A Journey to be a Digital Company - tangly llc

I long dreamed to work in a digital environment. I shall no longer print out a form, sign it by hand and use snake mail to deliver it to the receiving party.

Our software service company is an ideal candidate to validate if this assumption is realistic.

Profit is like the air we breathe. We need air to live, but we don't live to breathe. - Frederic Laloux

Agile@Scale - Are Common Patterns Emerging?

Your organization has decided to introduce agile at scale in all development departments or better in the whole company.

Your Chief of Agility COA, Chief of Digitalization COD or Chief of Change COC was in an expensive training and has selected the appropriate framework for your company.

Welcome to the club of companies introducing agile approaches and having no clues why they do it and how they could be successful.

Here some hardly learnt truths worth knowing when starting such an endeavor.

Imposing Agile methods introduces a conflict with the values and principles that underlie Agile methods -- Martin Fowler

Time to Migrate to a Modern JDK, Laggards!

Are you still using Java 8 to run your mission critical systems?

Are you truly using a six years old technology stack?

Are you already applying for a Java laggard club membership?

If you are still using Java 8 you are using technologies released in Spring 2014. You are missing all the improvements in the garbage collector, runtime engine and various API.

Java 11 LTS was released in September 2018.  The current LTS release is one year old. You had one year to migrate to this long term solution version.

It is time to modernize the fundament of your application and invest a small amount of effort in it. The payback is really good.

A Commons view on Scrum

Agile approaches encourage common ownership of artifacts during product development. Historically commons is the term used for shared resources. Can we apply the commons learnings to agile and Scrum approaches?

Interestingly economists were kind to state common ownership is doomed to fail through the tragedy of commons theory published end of the sixties.

Thirty years later Elinor Ostrom showed that commons can indeed work well if you follow a small set of rules. She found century old examples scattered around the world.  She was awarded the Nobel price in economics for her findings in 2009 and dissipated the previous fake news.

The picture shows a Suone in Wallis, Switzerland. The constructions bring water to arid regions and are build and maintained by communities. It is example of commons in place for hundred of years and is one of the concrete implementation studied by Elinor. Mountain pastures are also managed as commons in Switzerland. You will find a drawing of Suone on the hundred Swiss Francs note.

Agile Architecture within Scrum

You are applying the agile, lean approach to your software product development. Your teams use Scrum or Kanban to deliver running software every two weeks.

Agile architecture is a key element to improve the quality of your product and reduce cycle-time of your product outcomes.

Your journey toward greater business agility starts by identifying what outcomes are most important to your company’s success. A key component is to find out how to create great architecture within the Scrum framework.

The World is a Better Place and We Must Tackle Climate Change

The world has really improved in a lot of areas.

Stop whining we are doomed.  And yes we must act strong and fast to tackle the climate change disaster. 

But do not forget how much the world bettered the last centuries.

We are not doomed, we must solve the next challenges instead of just complaining and doing nothing.

Ask yourself if you need a car. Travel with train instead of flying. Schedule a video conference instead of a business trip. Each step reduces your carbon footprint. Millions of persons taking similar steps will be a huge improvement. Reduce your plastic and paper usage. Just do it!

Agile Code is Clean Code!

You are applying the agile, lean approach to your software product development. Your teams use Scrum or Kanban to deliver running software every two weeks.

To create an agile architecture you must write agile worthy code. And agile code is always clean code.

Start early, do it continuously and soon your code will be clean, legible and free of defects.

Agile Architecture Principles

You are applying the agile, lean approach to your software product development. Your teams use Scrum or Kanban to deliver running software every two weeks. The product market introduction is a success and you will successfully sell the solution for the next ten years.

How shall you define the software architecture of your product and insure a long living and high quality solution? The experts tell you the design is emergent, what does it means?

Code Scene as Crime Scene

You have a successful product and happy users. Slowly the cost adding new features is creeping up and product margins are shrinking. Which crimes did put us in this dreaded situation?

How can you analyze the history of your product's source code?

How can you explore the social dimension of your product development? How can you find good approaches to increase time to market and improve development costs?

Why I still love to use a MacBookPro and MacOS in 2019

As a young developer I loved Linux, compiled new kernels during evening sessions and struggled days to have the correct drivers for the graphic card and communication components of my notebook. 

I grew older and decided to enjoy my weekends, family and outdoor activities.

And surely I shall have no virus, trojan and other evils on my workstation. So I went to MacOS and Apple notebooks without regrets.

You Need an Engineering Culture

Agile approaches are not enough, You need a strong engineering culture to achieve quality and lasting success.

Often coaches and Scrum masters tinker with the processes and invest effort and blood to improve the ceremonies and the company structure.

But at the end of the day the success of your product is defined by its adequacy to customers' needs and its overall quality. You need a solid and professional engineering culture to produce high quality products and release them at high rate. If not you just release a new set of defects to your paying customers.

How do you establish and nurture a professional and effective engineering culture?

How Healthy is Your Product? - Company Culture 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 fourth and last 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 company culture and how does it focus collaborators to delight your customers.

Detecting Agile Bullshit

The Defense Innovation Board DIB advises the secretary of defense of the United States of America.

Members of the board are recognizable names like Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, or Instagram COO Marne Levine.

So I was quite surprised that a government committee was so straightforward to publish a document called Detecting Agile Bullshit.

Simple questions are used as a bullshit detector to identify organizations faking agile. Worth your time, if the government has this problem, you probably will also encounter it in the private sector.