AgileMore

Scrum board. What's the best taskboard and information radiator?

2011-05-11T21:00:00.006+02:00

About the last 10 years of my Agile experience I have been using various tools to monitor progress and keep an overview and radiate information. Some were more successful than others of course. Some of the "best" products were not always helping. Now at Backbase we use a set of JIRA tools. Before that I used mainly Super Sticky Notes and a whiteboard. To keep track of the numbers and print a

New job, blogging and mouse speed

2010-10-22T07:24:00.000+02:00

It's been a long period since my last post with a lot of things that happened. So here is the short story. I bought a new house last year and had to sell my own house. I'm glad that I was able to sell my house in time so that I'm not having double costs now. I even decided to sell it before our new house was ready... so we lived for about 4 months with my parents. That was fun with the four of

2010: New and Improved (OneMonthProject)

2010-01-01T16:45:00.012+01:00

Last month I wrote an article for the Whitehorses website. A Whitebook about a successful project (only in Dutch: Een succesvol project in de praktijk). The idea is that we approach projects in a new and improved way.New about it is that we start building software after a very limited starting up phase. When we reach the moment that the customer wants to hire us and we can start, we form a mixed

Performance and expectations

2009-10-22T17:19:00.007+02:00

Although this post is rather short, I do write it.At this very moment I'm waiting for a file-copy. I have an image of a virtual machine on an external USB drive (WB Passport Elite 250 GB, good drive!) and want to copy it to my fixed harddisk on my slow laptop (why are these things so slow within a year?). While waiting for it I'm able to write this. The expected time to finish was 16 minutes. So

The Principle of ‘Results Beat All’

2009-10-04T11:32:00.016+02:00

"The top strategy is ‘getting the stakeholder results’. Meeting requirements is more fundamental than any other process or principle."The above text and principle comes from the writing of Tom Gilb. From his Competitive Engineering (CE) book. I'm kind of a fan of Tom Gilb. Since I got into touch with EVO, a "methodology" which could be seen as an early Agile approach of software engineering.I

Microsoft Tag, that's what it is.

2009-08-14T15:37:00.004+02:00

In my previous post I posted an image. That image is a tag. Tags are used worldwide for tagging, identifying and pricing articles and products. Now Microsoft created a new web oriented tag which in my opinion may become a huge success.Read about it on the site of MS: http://www.microsoft.com/tag/<

Find out what this is...

2009-08-07T13:12:00.004+02:00

This picture can be machine read (even a mobile phone). But what is it?

About IT and business value

2009-07-24T12:06:00.006+02:00

The crisis is a pain. In our business of IT-expertise consultancy weird things happen... The hourly rates are very much under pressure in a lot of cases. Even below cost price is seen...!? Is that because the business value of IT solutions is dropping (and the returns are lower than expected) or is it purely the crisis circumstance that costs are cut.Both are probably true. But how would we solve

Getting to use GIT?

2009-06-01T15:34:00.006+02:00

Git is a relative new player on the version control playground. A few years ago Git saw the light and was brought by one of the smart guys on this globe. Linus Torvalds; he needed a distributed version control tool to maintain the Linux kernel and seemed not to be too happy with the tool they used before Git. The exact story can be found somewhere else... (some links here)I didn't use ALL of the

SOA and complexity

2009-03-04T13:13:00.003+01:00

SOA was the next generation of the modern solutions in IT, right? Yes it is, but why?SOA is a rather vague architecture of how to create an very manageable, flexible infrastructure for all your current and future applications. But what's the SOA best practice. Ask the big SOA-package providers and they all offer a kind of similar story. It's always easy, connecting applications can be done in a

Quiet, busy and holidays are waiting... and Ruby

2008-12-19T09:22:00.007+01:00

Hi there, I haven't been around here for the last two months. I've had some great post-initiatives about SOA and related items but they are still unpublished. I didn't have the time to complete them.Now I'm one day away from a holiday. I'll of course enjoy the free time without obligations but next to that I will improve my Ruby skills. Being a consultant/architect for nearly a decade I didn't

Use the current crisis to become agile and maybe make the SOA step

2008-10-20T17:00:00.003+02:00

Now is the time to stop thinking about making a step to become agile and just do it. Why? It's simple, now is the time to improve your business, processes etc and make the steps that were desperately needed. Use the crisis to grow and become stronger and better then before and beat the competition now, they are struggeling now and thinking about how to survive.Don't just cut costs. That won't

Timeboxing is bad? NO, it's GOOD!

2008-09-16T11:15:00.009+02:00

Last week I read an article in the Computable (a Dutch IT week magazine, in Dutch only, sorry). The subject was about system design and which pitfalls should be prevented. Besides being a story about more or less well-known practices it ended with an statement that we shouldn't time box. It even says that the "time box promise" requires a iron discipline to first create the full design

Hug a developer today

2008-08-30T14:14:00.016+02:00

Below is a nice video I found on the net which tells us a nice little story about the pain "we" have too much. Have a look at it, it only takes 90 seconds.In my next posts I'll address this kind of issues and possible ways to prevent the pain.(this video was created by DevShop)

Starting my blog

2008-08-22T11:38:00.005+02:00

Soon (September) I'll start my regularly updated blog related to Agile and Lean principles applied to software and business development.It's interesting to see that old habits and mechanisms that are not the most efficient nowadays are kept being used or applied a lot. Since my professional experience I've seen and applied a lot of alternatives and strongly believe and surely experienced that