The third and last day of the Lund Software Days was a Tutorials and Workshops day. A collegue of mine from Softhouse held a workshop on Value Driven Development. It was an introduction to the basis of Value Drive Development. Please read more about our service offerings around the subject.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

The Software Days in Lund is two events (Lucas and Spin-Syd) merged into one conference with focus on agile methods. The conference was mostly in Swedish and was held at LTH. It was high quality speakers and the highlights were:

• “Agile: order or chaos?“, Prof. Per Runesson, LTH. A discussion if we loose control using agile methods or not. According to Prof. Runesson we actually gain control in many aspects by using agile methods. They can also be sucessfully combined with established project steering methods, such as a gate-model.
• “In Search of Excellence“, Jack Järkvik, Ericsson. This tough guy talked a lot about how he had saved a lot of troubled projects at Ericsson. He did this by being tough, or actually being straight and clear if we are talking leadership. His recipe was to “improve in order of magnitude, rather than marginal changes”. Makes sense!

Uncategorized | No Comments »

As I am a consultant I get many interesting experiences from different assignments and organisations. This retrospective is from a Swedish multinational retail company running appr. ten fairly large parallell IT projects heavily integrated into oneanother. My role was as a Business Analyst, meaning I was responsible together with 4 other BAs to collect and document requirements in one of these projects.

The organisation has since a few years back adopted RUP in a very heavy document-driven way. Although RUP is meant to be iterative everyone from project manager to developer is thinking “waterfall”, which means that we collect and sign off all requirements before the developers are willing to accept them.

When the organisation notices that the results aren’t that great they add QA reviews to make sure we really follow the process. However the QA guys also think “waterfall”, since they just check that we have all the necessary documents, that no one will ever read. No one seem to really question the fact that we didn’t deploy anything the first two years. Unbelievable!

This organisation would really benefit from agile methods, such as Scrum.

For anyone in a similar situation I would really recommend reading the following whitepaper:
How to fail with RUP: Seven Steps to Pain and Suffering.

Uncategorized | No Comments »