Shrink the Change

The amount of software in the world increases in a rapid pace, so does the amount of legacy systems. If you are a developer with some years experience I’m sure that you at some point have had the pleasure of having to do a change, like fix a defect or add some functionality, in an old, messy codebase. Sometimes, the bug fix or adding of the new feature goes well, and you move happily on to a new task or a new project. Sometimes though, the pain of working with the system might just get unbearable. Each change takes forever and you are constantly afraid of breaking some important functionality (true legacy systems have no tests). You may have experienced this too. A little over 1 year ago, in May 2011, I found myself in such a situation.

Kanban Leadership Retreat 2012

This year’s Kanban Leadership Retreat, #klrat, was an inspiring event with lots of great food and drinks in warm and beautiful Mayrhofen, Austria. Long breaks, fantastic people, great conversations and an exciting un-conference program created a perfect arena for learning. As last year, it was arranged and organized by David J. Anderson & Associates. Thanks for putting this excellent event together!

Amongst the many interesting topics were:

Kanban Katas, Visualization, Systemic Flow, Lean Startup, Portfolio Kanban, Change and Crossing the Chasm.

I will elaborate on some of these in what follows….

Kanban Training Class With David J. Anderson

On February 1-2 2012, David J. Anderson will host his official Kanban Traning Class in Oslo. The first course David held in Oslo, got excellent feedback from the 20 participants. David is constantly evolving his material so I’m pretty sure that the participants at this course will get insights into some material not yet written down anywhere.

You can find the course details here:

Kanban Training Class with David J. Anderson

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this upcoming course.

Does It Matter What You Call It?

Imagine that the company you work for has decided that they want to be more agile. Great, right way to go. So they start a project to ease the transition. Not a bad idea really, make sure people use more or less the same terminology, help out with training and similar. To further ease the transition, management decides that all teams should use Scrum. Not a good idea!
With experience from both Scrum and Kanban, you know that it is not really about one method being better than the other. Rather, it is about choosing the right method for the environment you work in and being able to continuously improve.

Lean Web Development With Play Framework and Kanban

Late March this year I hosted David J Anderson’s first official Kanban Traning Class in Norway. Having David over to teach one of his classes was definitely both exiting and a great learning experience for me personally. I’ve been using Kanban for a while now and really come to appreciate the evolutionary way of pursuing continuous improvement and learning.

Now, if you’re going to arrange a course you need some way for people to register, so I decided to create a small web application for this purpose. I did not have much time and I had to do the work during evenings, after getting the kids to bed. In other words, I was in need for some rapid web development. If you want to deliver quickly I think the following is very important:

Superfast Customer Feedback – The Way Forward

Quite recently I attended the Roots 2011 conference in Bergen where I facilitated some Kanban game playing. At the conference I had the pleasure to see Fred George and 3 other programmers (including my former colleague Erling Wegger Linde ) from Forward Technology talk about how they develop software.

Kanban Game at Roots Conference 2011