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One of the books I read last year was Fixing Your Scrum by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller. On their YouTube channel, Agile for Humans, they have been posting daily videos (Your Daily Scrum) where they spend six or seven minutes taking a viewer’s question. Today they posted a new video with Daniel Vacanti, called Fixing your Kanban. In the video they introduced a new website ProKanban.org which plans to be a safe community site where people can come together. Vacanti mentioned seeing sites like scrum.org for the scrum community, and thought that Kanban was missing something like this. The site also linked to the Kanban guide which contains the basic details of Kanban.

At this time of year I am seeing a lot of people post their reading lists from the current year, so feel I need to follow suite. Every year I say I want to read more, but find it hard to do so. The pandemic has given more opportunity to just sit at home, or in the garden and read. Looking back, having set myself the goal of reading one book a month, I can feel pretty satisfied. ...

This afternoon, Wednesday 18th November, the latest version of the Scrum Guide1 has been released. The first update in over three years and there are quite a few changes. Scrum Inc. ran a 3-hour Zoom call2 to introduce the new guide, and here are a few of my takeaways from that call. The first thing is that the guide has been reduced from 18 pages to 13. There were a lot of unclear descriptions around Product Backlog Items, Retro Items and Sprint cancellations that have all gone. This reduction appears to be an attempt to open up Scrum to a wider audience, not just IT projects, which was JJ Sutherland’s reiterated in his takeaway. ...

With the world working remotely, I have managed to join a few meetup sessions which I would not normally have access to. A couple of days ago I was talking with James Coplien1, who along with the likes of Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Grady Booch, founded the the Hillside group2. Inspired by the architect Christopher Alexander3 work in pattern languages they have been running PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programming) writers workshops. With Jeff Sutherland4 and several other authors, Coplien has documented and collected patterns related to how Scrum teams organise and create value into a scrum book5. Most of these patterns are available online6. It includes all your favourites, from Sprint Goal and Daily Stand-up, to some more guild like patterns, i.e. Birds of a Feather (where similar roles, i.e. BAS or QAs, from different teams get together to share knowledge). ...

When the business ask for a change, do you know how long it will take until they are able to use that new feature in production? What is the basis for your estimate? How confident are you in achieving it? Recently a video showed up in my YouTube feed by Cat Swetel1 titled, The development metrics you should use (but don’t)2. She started off using just the start and completion dates of tasks to create a metric, Time in Process. The units of time taken to complete a unit of work. ...

I will occasionally look at the special offers on the HumbleBundle website, and at the moment there are a lot that look interesting to me! There is the Mad Scientist collection1, which includes books on making paper gliders, all the way through to rockets and drones. Then there is the DIY electronics collection2 of books on Arduino and Raspberry Pi for your various home projects. And if you want something about programming AI, there is the A.I. bundle3 covering a variety of topics from Statistics, and machine learning algorithms, to neural networks and Tensorflow. ...

Having a rather long commute to the office, there are a number of podcasts that I listen to. This morning I was catching up with some old Planet Money1 episodes and came across the Anatomy of a Hustle, which talks about Paul Manafort who has been helping on various political campaigns, including in Ukraine. He was caught trying to get payments from this work back to the US via accounts in Cyprus, shell companies and property. ...

The Java user group of Switzerland organised a continuous delivery workshop last night, which was run by Oliver Nautsch, with a really nice structure. Oliver has documented the process, with slides in GitHub, so if anyone missed the session, you can run through the exercises in your own time. Before the session we were given instructions describing what we would need to install on our laptops ahead of time. This basically involved cloning a GitHub repository and then using vagrant to start up a Linux virtual machine. ...

For a long time, I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to play around with two factor authentication (2FA) for the root account on my Raspberry Pi’s. This week I’ve finally got around to doing it, and as with so many tasks on the Pi, once you get going it’s pretty straight forward, with the google authenticator. The steps that I want to follow would be: Create a standard user account, from which the sudo commands will be issued. Block ssh access to the root user Enable Google authenticator for sudo commands Setting up sudo access If you have not already created personal accounts on your box, run the adduser command: ...

Over the past few months I’ve been changing out the light in our apartment for some of the plain white Philips Hue lamps. On the whole I’ve been pretty impressed. Using apps like Yonomi I was able to set up a kids bedtime routine, where with the click of a single button, the main lamp in the kids room turns off, the side lamp dims to 1% and the Sonos starts playing lullabies at 15% volume. ...