Core group

Niklas Bjørnerstedt

The practice of “5 whys” is a popular lean approach to root cause analysis. It can be overly simplistic in some situations but few people would question the virtue of trying to figure out the real causes of a problem as opposed to just treating the symptoms. You can visualize 5 whys as a timeline where the problem you are trying to solve is (in most cases) a recent event and the sequence of causes and effects that led to … Les resten ›

Niklas Bjørnerstedt

The 10 year anniversary of the agile manifesto has just passed. As part of some kind of distributed retrospective, there has been a lot of discussion about what will happen with agile now. I think that agile will be dead in ten years – I just hope it will be a good death. This will actually be the second death of agile, but I need to set some other things in context before describing the first one.

Niklas Bjørnerstedt

Atul Gawande has written a fascinating book called The Checklist Manifesto. The core message in this book is that many professions have advanced to an unprecedented level of sophistication and complexity. The main obstacle in getting optimal results is increasingly the practitioners ability to remember which things to do and when to do them. Atul proposes a simple but effective tool to alleviate this problem: checklists. The idea is of course not new, people have been writing checklists for ages. … Les resten ›

Niklas Bjørnerstedt

The agile perspective When the agile manifesto was published a decade ago I welcomed it. I had been building applications for a decade pretty much according to the principles in the manifesto. During this period I had watched in horror as RUP quickly became a de-facto standard. It was such a derailment of the agile ideas that had started to get momentum in the early nineties. For me the agile manifesto was primarily a wake-up call to developers to get … Les resten ›