Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The T-Shaped Tester

At the TestNet kennisavond on Decemer 11. 2013 in Nieuwegein NL, Remi-Armand Collaris (Agile Facilitator and Coaches at Ordina) gave the key-note called "The T-Shaped Tester".
Here we have published:

  • The presentation on SlideShare (NL)
  • Aditional resources

Thursday, November 28, 2013

DevOps Games - XP Days 2013 Workshop

At the XP Days conference on Novemer 29. 2013 in Belgium, Jan_Sake Kruis and Remi-Armand Collaris (both Agile coaches) present a workshop called "DevOps Games".
Here we have published:
  • An abstract of that session
  • The presentation on SlideShare
  • Aditional resources

Friday, November 15, 2013

Estimation Game (2)

The Round Trip Version

This is part 2 of 2 of a post on early estimation in Agile projects. To this end we introduce the Estimation Game. The first part of this post described the Basic Version of the Estimation Game.

In order to leverage experiences from past projects, it may be a good idea to involve not only the relative measures of “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” but to relate them to ‘round trips’ from the user to the system and back to the user. Suppose you have a user and a system with a screen on which the actor can interact with the system. A round trip then starts with a stimulus from the user, he performs some action which is input for the system. The system processes the input and returns the result to the actor. A new round trip starts when the user reacts to the result, which in turn is a new stimulus for the system.

Friday, November 1, 2013

Estimation Game (1)

Whereas Planning Poker works very well for estimating a Sprint or Release while the team is up and running, it is less useful for an early project estimate. It is hard to get a good feel for the size of a project at the beginning of a project, as the team has not established a measure yet. Moreover, early in a project we don’t have the level of information needed to do a meaningful Planning Poker session.

For estimating Use Cases or Epics in an early stage (before they are detailed) we use an aproach we call the Estimation Game. It supposes that Use Cases or Epics have been identified and have a brief description. In this post we share our experiences in applying this game. In the Estimation Game the team, users and other stakeholders cooperate to estimate the Product Backlog together.

The Estimation Game – Basic Version

Friday, March 8, 2013

The Soup Stone - Catalyst to Agile Adoption


At the Agile Dev Practices conference on March 4. - 7. 2012 in Berlin, Germany I present a workshop called "The Soup Stone - Catalyst to Agile Change".

Here I have published:
  • An abstract of that session
  • The presentation on SlideShare
  • Aditional resources


It is on debate how many Agile implementations fail, but quite a few do. What is holding organizations back? Is it fear or something else? How can I help my organization?

In this session we interactively investigated what motivates people to change their behavior, as this is the basis for organizational change. What can drive management  and team members to become more Agile. And then there was the fairytale of the Soup Stone.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Agile Contracting Games


At the XP Days on November 29. and 30. 2012 in the netherlands and the Mini XP Day on April 26. in Belgium we present a workshop called "Agile Contracting Games - Experience What It Takes to Build a Cooperative Environment". In this workshop we play card games to investigate the topic of Agile contracting.

Agile Contracting Games - Intro

Below you find the presentation and some related links.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Agile Contract Scan

This is part 2 of 2 of a post on Agile contracting. Part 1 is called Top Ten Reads on Agile Contracts.

A lot of publications on Agile contracts handle payment models or topics for the contract but not the mindset it reflects. When starting a new Agile initiative however, wouldn't it be nice if the contract would reinforce the Agile mindset as well? In this post we suggest elements for a scan you can use to assess a contract. Involving stakehoders in such a scan will spring improvement ideas that they will themselves support.