Category Archives: Technology

Welcome to the Mobile Era

by Johannes Brodwall Posted on October 4, 2016

(Looks like I’m back in the conference organization game again! After a few years of lots of travel and then a few years of lots of family responsibilities, this year I co-funded the Mobile Era conference. It looks like it will be a blast!)

If your experience is anything like mine, most of the interesting projects around you are having a larger mobile component this year than last year. I think this trend will continue. It can be a mobile-first website or a custom internal app for a company that wants their workers to be more effective when they are in the field. It can be an app to engage your customers or an intelligent sensor or “thing”.

We now have the technology to move lots of applications that used to be tied to a workstation over to a mobile device and in so doing unshackle people from their desks.

But this leads to a new challenge for developers: If you were an “enterprise developer”, you’re used to large data volumes, complex domain models and integration with various systems in various degrees of disrepair. If you were an “apps developer”, you were used to multiple device configuration, designing for small surfaces, and APIs with various peculiarities. Now the need has come for people who combine those skills.

With this in mind, it dawned to me almost a year ago that there is no good event in Norway that addresses this challenge. I wondered if anyone else was thinking like me, so I send an email to a few people with “if you think this is cool, I’m meeting a couple of people at Espresso House next Monday to see where we want to go. Please forward.” I was pretty amazed by the turnout (I’m the guy hiding in the back):

Mobile Era team

When we compared notes, many of us had almost identical ideas about what we thought a Mobile conference could mean. In the front and center of the picture, you can see Maxim Salnikov who came up with the name that embodied everything we had in mind. Thus the Mobile Era conference was born.

After a long and winding road, Mobile Era is only a month away. We have an amazing program with deeply technical subjects like the Realm Mobile database, Mobile DevOps, the new Awareness API in Android, performance tuning in Swift, ionic 2 features, React Native, Firebase, IoT. If you wanted to catch up on what’s happening all over the Mobile space, now is your chance!

When I look at my own preferences, I see that I more and more often leave the computer behind and use my mobile instead. I do code review on my mobile, I watch tech talks on my mobile (as well as tv), I receive production logs on my mobile, I deploy the next version of my software on my mobile.

In the Mobile Era, I expect my users to demand as much from the software I write.

PS: The early bird closed last week, but if you write a comment on this blog post, I’ll email you a special discount code which is valid for another week or so.

Posted in English, Mobile, Non-technical, Technology | 3 Comments

Micro-Scrum: A stamp-sized version of Scrum

by Johannes Brodwall Posted on October 20, 2013

“Show frequently what you’ve done to someone who cares”

Are you working in the way you are because it’s a good idea, or just because someone told you to do it? I increasingly hear experienced professionals at Agile conference bemoan the blind adherence to the techniques of Scrum without understanding the principles and values that make it work. I also encounter many software professionals who are overwhelmed by the amount of things that they are asked to do. The result is the questions “are we ‘Agile’?” and “should we be doing ‘Agile’ or not?”

I die a little bit inside when people say “should we do Agile or not”. The assumptions behind this question are all wrong: That there is one way to “be Agile”, that learning from Agile methods like Scrum requires that you use everything in those methods, and that there are good reasons to be “not Agile”. All of this is wrong.

To me, the most essential lesson that the Agile manifesto tries to communicate is that of Feedback. And frankly, if you’re ignoring feedback on your project, you’re stupid. There are different constraints around the feedback on different project, but essentially, delaying feedback is delaying critical learning.

The most essential manifestation of feedback in Scrum is the Sprint review, or demo. No matter if you’re calling what you do “Scrum”, “Kanban”, “Cowboy coding”, “Waterfall” (which is more like Cowboy coding than a real process) or just “the way we do stuff here”, you will get benefit from showing what you’ve done to someone who cares frequently. For some projects, “someone who cares” may be an end user, while for other projects it’s not feasible to involve end-users frequently. On some projects, “frequently” may mean every day, other projects may not be able to do more than once every month. You may even find that nobody cares about what you do. If that’s the case, surely you can find more relaxing ways of doing it.

When you are showing what you’ve done to someone who cares frequently, you can improve. You can think about how to show it better, how to have the show more accurately reflect what you’ve done, how to involve more people or people how care more and how you can do it even more frequently. Some of the techniques of Scrum may help you do that, but use whatever source of inspiration you like.

No matter if you’re excited about the word “Agile” or not, if you’re not getting feedback, you’re not only non-Agile, you’re non-smart.

Posted in English, Extreme Programming, Software Development, Technology | Leave a comment