Tag: Sweden

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Øresund Agile 2008 Conference Day

(Continued from Accelerated Agile on Øresund Agile 2008.)

After two days of workshops, Wednesday was the conference day. Two sessions specifically addressed distributed Scrum: having teams, or part of teams, in different geographic locations. The presentation by Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland was great but also a bit utopian while the other, by Arto Vihavainen and Muqeet Kahn from Qvantel, was not only interesting but also very down to earth. Tobias Fors from Citerus had a very the best presentation slides and Henrik Kniberg told a great tale of Scrum and XP adoption.

Next year’s conference, obviously Øresund Agile 2009, will be in Copenhagen on May 12-14. Add it to your calendar right now!

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Accelerated Agile on Øresund Agile 2008

Yesterday I participated in the Accelerated Agile workshop at Øresund Agile 2008. It was attended by both developers and non-developers. Some parts of the workshop were common for the two groups and others were separate.  Me and another developer actually did both TDD and pair programming! BestBrains, the company that organized the workshop, had prepared an Eclipse project in a Subversion repository, using Maven to build and with CruiseControl for automated build on commit. We pair programmed on an MS Windows machine but I tried on my Ubuntu Linux machine to and it worked fine.

Update Photos and comments from BestBrains.

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Agile Architecture on Øresund Agile 2008

Today, on the first day of Øresund Agile 2008, I attended the Agile Architecture workshop held by Jim Coplien. He is a really great speaker! Some things that stuck in my head:

  • Don’t use TDD, it destroys architecture because it makes the programmer focus on individual methods, losing the bigger picture on the way
  • Don’t bother with unit tests, they make a bigger code base (equal amounts of application and unit test code is not unlikely), meaning more defects! The system tests should be enough
  • A subset of system tests that run in less than ten minutes should be used as a smoke test.
  • For interactive systems he was able to unify Agile software development, Model-View-Controller(-User) and Object Orientation.
  • MVC inventor Trygve Reenskaug was referred to a few times, and Jim told us that Trygve’s Data-Collaboration-Algorithm (DCA) was going to be the next big thing in software development! (This will be the seventh hit or so on a Google search for "Data-Collaboration-Algorithm". Maybe I should make a dedicated blog post about it.)
  • Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are bad because they add new languages to learn when new people should work on a system, and it takes years to create a good language.
  • UML could be used to visualize a system, but should be generated from source code. Quote: "No hand should ever touch a UML diagram."

Food for thought, isn’t it?

The list above is unfortunately a little short on things that Jim advocates but I need some good sleep before the Accelerated Agile workshop tomorrow and my writing would not be half as good as hearing him saying it.

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ThoughtWorks opens Swedish office in June

I can’t help keeping an eye on ThoughtWorks so here comes a followup on I read that ThoughtWorks is looking at Sweden:

According to Ola Bini’s ThoughtWorks comes to Sweden and Marcus Ahnve’s Joining ThoughtWorks, Starting Office in Stockholm they will be the ones manning the ThoughtWorks Swedish office that opens in June.

By the way, Ola Bini is the 6th best Swedish developer according to Computer Sweden. Ivar Jacobson has the well deserved top spot! I wonder what it takes to get on the list in a few years…

 

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“Novarra”, or “Surf Closed” or “How to put ads on all websites”

Swedish telecom operator TeliaSonera has introduced a mobile data service where you agree to view ads on every web site visited. This service is provided by a company called Novarra. The ads are part of the deal, so the customer get what they pay (or rather don’t pay) for. It also seems that they filter other ads! The interesting thing is that major websites, primarily newspapers, don’t like to have their content modified or ads removed so they redirect Novarra-processed requests to surfclosed.wordpress.com. The Norweigian Mobiletech site has more information and screenshots in the article Transcoding issues introduced by Novarra. Their article was offline for a while, but now it’s back with a small addenum saying “We are experiencing a constructive dialogue with TeliaSonera.”

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I read that ThoughtWorks is looking at Sweden

If I wasn’t content about living in my corner of Sweden, I would have knocked on ThoughtWorks door a long time ago. I consider them to be one of the most interesting companies around and some people I admire work there, most notably Martin Fowler and Dan North. Today I read in Ola Bini’s blog that ThoughtWorks is looking at Sweden. He writes:

So what are we doing for exploration? Well, of course we have started to look into business opportunities and possible clients. We are looking at partnerships and collaboration. We are looking at potential recruits.

I must say that a collaboration between my employer Softhouse and ThoughtWorks would be really neat!