Posts Archive

This Saturdays edition of Dagens Industri had a really interesting column by Jan Åman, former curator of Färgfabriken. He writes about how you can either move forward or secure your back, and how the world is run by people watching their backs and making sure that decisions can never be questioned.

It is very close my favorite XP slogan “playing to win” and what I talk about in my presentation on Agile Documentation. A good read, but unfortunately only in the paper edition.

I am quoted in todays issue of Computer Sweden on BDD. It is a well written article even if I do not agree with Emil Gustafssons quote in the end where he states that BDD doesn’t bring that much new things to the table. I think that people looking at BDD for the first time might perceive it as such, but I must say that there is a clear difference in both approach and outcome.

The Agile Sweden annual christmas party is on Thursday at the Agical office. The evening will kick off with a few lightning talks, of which I am doing one. My talk is titled “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work” and will discuss how XP’s value of simplicity has more or less been forgotten as agile has gone mainstream.

There latest storm in the teacup that is Swedish IT is caused by the national news agency TT decision to move from OpenOffice to Microsoft Office, mainly because ‘I (head of development) do not want to sit here wondering how I will connect OpenOffice with a hundred eleven other systems’. I believe ‘a hundred eleven’ is a long form for ‘a lot’.

This has in almost deterministic fashion caused people from both sides of the OSS-MS divide to wave their party flags. But no one asks the to me more obvious question - why do you connect your office suite with all those systems, and why is that a problem if you do not have Microsoft Office? Seems more like an architecture question if you ask me.

The videos from Smidig 2008 are up. This is mine (in Swedish):

Aslak reminded me that there is no such thing as an icebear. Tag line changed.

I had a interesting conversation with Kevlin Henney at Øredev regarding the word ‘should’ and its usage in Behaviour Driven Development. Kevlin does not like ‘should’ as he feels it is too vague in many circumstances. And I have to agree with Kevlin.

Sometime you are speccing something like “the title of the index page should be ‘blabbr.com - the worlds largest social network’”, which might be something that we will change in the future. ‘Should’ is a good choice of words here.

My Friday morning inbox contained an email from Niclas Nilsson asking me to replace him doing interviews for InfoQ at Øredev. It took some planning calls to my wife and booking of babysitting, but now I am good to go.

I will be interviewing these six gentlemen:

• Jon Bostrom
• Walter Bright
• James Bach
• Roger Sullivan
• Luke Hohmann
• BJ Hargrave

Let me know if you have any question you would like me to ask.

I will be at JAOO this year, telling everyone who is interested all about ThoughtWorks Sweden. Last time I went to JAOO was 2001, so I am really looking forward to it.

I will probably spend quite some time in the ThoughtWorks booth, so come by and say hi. Or beat me in the IT-run which I have signed up for.

I am happy to say that I will give one of the lightning talks at Smidig 2008. My presentation is about optimizing the whole product chain, from concept to cash, and stop focusing on projects as they fragment the organization and cause local optimization.

Last years conference was great and inspired us here in Stockholm to do our own version in the form of Agila Sverige. I am really looking forward to going back to Oslo.