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If you are serious about continuous improvement aim for a Single DoD

Your developers tell you: “My job is done!”, but we cannot release it to customers, or every component works great and passes all tests, but when we test the full product as a whole we find huge amount of problems. Do you have an organization where you have several DoDs(Definition of Done), for example for User Stories, Features and Epics? Have you ever heard people in your organisation saying they are waiting for other people to finish their job? Have they ever failed to deliver because of this? Does all of this sound familiar to you? I would like to discuss how important it is for a company to aim for a single DoD. Having a single DoD makes us to think about all tasks that are needed in order to release the product to our customers without entering a waterfall mode. I see many companies with different levels of  DoD; this makes companies slower and not serious about continuous improvement. In my presentation, I want to explain how a company gets slower when they choose the path of having several DoDs. In order to help companies to solve this issue, I will to present an improvement roadmap that companies can follow and achieve a single DoD for all work. This will help you deliver software faster and with less effort. Join us to learn from our failures as well as our successes! Learn how you may increase the throughput of your team and achieve more with the same people.

Turku Agile Day, the coziest agile software development conference, will be back on 14th & 15th of May 2013.

Attend and learn about inspiring new possibilities in field of agile methods! The themes this year include agile management, soft skills and development techniques. The event is famous for it’s cozy and authentic atmosphere – and of course the coffee. The conference is brought to you by enthusiastic volunteers from all over the field of IT and has always something new to offer!

Don’t miss your chance to attend the inspiring talks and workshop at Turku Agile Day 2013. Sign in today at http://turkuagileday.fi

Watch a TED talk about using Agile for your family, also contains nice simple explanation of what agile is a about:

Bruce Feiler: Agile programming for your family

Agile Saturday VIII is over and was the biggest event so far.

Big thanks to all the speakers, organizers and the attendees!

We are already thinking about organizing a next event, but this time we would benefit from some help.

WANTED: Volunteers, Track hosts and Speakers!

Please let us know if you would like to either help with the small things during the event, ready to keep track of some track (and at one point we had as many as 6 last time!) or have an experience to share with the community.

And, last but not least, let us know if you could sponsor our future events. Venue, coffee, prizes, etc are not cheap, but we would like to keep the event free of charge!

Together we can make it even better, keep in touch!

The Dangers of Organizational Change. Especially Agile

“Report from the field. We will be discussing with whiteboard, marker, my observations, your questions and thoughts.

When you are changing the way your team/company/community is working you will be dealing with people’s commitments, fears, courage, motivation, team’s dynamics, culture and much much more other issues. If you are unprepared then you are pushing your people into pain and confusion. In worst case scenario they can end up in a worse than they been before this change. That is not good.

I will cover some basic topics that can help you to be prepared (or at least to be aware) when you are facing organisational change related challenges.”

Extreme Startup Competition

Antti Rintala and Antti Kirjavainen from Houston Inc. will organize an Extreme Startup Competition at the Agile Saturday event. Sign up and get a chance to show your coding skills and win a prize!

If you want to participate, please bring your laptop. You can code in the language most familiar to you. You an download a starting point for your extreme startup server from GitHub to get started super quickly: https://github.com/steria/extreme_startup_servers

For more information about the Extreme Startup see the other blog post

The competition starts at 15:00 at room “kesk-euroopa” and lasts until 17:00. Welcome!

How agile works and how to prove it

We all know that agile works. We would not be here otherwise. But do we know why? And to what extent? Does it matter? To answer these questions, I’ll firstly give a brief overview of the theory behind agile methods. Then I’ll take that theory, mix it with some math and pour into certain tools in order to quantify exactly how much is agile worth. There will be graphs, coconuts and baths involved. And reasonably little math

Agile Governance

I believe, agile is all about making sense, so why not try to make sense of governance.

Product First-method to Lean Product Creation

Product First-method concentrates on the products to be built and takes a different viewpoint to how Lean transformations are conducted in organizations. Product First allows for finding out the most valuable thing to be built and makes seamless integration of product creation process possible without the usual friction that is associated to Lean transformations.

Soils for change

Creativity is an inseparable part of innovation. Companies that induce creativity tend to be much more successful than their “non-creative” counterparts. There are many methodologies to help you a lot in creating and environment to support creativity. But many oraganizations still fail miserably. I think a big reason for that is how people communicate with eachother. And by that make the awesome systems created to be not used

Introduction to Test Driven Development

“Test Driven Development is a software development process that relies on short cycles of writing test code and making the tests pass by writing production code. I will give an overview of TDD and talk about my own experience using TDD.

We will talk about the reasons code quality decreases over time, and how that process can be prevented by a comprehensive suite of tests. We will discuss the three laws of Test Driven Development – the central discipline of TDD, and the benefits of following these rules: increased quality, reliable low level documentation, decoupled design, and no fear of change.”

Nodextreme Startup – JavaScript Extreme Startup Engine

The talk is about implementing the Extreme Startup Server with NodeJS and will serve as a tutorial of kinds to NodeJS and JavaScript development in general with concrete examples.

Short bio:
My name is Antti Rintala. I’m the benevolent dictator of Frontend Circle
(concentrating on User Experience and Frontend technologies) at Houston Inc. I’ve been coding JavaScript as main language for 6 years now in both frontend and backend. You can also find me from LinkedIn: http://fi.linkedin.com/in/anttirintala

Agility in Helmes

Software Development experience for 19+ years in different roles and responsibilities (from specialist to expert to manager, from formal to agile to lean) meanwhile providing business critical solutions for Logistics, Health Care, Telecom, Finance, Insurance, Publishing and Manufacturing. Focusing on continuous self-improvement, experience, skills and knowledge to creating world-class solutions, teams and software development company

A balanced metrics set for a software business

“There are so many things that we can measure about a software business that there is a temptation to measure too much. There is always also the temptation to link pay to performance and set targets for metrics results. Some things are so easy to measure, but others so difficult. Does it make sense to measure estimates that are not facts?
Towo will describe a metrics set suitable for leaders of software business to gain situational awareness. He will also touch on the nature of measuring work and incentives.”

Coderetreat

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of ‘getting things done’, the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.