Recently this statement raised my inner alarms: “We’ve got lots of problems! For example, nobody is pair programming.” Why would this rub me the wrong way? That nobody is pair programming? After all, I am indeed a huge fan of pairing up. I witness this practice’s many benefits every single day at work. But no,… Continue reading So what? – Look for the real problem

At the end of 2011 I wrote about what makes an agile mindset (in my opinion) and even made a fancy infographic about it: It concentrates on how people think about their colleagues as humans vs. cogs; whether they have a growth vs. a fixed mindset; iterative product development vs. extensive planning and more. These… Continue reading What is an Agile Mindset? Six years later

When I first learned about Kanban, I also learned about “Swarming”. Swarming is when the whole team pitches in to work on the same thing. That same thing is often a blocking task that WIP limits helped surface. Can’t work on “your” tasks because you reached the WIP limit? Go help clear that blocking task… Continue reading Examples for Swarming beyond the team

At TopConf Linz 2017, Allan Kelly posed a question to the audience: “Have you ever delivered a project early?” Out of 75ish people only 3 raised their hands. That’s not a lot of people. All three handraisers were fellow speakers and agile practioners. I was one of them. Interestingly, I had hesitated to raise my… Continue reading How to deliver a project early

Recently I’ve been presenting our Work Hacks at a couple of places and talking about pairing up as part of it. Not only do we pair program but we also mob program and pair up across roles: Dev and UX designer, PO and customer support, UX and PO, dev and customer support, dev and …… Continue reading How did you introduce pair programming at sipgate?

We don’t go out and do difficult things because we’re confident. We do difficult things and that gives us confidence. We don’t work longer hours and get more done. We work less, sleep enough and get more done. We don’t have more defects in production when we deliver often. We have fewer defects when we… Continue reading We have it backwards

[This post first appeared in German.] At sipgate, we’re more than 10 teams that work (more or less) independently of each other. Each team is self-organizing. Together we deliver more than 20 updates of our services to our customers. That makes it hard to stay up to date with all improvements. That’s why the Scrum-prescribed… Continue reading Demo time – How to stay up to date with 10+ teams

“Self-Selecting Teams” and “Dynamic Reteaming” are a big topic in my timeline thanks to the books by Sandy Mamoli & David Mole and the upcoming book by Heidi Helfand respectively. This made me relize that I’ve written about the composition of our teams over the course of the years but not about how people join… Continue reading How teams form and break up when there are no managers

Maybe it’s because usability was such a strong focus of mine for such a long time but I feel like most good ideas boil down to usability. It’s kind of my “grand unifying theory of good practices”. To me, Agile Software Development is about providing good usability to the customer (not necessarily the user). Clean… Continue reading Agile is about usability. So is Clean Code.

When you let the writing on whiteboards stay on for long enough – say, a couple of month – dry-erase markers stop being “dry-erase” and start being “leave unwipeable shadowy traces behind”. You’re left with an unsightly board, no matter how often you wipe. Water doesn’t help, at least not against dried up German Edding… Continue reading How to get a very dirty whiteboard sparkly clean