We’re running Mobile Era for the second year on October 5th-6th and I’d like to share some experience on how we’re using scripts and Trello to help with the organization effort. If you’d like automating simple tools, this is the article for you. If you haven’t signed up for Mobile Era yet, you can leave a comment in this blog post for a discount code! Google Forms is great! You can simply design pretty advanced forms and easily get responses.

So: What is best? A native app or a hybrid app? And if you build a hybrid app, what’s the best framework to use? As with most interesting questions, it turns out that the answer is “it depends”. I often get questions like “isn’t Xamarin (or Cordova) better than build a native app”. Weeeell, it’s not as simple as that. Here’s a few ideas that I’ve found myself repeating lately:

I recently attended the XP Days Ukraine conference in a rainy, but beautiful and Christmas-decorated Kiev. I conducted a coding dojo and gave a talk where I demonstrated pair programming live together with Dima Mindra. After the talk, I got a few questions about how to run a Coding Dojo. This article is meant as a guide to anyone wanting to start up a Coding Dojo, whether it’s in Kiev (Mikail/Aleksey), in Odessa (I’m looking at you, Dima!

Can the various European Agile User Groups benefit from working together? I am cautiously optimistic. At XP2011 this week, Jurgen Appelo has taken the initiative to launch the Agile Lean Europe network. This is an initiative to bring together representatives from 17 European countries. Sergey Dmitriev and I will be representing Norway. To what end? I’m still not sure. There is no doubt that there is much Europeans can learn from each other.

The Agency for Public Management and eGovernment in Norway is currently developing guidelines for IT-projects within the Norwegian governmental sector. The Norwegian Computing Association hosted a presentation and discussion about this work yesterday. I was privileged enough to summarize the comments from one of the three discussion groups at the meeting. For the enjoyment of the internet, I hereby provide a few ideas on eGovernment projects. Value first The speaker from The Norwegian Government Agency for Financial Management (SSØ) pointed out that many projects are not sufficiently concerned with satisfying real objectives.

This is a test case from my current project: Scenario: Finish gathering information Given I have an open case And the case has a task "gather information from X" And the case has a task "gather information from Y" When the user confirms that task "gather information from X" is completed And the user confirms that task "gather information from Y" is completed Then the case should generate a new task "evaluate customer standing" It seems pretty run of the mill.

I’ve been part of the group organizing the Norwegian language, lightning talks based conference Smidig the last two years. This Norwegian language article describes the essential guidelines to giving a short presentation. En god lyntale kan ha enda større påvirkning enn et godt foredrag, fordi lettere kan nå flere mennesker. Men det krever innsats. En god lyntale er: Fokusert: Du skal ha ett poeng, én påstand eller ett spørsmål som foredraget bygger rundt.

The Norwegian computing association has released guidelines for contracts regarding agile projects. Wednesday, November 26th I will be part of a panel debating this work and the combination of agile and contracts. This Norwegian language blog post contains my introductory remarks for the debate. Kom på debatten på Oslo Lean Meetup på onsdag og delta på debatten! Jeg er ikke en prosjektleder, en advokat eller en politikker, så jeg kan ikke si så mye om hva som må være med i en slik kontrakt.

I’m going on the road again. This time it’s not far, just to Trondheim for a seminar for the Norwegian computer association that I will be giving together with Aslak Hellesøy on agile development and testing. This will be similar to our line-up at JavaZone: Aslak will cover “how to make the correct software”, and I will cover “how to make the software correct”. Hopefully, we’ll make a few test managers think and a few others angry.

The Norwegian word “smidig” means “agile”. So when we wanted to make a Norwegian conference for the Oslo Agile community, “smidig 2007” (November 26th and 27th) was a natural choice for a title. The seed of the conference was idea by Nils Christian Haugen and Aslak Hellesøy to have a whole day devoted to open spaces. Meanwhile, I had been experimenting with “lightning talks” on Oslo XP meetup, a user group that meets in Oslo every month.