end of a series of Agile2008 talks.
Download article Download presentation
Also see this InfoQ article
Agile and Offshoring, oil and water?
If you are reading the Xebia blog chances are that you are already familiar with the benefits of Agile development. Practicing Agile (in our case Scrum combined with XP) delivers hyperproductivity combined with very high quality. The promise of offshoring in the modern IT industry is also clear: more available talent, scaling up and down without local layoffs or knowledge drain, and of course cost reduction. Together they make a killer combo!
However, Agile and offshoring seem like oil and water, they don’t seem to mix. How to get a focus on individuals and interactions when your people are distributed across the globe? What is the secret sauce to use to get it running smoothly?
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Posted by Anurag Shrivastava at around evening time: July 7th, 2008
On 6th July 2008 we had opportunity to welcome Mary and Tom Poppendieck at the Xebia office in Gurgaon, in their last leg of India tour, in which they organized workshops on Lean Software Development. Mary, an Engineer, started her career at 3M, as a junior engineer, described how she was mentored by seniors to learn and perform. It was very easy for me to relate the 3M case study at ISB with the actual experience of Mary at 3M. A key point for me to notice was that at 3M the business managers kept two best engineers without any project assignments so they would be available to help juniors.