The Customer Pain Map
“Ouch, that really hurt.” “What was it?” my sparring partner replied. “The choke or the overstretching of the elbow joint?” “The quick throw, I had no time for proper fall breaking.” I replied. It...
View ArticleWill Agile be trashed?
Agile is hot. Almost every Fortune 500 company is “Doing the Agile Thing”. But with the success also the critics are growing rapidly. The post “Agile is Dead” from Matthew Kern was extremely popular....
View ArticleBeing An Agile Security Officer: Security Stakeholdership mindset
This is the second part in my blog series about 'being an agile security officer'. In this blog I will focus on the mindset of security stakeholdership in Agile and DevOps environments. In the Agile...
View ArticleThe Best New Years Resolution: Agile Product Management
Agile Product Management is grounded in the Jobs to be done theory and Lean startup principles. In my book “The Product Samurai” I described how you can effectively apply these techniques to be a...
View ArticleDe future fit organisatie - praktijkervaringen deel 1: De kracht en waarde...
Een succesvolle transformatie naar een wendbare, future fit organisatie begint bij het neerzetten van de basis voor de borging. Een organisatie die start met heldere en begrijpelijke cultuurwaarden die...
View ArticleBeing an Agile Security Officer: pwn the process
This is the third part of my 'Being an Agile Security Officer series'. As mentioned in my previous blog, in the Agile world the Product Owner is the person who translates business and customer desires...
View ArticleTester in an agile team: a necessity or dispensable?
Let’s imagine it’s the year 2025 and we peek inside an average IT company to take a look at the software development teams working there: what are the chances that there will still be a person who is a...
View ArticleIt’s 2017: Test automation is not optional when building mobile apps!
Note: although this post focusses on mobile app development using Xamarin it also applies to other native mobile apps built in Swift, Java or even web apps. it’s 2017! whatever you are building get...
View ArticleThe secret to making people buy your product
There is no greater waste than building something extremely efficient, well architectured (is that a word?), with high quality that nobody wants. Yet we see it all the time. We have the Agile manifesto...
View ArticleBusiness Analysis Manifesto: the changing role of Business Analysis in an...
The other day a discussion moved towards the -changing- role of Business Analysts in an Agile environment. I referred to the Business Analysis Manifesto. Created by and for Business Analysts, but...
View ArticleBeing an Agile Security Officer: user stories
This is the fourth part of my 'Being an Agile Security Officer series'. In this blog post I will go deeper into the details of how user stories are created and what role security stakeholders should...
View ArticleBeing An Agile Security Officer: Spread Your Knowledge
This is my fifth and last part of my blog series about Being an Agile Officer In the previous parts I showed how Security Officers can align with the Agile process and let security become a standard...
View ArticleAccurate Forecasting Without Estimation
Often the team or somebody in the role of product owner gets either the question ‘When will it be finished?’ or ‘What will be finished at <some future date>?’ and some forecasting is necessary to...
View ArticleWhat are we doing? And why?
What are we doing? Why are we implementing this sorry excuse of a user story? What will this user story achieve in the bigger picture? Is there even a bigger picture? I have attended several...
View ArticleMastery - being the best version of yourself
I was 21. I just graduated from MBO college, it was night and I was strolling around town with a couple of friends. We just celebrated our graduation and did not want to go home. After a few hours, we...
View ArticleAutonomy – Taking the wheel
I remember when the Product Owner stepped into our room with a new user story. He asked if we could make a minor change to one of our web pages. What he did not know is that nobody understood the code,...
View ArticleUsing Specification by Example / BDD for your refinements
When I'm joining new teams at clients it often becomes clear that the added value of refinements is not always seen. Team members complain that hours are wasted. The refinement sessions shouldn't be...
View ArticleSPACEMAP - organising a motivational environment
Introducing the SPACEMAP! A 'map' to gain insight into motivational problems within an organization/department, so that coaches and managers no longer have to talk about vague motivation problems, but...
View ArticleScrum Master Q&A Fulltime Scrum Master Role
In my Scrum Master training courses, I get a lot of questions about the workload of a Scrum Master. One question I hear frequently is this: Is the Scrum Master role a full-time job? The answer is yes!...
View ArticleIs Scrum Agile and is Agile Scrum?
The short version: yes and no! Scrum is Agile but Agile is not (only) Scrum. Future Fit Organizations Organizations want to become flexible and Agile or as we like to call it at Xebia: Future Fit....
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