How Healthy is Your Product? - Product Strategy Check

You are developing your product using agile and lean approaches. 

How can you check your approach and distill improvements? A health check of your product and your development approach is certainly a good solution.

This post is the third of a set of articles identifying health checks with different focus. We will identify strengths, potential weaknesses and hopefully find room for improvement.

What is your product strategy and how do you involve your customers and stakeholders.

How Healthy is Your Product? - Delivery Pipeline Check

You are developing your product using agile and lean approaches. 

How can you check your approach and distill improvements? A health check of your product and your development approach is certainly a good solution.

This post is the second of a set of articles identifying health checks with different focus. We will identify strengths, potential weaknesses and hopefully find room for improvement.

How you build and deliver your software product has direct implication on your liquidity and cashflow. Improvements in your delivery pipeline have direct impact on your finances.

SAFE 4.6: Improvements Direly Needed

It is official. The power engine of SAFe 4.6 vehicle is Team and Technical Agility. View the official presentation and more important download the slides.  It is one of their five Lean Enterprise competencies and one of their four core values. SAFe finally recognizes the tremendous importance of technical proficiency and craftsmanship.

They advocate two findings. First you need team agility, how you apply Scrum or Kanban. In other words being agile instead of doing agile. Second you need technical agility, how you develop a quality product.

I challenge you. If you are following SAFe, talk with your teams and checks how many of their official good practices are you using on a daily basis.

How Healthy is Your Product? - Source Code Check

You are developing your product using agile and lean approaches. 

How can you check your approach and distill improvements? A health check of your product and your development approach is certainly a good solution.

This post is the first of a set of articles identifying health checks with different focus. We will identify strengths, potential weaknesses and hopefully find room for improvement.

The initial examination shall always be the source code. Your code base is a key asset of your company.

How Should You handle Definition of Done?

An agile team is sole responsible for the internal quality of the product they build and maintain.

And the developers shall be accountable to produce the expected quality and optimize long terms goals of the organization.

They provide the answer to the seminal question

Did we build it right?

Definition of Done DoD is a major building block to answer this question with a sounding yes.

Shu Ha Ri for Enterprise Agile

First teams have successfully used Scrum to develop applications. The news spread out and everybody wants to apply Scrum. It is time to introduce Enterprise wide Agile with Scrum or Kanban or XP.

Your Company wants to introduce Enterprise Agility in their product development, quality assurance and sales departments. The company as a whole shall transition to an agile organization and all teams shall adopt Scrum.

Try the "Shu Ha Ri" approach for such a change process.

What does an Agile Coach?

An agile coach has three main areas of activity:

Foster Autonomy: Teach and support the team and individuals to be autonomous within the given boundaries of the organization and its processes.

Create Ground for Motivation: Help teams to maximize their autonomy, individual mastery and make sure the team has a purpose.

Provide Coaching: Support teams and individuals to identify potentials with their roles and within the agile organization and improve.

Architectural Decision Record ADR

Architecture Decision Record ADR is a compact and traceable documentation of all important decisions taken during the realization of a product. Use asciidoc or markdown and Git to have an agile and lean documentation of your major decisions.

The huge advantage of ADR is the timeline of the decisions. It tremendously help to understand the technical changes during the product lifecycle.

How to reach the Software Quality Graal?

Lately I was asked how many bugs and smells detected through SonarQube were acceptable for a software product. And a Scrum master inquired which organizational changes are necessary to empower software developers to write good code. Speechless and dumbfounded I was unable to answer these questions.

After quite some time I realized these persons believe tools can measure the quality of software. But tools can only measure non-quality.

They tell you when you are doing it wrong, only your heart can tell you when you are doing it right.

But first that does it means to have a quality software product?

What Does a Great Product Owner?

Often organizations state that the product owner role is very difficult to fulfill. I heartily agree being a great product owner is challenging.

And I also clearly state that his activities are often not the ones of a super hero but regular techniques a motivated and interested product owner can easily learn.

Below I took the list of activities of a great product owner article from the scrum.org site and discuss which ones are regular activities of any well-trained product owner.

What does a Product Owner?

The product owner is one of the three roles defined in the Scrum framework.

The product owner is the agile term for an excellent product manager. He defines the vision, roadmap, release plan and the features of the product to build. He is in charge of the budget and of a tentative schedule. Regularly he refines the backlog with his development team(s).

Often I encounter a business analyst or a project manager in this role. What shall they learn to become an effective and efficient product owner?

Sonar Lint for the Impatient

Remove issues before they reach customer sites. No quality problems shall reach your Git master branch.

What is Sonar?

SonarQube is a central server that processes full analyses (triggered by the various SonarQube Scanners). Its purpose is to give a 360° vision of the quality of your code base. For this, it analyzes all the source lines of your project on a regular basis.

Agile Trends Switzerland 2018

What are the main hurdles to introduce agile approaches in Swiss companies. The Swiss agile trends report was published for the last ten years and learn us the difficulties and successes of agile transformations.

SwissQ has published a "SwissQ Software Development Switzerland 2018", the tenth version of this report.

Introducing agile company-wide was and is a cultural change process. Such a change takes time and sometimes hurts. Too often organizations stop the process and revert to all command and control approaches with Waterfall project management.

Without commitment of senior management, the initiative will fail. In other words Walk the talk.

You must teach, coach, and support your collaborators through the transition. You need to believe in them and provide an environment where they can safely learn and experiment.

At the end what matters is collaborator purpose, customer satisfaction,  and business value.

Agile Introduction Success Criteria through the LeSS lens

An agile organization is able to deliver or change direction at any time without additional cost. 

More companies want to become truly agile and book an expensive journey to the holy land of agility. Often the travelers never reach their true destination.

The LeSS people have a clear set of conditions to increase the odds. 

All my experiences confirm these conditions are essential for success.

Pragmatic Craftsmanship - Professional Software Developer

The last months I was often confronted with  software products having insufficient quality.

Insufficient means late delivery, and few new features. The effort to correct errors in the field eats 30% to 50% away from the whole development budget. How can such a dreadful situation occur?

One root cause is the low quality of the source code and ignorance of basic coding design approaches. We are not talking about complex design activities or complex patterns; we are discussing basic approaches how to write correct and maintainable code.

Java 10 aka 18.3 Changes

For Java to remain competitive it must not just continue to move forward — it must move forward faster. - Mark Reinhold

What has changed?

Oracle has decided to release a new JDK two times a year. The next release Java 10 aka 18.3 will be available on of March 2018.  JDK 11 aka 18.9 will be released in September 2018. Java 11 will also be a long term support release.

Agile in eGovernment Projects

How can agile approaches be applied to deliver solutions in a government environment?

Here an example of a GIS open data portal successfully developed using agile approaches such as Kanban, lean product and technical excellence.

How should You handle Technical Debt?

What is Technical Debt?

Technical debt is the difference between what was promised and what was actually delivered.

This includes any technical shortcuts made to meet delivery deadlines or to avoid training your development team.

Debt implies you pay interest on this debt until you reimburse it. If not interests shall continuously be added to the debt.

In other words either you pay back your debts and associated interests or you go bankrupt in the long term - because the value of your software diminishes over the years and at some point its value is lower than your debt -

Scrum Guide 2017: What changed?

The Scrum guide was revised in 2016 and got clarification concerning the core values. I was thrilled. Talking about values and mental models you must have to successfully introduce and be agile is awesome.

A new revision was published end of year 2017, just a year after the values addition.

What has changed? What have the community learnt and committed to the new version of the guide.

Six Levers for better Agile Product Development

How can you create better products and services?

How can you delight your customers, your collaborators, and your stakeholders?

We identified six levers to multiply the effectivity of your agile development teams and empower them to create great services and products.

Please add these tools to your toolbox and create great products.

Why is it so Cool to Develop with Java?

Why is it so cool to develop software using Java, a modern IDE and agile tools.  Because the environment empowers you and incredibly speed-up your development outcomes.  In seconds you know if the next code increment adds value to your product.

Liberated your team works adding functions and no more spend unaccounted hours in setting up infrastructure.

Below our current set of techniques and tools to multiply our results and bring earlier a product to your customers.

One Way to Improve Your Scrum Approach

You work using agile approaches. Your collaborators are trained how to use agile approaches. Techniques such as test driven development, continuous integration or clean code are regularly practiced.

Now you are looking for the next improvement. How can your team improve outcome and increase customers' value?

It is time for a fresh view. Perform an agile assessment with an external expert from another company or department.