At ØreDev I ran into Lasse Koskela. We started talking about estimation techniques, and we both felt that the dominant estimation technique of relative estimation with planning poker has been unchallenged for a very long time. We found ourselves wondering what the next big idea about estimation will be. After throwing a couple of ideas back and forth, we decided to invite to a workshop comparing a few estimation techniques. We decided to call the workshop “The Malmö Experiment.

Just three weeks ago, I was asked to step in for Ted Neward to give a tutorial at Øredev on Effective Enterprise Java. As I did not have time to get the tutorial materials printed, I present them here on the web for the participants and others. 1. Effect Enterprise Java architecture in 2009 Since the Effective Enterprise Java book was written, many of the topics regarding transactions, concurrency and shared state have been resolved.

When I write Java-projects that produce web pages, I test on several levels. First, I use Jetty and WebDriver to test the result via http. (WebDriver even lets me test JavaScript!) But for speed and agility, unit-level tests beat even the fastest integration level tests. Unit tests run much much faster, and lets me pinpoint problems much more accurately. As a general rule: If you introduce a bug, you want a unit test to be the one that sees it first.

I’m working on a collection of patterns for early releases with Niklas Bjørnerstedt. Here are some of my thoughts based on this work. In a few different projects, I’ve noticed that the idea of “where are we going” seems to go though a familiar pattern: “The old system is the requirement document, just make the new one do the same things”. After a while, someone will realize that it’s rather pointless to replace a system with a new one that does the same thing, which leads to… “Analyze the business processes and make the new system automate all decisions that a human used to make.

This Norwegian language article introduces a short two-page guide I’ve written to explain Scrum to people who’ve only just heard of it. I samarbeid med våre dyktige redaksjonelle medarbeidere på Steria, har jeg forfattet en “3 minutters guide” til Scrum. Denne tar for seg spørsmålene som “hva er egentlig Scrum”. [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“360” caption=“Dette er Scrum”][/caption] 3-minutterguidene kan lastes ned fra Sterias hjemmesider. Jeg planlegger å følge opp denne guiden med en guide som beskriver hva som skal til for å faktisk lykkes med Scrum.

Every Scrum-team should use their taskboard to support their particular way of working. I’d like to share the way we use our taskboard at my current project for your inspiration. [caption id=“attachment_447” width=“300” caption=“Colored ink, paper and makers support team process”][/caption] When I started my current project I went to pick up sticky notes and marker pens for the taskboard. I grabbed, more or less at random three colors of notes (red, green, yellow), four colors of pens (black, red, blue, green) and five color sticky bookmarks (yellow, green, blue, orange, red).

The generation that has been growing up was raised in a world that was radically different from the world we live in now. There is a generational shift, and we know that what we were taught is no longer true: [caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“200” caption=“What does your brain look like?”][/caption] We were taught to trust information from authorative sources, but we’ve learned to prefer the voices of named individuals. Be personal.

What will the daily experience of software development look like, say, five years from now? Have our current processes reached their peak, or will the world continue to change? Alan Kay said “the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.” Here are some ideas of the future I want to invent: I hope it will be dramatically better than what we currently do. [caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“240” caption=“Steel pipes (by monkeyc.

It’s not secret that Apple likes to control their platform tightly. As long as their dictatorship is a benevolent one, whether you find this objectionable or not is a rather uninteresting question. But lately, the question seems to be less and less academic: Google’s Voice Application for the iPhone got rejected and two existing applications (GV Mobile and Voicecentral) were removed from the AppStore! This is an extremely nasty thing to do to the developers.

This Norwegian language post talks a little about a quick intro to Scrum that I wrote for my employer Jeg har forfattet en “3-minutters guide” til Scrum. Dette er en to siders lettlest artikkel som publiserer via min arbeidsgiver Steria. Denne har som mål å være tilgjengelig både for tekniske og ikke-tekniske prosjektdeltagere som gjerne vil forstå litt mer om hva Scrum dreier seg om. Du finner artikkelen på Sterias arkiv over 3-minuttersguider.