The question can of course not be answered categorically. You have to ask yourself what the purpose of your Kanban board is, how the small tasks fit into that and a lot of other questions specific to your own context. However, here are a few of my reasons to consider tracking them in some way.

• Even if the tasks are small, if there is a lot of them the context switching and thrashing will affect your ability to do other work.
• What starts out as a small task can often turn into a bigger task because of unexpected complexity or other problems. “Oh, that’s just a five minutes fix!” Yeah, right…
• Even if the amount of work you are doing is small, you might have to wait for someone else’s input or the task can become blocked for other reasons.
• In my experience, a lot of these small tasks are failure demand, i.e., they are tasks created because we have failed to deliver the actual value in some way. If we can collect data on this and analyze it we might be able to get rid of the root cause of the failure demand and remove it, freeing up resources that instead can be focused on delivering value.

But does this really mean we should track every little task in the same way we track the normal work items? Probably not. Inspired by the excellent TV series “Homicide: Life on the Street”, where a big whiteboard is used to assign ids of unsolved murder cases in one color and then changing them to another color when solved (see my other blog post about this), I came up with an idea that has since proven useful for other teams too.

When a small task enters the workflow, we write down the tracking-id of the task on the board. Some teams have individual columns for team members, others just one for the entire team, whatever makes sense in the context. Once we have finished the task we strike it out on the board. Towards the end of the day we go through the column to see if there are ids that have not been crossed out. If we find one that isn’t finished, then apparently it wasn’t such a small task after all, so we write it on a sticky and put it in the regular workflow annotated with the information needed (blocked, waiting for info etc). And we draw a line under the numbers to indicate that this day is over and the next begins below the line.

After a week or so, we look at the small tasks log and analyze it. What patterns can we see? Is there perhaps a spike in demand Mondays and less towards the end of the week? How could we adjust our capacity based on that knowledge? Could we try to even out the arrival of the tasks? How much of it is failure demand? The same type of failure demand? Could we easily get rid of that demand by changing anything in our process? How many of the presumed small tasks actually turn out to be bigger than anticipated? Is the amount of small tasks so big that it should affect the WIP limit for the team or for individual team members? Maybe we could put a sticky in the usual workflow with an avatar of the team member currently in charge of the small tasks to indicate that she shouldn’t take on so much other work on the week of her being in charge? And put a sticky in the ToDo-list for the person that performs this duty the next week, so that he remembers to finish stuff and don’t take on a new big task towards the end of the week? And so on and so forth, whatever makes sense to the team.

Did you ever watch the great TV series “Homicide: Life on the Street” (“Uppdrag mord” in Swedish)? It’s an American fictional police series about the Baltimore Homicide Unit based on the writing of my all time favorite writer/producer of TV series David Simon (Generation Kill, The Wire, Treme). One integral part of the show was a whiteboard used by the unit. “The Board” was divided into columns — one for each detective—and under each of the detectives’ names, a list of victims, either in red or black depending on the case’s open-or-closed status.

This is how David Simon described the Board:

“In the time that it takes the coffeepot to fill, shift commander Lieutenant Gary D’Addario (Al Giardello in the series) can approach the Board as a pagan priest might approach the temple of the sun god, scan the hieroglyphic scrawl of red and black below his name, and determine who among his [detectives] has kept his commandments and who has gone astray. The board reveals all: Upon its acetate is writ the story of past and present. Who has grown fat on domestic murders witnessed by half a dozen family members; who has starved on a drug assassination in a vacant rowhouse. Who has reaped the bountiful harvest of a murder-suicide complete with a posthumous note of confession; who has tasted the bitter fruit of an unidentified victim, bound and gagged in the trunk of an airport rental car.”

Source: http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/9/29/in-which-it-was-nothing-new-for-david-simon.html

UPDATE

I have invited Benjamin Mitchell to do a talk at Avega Group this Thursday, May 26 16:00 to 20:00, at our office in Sturegallerian. We have a couple of spare seats so if anyone out there wants to come please e-mail me at Gmail or leave a comment below.

Increasing effectiveness and communication with the Mutual Learning Model with Benjamin Mitchell

The Manifesto for Agile Software mentions that it values “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. Most Agile approaches have very little to say about how to help individuals create interactions that produce effective results. For Agile teams to be effective they need to manage the challenge of learning and adopting new practices, working alongside other teams in organisations and managing stakeholder and customer demands. These situations can create tension as it is often necessary to reconcile groups with different views of the world.

This seminar will introduce a framework for helping individuals, working together in teams, realise their creative and problem-solving potential, especially in challenging delivery-focused situations. The framework is based on the sound theory and over 30 years of research on Organisational Learning from Harvard University Professor Chris Argyris and his associates. It provides a practical approach to helping teams improve the quality of their decisions, increase personal commitment to decisions, whilst reducing implementation time and increasing organizational learning. A central idea of the approach is that our beliefs, values and assumptions guide the behaviours that we choose to use to get effective results. In situations of embarrassment or threat most humans tend to act differently than they would tell others they do. At these moments people adopt the Unilateral Control Model, which leads to reduced effectiveness and is anti-learning. Argyris proposes a more effective set of values and beliefs and associated behaviours referred to as the Mutual Learning Model.

This seminar will use practical exercises to help participants reflect on their own mindsets, before introducing the work of Argyris with reference to the speaker’s experience leading teams as a Project Manager and Agile Coach.

About Benjamin Mitchell
I work with leading software product development organisations to assist them to become more effective at achieving their business goals. I do this through helping senior leaders and teams focus on building and validating what the right products are by understanding customer demand and using iterative development approaches. I accelerate learning in organisations by helping them develop productive communication skills that allow them to make better quality decisions. I have practical real-world experience delivering software projects with exceptional results based on practical, implementable advice. I am a highly-rated international speaker on applying innovative approaches, such as Kanban, to software development. Based in London, I work with clients as a speaker, executive coach or team consultant.

This is my lightning talk from this year’s Agila Sverige (Agile Sweden) conference that I finished less than an hour ago. I am experimenting with doing blog posts in slides/presentation format and I have been using Sliderocket to do that. This embedded slide show will hopefully evolve to contain more of the talk behind the slides, either through adding text and extra slides or through audio recording. (And the plan is to translate it into English eventually.) If you have feedback and ideas for this (or for the content for that matter), please leave a comment!

If I was forced to mention a few highlights it would be David Snowdens keynote for it’s challenging content and entertaining delivery, Chet Richards keynote for it’s inspiring content that made me reflect and think about my own fundamentals, Siraj’s and Pascal’s welcoming and cosy Open Space “booth”, the FlowKaizen tool with it’s promise to end the digital vs physical board, and the great mix of people, backgrounds, disciplines, opinions and thoughts.

I was also very glad that my talk was appreciated and that so many came to listen – I was a little nervous because I was doing an introduction and the crowd seemed so experienced. Here are some of the feedback I received:

“Really enjoying the content and relaxed style of Joakim Sundén’s Kanban talk.”
- Benjamin Mitchell, Systems Thinking, Lean and Kanban consultant

“Very rich Kanban introduction. Congrats!”
- Rodolpho Ugolini, Software Systems Architect at IBM Rational, Brazil

“Kanban track is full :-) Joakim Sundén’s teaching Theory of Constraints bottleneck exploitation :-) Great to hear!”
- David J. Anderson, pioneered Kanban, author of Kanban book

“Lots of practical tips given by showing how actual Kanban boards can visualize symptoms and address problems.”
- Gerry Kirk, Agile Coach and Trainer

“Alltså, Joakim Sundén äger!!!”
- Johan Söderström, Technical Project Manager

Thanks a bunch to everyone who helped organize this great conference and for everyone who attended and made it great! I hope to see you at LESS2011 in Stockholm and at LSSC12 in Boston next year.

Comments from participants in the experiment at Turku Agile Day in March:

“Finally got to see Deming’s ‘Red Bead Experiment by the very good Joakim Sundén. It was brilliantly crafted and facilitated.”

“Joakim Sundén has ignited anarchy in my mind with his red bead performance – I am questioning the basis of everything now. Good!”

- Mike Sutton, Turku Agile Day Keynote Speaker & Agile Coach, WizeWerx

“Especially enjoyed the variation theory stuff in your Red Bead experiment! New insights.”

- Sami Honkonen, Agile Coach at Reaktor & Singer in Death Metal band Embreach

“Watching the red bead experiment, hosted by Joakim Sundén. Both funny and educational.”

- Jurgen Appelo, Conference Keynote Speaker & Author of “Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders”

Targets, rewards, motivational speeches, ranking, individual bonuses, and even punishments, are to this day common management practices to get results from the workers. Are they effective in getting us to do better work? The world famous consultant Dr W Edwards Deming, who was “the man who taught the Japanese, America and many other countries about quality”, created The Red Bead Experiment in 1982 to communicate his take on the subject. In this session we will run a version of the experiment that has been slightly adapted for software development by David P. Joyce. The experiment introduces many of Deming’s ideas about management, the principles of variation and statistical process control charts. And it is a humorous and fun experience for both participants and audience! After the experiment there will be a presentation followed by a group discussions on the learning points and how they can be related to software development and the management of software development teams.

Turku Agile Day

I gave a talk on Kanban at Turku Agile Day about a year ago. I really liked the conference and the talk was well received. So well in fact that they invited me this year as well. This year I did Deming’s Red Bead Experiment again (thanks to David Joyce for slides and inspiration).

Developer Summit
Only a couple of days after my third child (Albin) was born, I did a Kanban talk at Developer Summit – the conferene where I did my first conference talk a couple of years ago. That time it got me a first page in Computer Sweden and lots of debate around professionalism and work ethics. Nothing as controversial this time but my talk was voted best of all in the conference!

LeanSSC 2010
I was one of the very few Europeans that were able to attend the inaugural Lean SSC conference in Atlanta in April last year. Can you guess the reason? Volcano ash stopped most flights but we got lucky as the clouds opened up in the North the day before our departure and closed down the airport again only hours afterwards. The conference was really great and had the same open minded and curious practitioner focus as my first Lean and Kanban conference in London. I got to meet a lot of interesting people, made several new friends and got to hang with an awesome party crowd (thanks Pillar guys and girls). This year’s conference will be in Long Beach, Los Angeles, in May and I am going to do a practical introduction to Kanban in the Kanban track. Really looking forward to it. You should come too!

Lean Coffee Sumpan/Stockholm
Inspired by our new friend Jim Benson, author of Personal Kanban, me, colleague Peter Evjan (formerly Hultgren) and Johan Söderström founded Lean Coffee Sumpan (later moved to Stockholm) where we meet every Wednesday morning 8-9:30 to discuss all things lean and agile. Join us at Le Café, Klarabergsgatan.

Ltd WIP Society
We have had several meetings with The Limited WIP Society, e.g., an evening with show and tell of electronic tools. Next week we are going to play four simultaneous games of GetKanban. There seems to be a great interest around this since it filled up very fast.

Kanban training
I have been doing a lot of Kanban training, from short introductory stuff to full blown two day courses. Together with the coaching of several Kanban teams this has really given me many new insights and I have learned a lot from the discussions, not least from non-development teams doing digital production management, operations/incident work, advertising, etcetera.

Oredev
Many of the slides and ideas I use when I talk about Kanban are developed together with my colleague Marcus Hammarberg and we sometimes do presentations and training together. At last year’s Oredev we did an appreciated half day Kanban tutorial. It was pretty tough to satisfy all participants since they ranged from I-basically-co-invented-Kanban and agile-coach-at-ThoughtWorks-the-last-10-years to my-company-just-started-with-something-called-Scrum, but judging from the feedback forms we did really well!

Agile roll-out
In my day to day work I have among other small things been involved in an agile roll-out in a big and very well known Swedish retail company. I helped a ~300 people department develop and introduce a new development model based on lean and agile principles. I trained, coached and supported more than a dozen different Scrum and Kanban teams. Very fun and interesting work that further developed my coaching skills.

Agile Sweden (Agila Sverige)
Last year I once again helped organise Swedens number one agile conference. It was a blast as usual and I am looking forward to this year’s conference May 23-24 where I hopefully will do a lightning talk and conduct the Red Bead Experiment.

Avega Group Conference
This year we traveled to Turkey with Avega Group and had an amazing Open Space day with fantastic lightning talks from many different roles within Avega and over 50 Open Space sessions with 250 participants. The feedback was clear: “We should do this every year!” And I think we will do it again this year. But in Spain…

China, Thailand and paternity leave
Since Christmas I am on vacation and paternity leave and will be until late summer. We started out with an awesome eight week trip to Beijing and Thailand (the entire family of course). You can read more about that (in Swedish) and look at pictures and some video at http://familjensunden.wordpress.com/. Now I am home with my 10 year months young son and my two girls (when they’re not in pre-school or daycare), just taking it easy in the beautiful spring weather. So now I finally have some time to blog… ;)

I am not completely off the grid though. I have had the time to give a talk at the very nice first Agile Riga Day and, as mentioned, in Turku. I hope to be able to join some more Lean Coffee sessions, organise and attend some seminars and Limited WIP Society evenings and so on. And speak at Lean SSC 11 of course.

I basically only had one complaint last year and that was the length of the conference: only one day. It seems they listened to my criticism because this year the conference goes on for two days and is packed with interesting Swedish and international speakers, e.g., Michael Feathers, Diana Larsen, Kent Beck, Douglas Crockford, Brian Marick, Chris Hedgate, Roy Osherove, Marcus Ahnve, Ola Ellnestam, Bill Wake, Neal Ford, Jimmy Nilsson and Henrik Kniberg. With so many good speakers and interesting topics, presented in the nice Svenska Mässan convention centre, it will be almost guaranteed to be a great conference.

I hope to see you there!

What I like about these participatory ALT.NET events is how easy they are to organize. One guy (new colleague at Avega Group Anders Jönsson this time) suggests that it’s time for another unconference, workshop day or whatever, on the discussion group and the thread catches on with people chiming in what kind of workshops they want or are able to run. Another guy (Tibi Covaci) suggests a venue (Informator), there’s some voting about a suitable date and suddenly all you have to do is show up wanting to learn!

If you haven’t been to any of the ALT.NET gatherings yet you should definitely come next time – it’s always fun and you always learn a lot! Meanwhile, be sure to partake in the discussions and why not post your own idea for the next event?

Inspired by Benjamin Mitchell and David Joyce, my colleague Marcus Hammarberg and I ran a version of W. Edwards Demings Red Bead Experiment, a tool to teach how slogans and management yelling at workers to “motivate” them won’t affect results – only process improvements will. Marcus did a great job as the nefarious project manager whose only “help” to the team consisted in slogans, threats of punishments and promises of rewards, reassurances about how perfect the process is etc. We had fun running the experiment, but since our prepared Excel sheets couldn’t easily be altered to work with a smaller number of workers it took too much time. As a result we had to replace the group discussions about what happened with an unprepared, and therefore not so good, lessons learned.

If you attended the experiment and want more or if you just want to learn more about the lessons it teaches, check out the recording with Mitchell and Joyce at Skillsmatter. Or why not the one where I (that’s me in the green sweater) and colleague Christophe Achouiantz (the tall guy next to me) participated?

Unfortunately our busy schedules made it difficult to find a good date and when we finally settled for one it was only a week away. We sent out invitations to two mailing lists, Agile Sweden and ALT.NET Sweden, with a last registration date five days away hoping to at least round up a few enthusiasts to exchange experiences and ideas. “Perfect is the enemy of good enough” and all that… So you can understand that I was a little surprised to find that over 50 registrations soon filled up my mailbox; there is apparently a great interest in Kanban in the Stockholm agile community!

The meeting started with Mattias introducing Kanban in ten minutes followed by a case study, “Converting a Scrum team to Kanban”. You can find the slides and other nice stuff on Kanban at http://www.crisp.se/limitedwip.

Torbjörn Gyllebring from Cint presented a second case study about “sneaking” Kanban into a company: “stealthban” (“smygban” in Swedish).

Last but not least I presented a case study about a Scrum team that was doing pretty well but still decided to pick up Kanban as an answer to particular problems:

You can also find my slides as a PDF in the Talks section of my blog.

I think the talks were great and they seemed to be really well received, stimulating some really good questions that we unfortunately didn’t have time to dig deeper into before the Avega Group and Crisp sponsored (thanks!) pizza slices and beers.

After dinner a majority of the remaining participants played The Bottleneck Game led by Mattias Skarin and Henrik Kniberg as a prolonged Open Space session while the rest of us discussed different Kanban related topics in sessions such as “analogue/digital/hybrid Kanban board” and “Kanban and RUP”.

In the closing of the Open Space people seemed very pleased with the evening and many asked when the next meeting will be. Judging from the interest in the first one and how fun it was my answer is: soon!

The focus for the first day was Kanban in general and practitioner reports of Kanban experience in particular. The day started with a panel of practitioners consisting of Alan Kelly, Matt Wynne, Reni Friis, Benjamin Mitchell, Mattias Skarin and Chris Matts. They had ten minutes each to tell us about their experiences; benefits, mistakes, puzzlements, and so on.

Kelly pointed out the fact that Scrum is supposed to be about self-organized teams but you are not allowed to change the Scrum process itself until you are doing Scrum perfectly. This is actually an impediment to continuous process improvement. He also mentioned that David Jones, one of the authors of Lean Thinking, when visiting an XP conference in London recently, pointed out that “you guys are calling this agile, it looks like lean to me – I don’t mind what you call it, you can call it whatever you like”. Agile is a form of lean.

Matt Wynne first came in contact with Kanban at an XP day 2007 navel-gazing session called: “Have we lost our mojo?” There he met Karl Scotland and Fred George who really had this zeal and were excited about the stuff they were doing. They talked about solutions to frustrations Wynne was feeling with his current practices with Scrum., such as having to clear the pipeline every two weeks, sit down and plan the work for the next two weeks of which some were never done because of changed prioritization etc.

Wynne made an analogy with Behaviour Driven Development that sometimes is called Test Driven Development done right: “This lean/kanban stuff is agile development done right.” He saw a real culture change happening when everyone was buying into this. The magic word for him was pull, when the developers are deemed responsible enough by management to set the pace in which work gets done. It’s about having respect between managers and developers.

Among the things Wynne learned was that iterations can be good because you get the chance to stop and celebrate, show and tell about what you’ve done, do retrospective etc. It is important to remember to do these things when you do iterationless Kanban.

Danish IT management consultant Reni Friis talked about her experience in a kind of “midwifish” role to help programmers understand processes. She told us about her success in lowering the cycle time of MSI installers development for the Department of Defense from 640 man hours down to 260 hours and reducing the number of steps in the value stream from 29 to 16.

Friis and her colleagues got all the people in the department together in a room to do a value stream map, educated them in lean thinking and got them really worked up and enthusiastic about continuous improvement. They challenged current practices such as why testers don’t supply the developers with the test they develop. It seems obvious but it rarely happens. She called it “logic for chickens” a freely translated Danish proverb.

One of the challenges was to get an important person that was a bottleneck to disentangle herself from the several steps of the process where she was a constraining dependency. It is all about explaining that the process is inefficient, not the individual.

One mistake they made was to not include all of the department in the training. The people that were trained experienced an epiphany that was difficult to transfer to the rest of the organization and it became a source of irritation for the others.

Another mistake was not involving management enough. The manager needs to know the process and the culture she is responsible of.

Benjamin Mitchell works at an investment bank and first came into contact with Kanban when he met Karl Scotland at a Scrum Gathering and they did an Open Space session on Kanban together.

Mitchell and his team were doing Scrum when they encountered a big and difficult bug that later proved out to be a bug in Internet Explorer. They were forced to relax the Scrum rules in order to accommodate the amount of work it took to fix the bug. This made them aware of the possibility to actually improve Scrum beyond the traditional rules.

The level of chaos Mithchells team experienced did not work well with Scrum. The company had a command and control environment where people felt compelled to say yes to everything. With Kanban they turned this “yesman culture” into a positive: “Yes we can do that, just tell us what we should remove from the work we’re already doing.”

Mitchell also made an eh… interesting analogy between the need for release cadence and the human fondness of orgasms; there’s something in humans that want things to build up and then release.

Next out was my fellow countryman Mattias Skarin. Mattias honored the time limit and even compensated for the others running long by keeping his report short and to the point. He pointed out that Kanban helps people discover problems regardless of what environment it is applied in rather than selling a generic solution to people.

Mattias warned us about the mistake to not appoint a facilitator, e.g., a Scrum Master, to be in charge of telling the team when a commitment they’ve made has been violated etc. Another mistake is to appoint a Scrum Master or facilitator that is to coupled to the status quo and hinders the team from improvement instead of facilitating it.

Last in line was Chris Matts who was mostly into the practitioner experience part of Kanban; practitioners discussing real issues, solving actual problems. The Kanban community is a community of practitioners harvesting great ideas and presenting genuine problems they want to solve. As a practitioner Matts want all of the tools in the toolbox and is not interested in labeling them – all of you guys out there, how are you solving real problems, with or without Kanban?

After these presentations there was time for Q&A, but since I deliver my notes incrementally and by pull I will post the rest when pulled (through comment on this post!) and there is capacity…

Tomorrow morning we are going to visit Fujitsu to learn about their implementation of the Toyota Production System in software development. Later this week we will visit Totyota twice and among other things meet the Chief Engineer of the Lexus, go to Agile Japan and visit some other agile and lean companies in Japan. I hope I will find the time to write about our experiences on this blog.

First out is Torkel Ödegaard with a talk on managing dependencies, Dependency Inversion Principle, Inversion of Control containers and such. Torkel is a really smart and skilled guy and I am glad to announce that he is now a colleague of mine since he recently joined Avega. The downside of this is that it makes the track look a little incestuous because the next guy in line also happens to have Avega as his employer…

Peter Hultgren is going to talk about that has been dear to me for a very long time – refactoring. I’ve seen Peter deliver presentations at customers and at the ALT.NET unconference and he’s an entertaining speaker with a flare for slide design. Of course he’s also passionate about refactoring to clean and simple code.

If you know anything about Agile Sweden you probably know of the third speaker, Joakim Holm. Jocke is an experienced agile practitioner, blogger, coach and educator, always with something interesting to say from that point of view you seem to usually forget yourself. This time he will tell us about his experiences and observations from pair-programming and other ways to collaborate around code.

Last but not least we have the honour of Scott Bellware visiting us to do both a talk and a full days workshop on “Good Test, Better Code”, his own take on Behaviour-Driven Development. For those of you who still don’t know Scott, he’s a developer, agile coach and product director. He speaks and teaches at software conferences in North America and Europe. Scott can also be said to be one of the founders of ALT.NET.

Scott has a great testimonial of himself on his web site, by no one less than Ted Neward, that I want to quote in its entirety because it’s a fun and eloquent characterization of Scott and why you should go to his talk and/or workshop:

“Scott is one of those rare individuals with strong opinions, strong technical skills and experience, and a clarity of purpose and character that demands the highest expectations of himself and the people around him. Never have I met someone who is both so open-minded and yet so passionately outspoken. If people like me are priests of a technical religion, then Scott is the prophet in the wilderness, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, preaching to a growing community of people who want to see software ‘done right’. Anyone who is involved in the development of software, whether they agree with Scott or not, needs to listen to what he has to say.”

Scott will also be giving a talk on “Web Testing for Developers with Application Models” in the Web track.

There are of course several other very interesting speakers and topics at Developer Summit, such as Linda Rising on trust, self-deception and retrospectives; Brian Loesgen on “All things ‘M’” and SOA; Ian Robinson (ThoughtWorks) on REST; and Julia Lerman on Entity Framework.

I hope you like the line-up as much as I do and that I’ll see you at Developer Summit, April 15-17!

Among the highlights were Neal Ford‘s two talks – his presentations are very beautiful in the same Presentation Zen style I aspire to. Kent Beck gave a calm and somewhat fun keynote about “Habits of Agility”. Although interesting in a way I would have preferred the original topic – “Responsive Design”.

Anyway, I haven’t had the time to polish my revised slides and make them available for download so you’ll just have to do with the slides from Øredev. They are about the same. You can find them under Talks.

Thanks IBS for a great time, I hope to see you next year!

Register at http://altdotnet.se/ (in Swedish) and feel free to submit a topic of a lightning talk. Among the topics so far:

• Iphone development
• BDD with MSpec (yours truly!)
• Continuous Integration
• Code rot
• OpenTK
• Should we stop using mocking frameworks?
• Object databases for .NET

Hope to see you there!

If this doesn’t get you excited you should know that the event is in the evening and that there will be food and beers…

To be fair I had some work left to do with my talk (since I strangely enough did not find the time to work on it at OOPSLA and PDC) so I guess I missed out on a few opportunities while working. Since I did the introduction on the ALT.NET track in the morning of Day 2, I could at least focus on two thirds of the conference.

The ALT.NET track had my attention the entire Thursday and I really enjoyed all of the talks. First out, following my introductory talk, was our track host Scott Bellware on “Good Test, Better Code”. He gave us a taste of his flavour of Behaviour-Driven Development using the Context/Specification framework MSpec. It is really fun listening to Scott as he is very passionate about stuff, e.g., not having to read other people’s code, which seems to be the main driver behind his BDD work… Unfortunately, 50 minutes wasn’t enough time to get into the details, but it sure left me wanting more.

After lunch, Microsoft Program Manager (MEF team) and ALT.NET activist Glenn Block gave a talk about Microsoft and ALT.NET. Even though not much of what he had to say was new to me, it was still uplifting to see all of the initiatives actually taken by Microsoft to be more open towards Open Source and other communities in general. CodePlex, JQuery integration, source code release of ASP.NET MVC and other projects, etc. With Microsoft employees such as Glenn, there’s certainly hope.

Next up was Ayende, by many percieved as the ALT.NET guy, with a talk on Castle ActiveRecord: “Using Active Record to write less code” Ayende argued that persistence is a solved problem and that it should not only be considered unnecessary, but even criminal, to be writing persistence code since your stealing from your employer or customer. He used live coding to show the audience in an entertaining way how easy persistence code is when using NHibernate and Castle ActiveRecord. It was a great session as Peter Hultgren already told you.

Scott Bellware did another session in the afternoon, this time the subject was “5 Things I Learned from Lean that Could Have Saved My Last Agile project”. Scott talked about his experiences with an agile project that went bad and finally was cancelled. He gave a short introduction to Lean thinking and how it applies to software development and then introduced a few lean principles and practices that maybe could have kept the project on track. I found this talk very interesting since I really like lean thinking – I think it has a more explicit focus on the big picture, and on continuous improvement, than (other) agile methods.

The grand finale of the ALT.NET track was a panel discussion in which yours truly got invited to join the panel together with the other speakers on the track. We discussed the future of ALT.NET (to be subsumed by Mainstream.NET), differences between the Java and the .NET worlds (one vendor to rule them all) and were asked a couple of interesting questions from the audience (among others Aslam Khan, Magnus Mårtensson, Patrik Löwendahl and Claudio Perrone).

A few other interesting sessions I attended were “High Accountability Exploratory Testing” with James Bach (what a great and funny guy!) and “Clean Code” with Robert C. Martin. Ted Newards and Robert C. Martins keynotes were also nice. Among the talks I missed I heard that Aslam Khan and Luke Hohmann were great. I take comfort in the fact that they soon will be available online at the Øredev site.

I would also like to mention the speakers dinner at city hall and all the informal conversations at Bishops arms pub and other places among the definite highlights of the Øredev experience. Thank you Michael Tiberg and all of you who made Øredev such a great conference. And I hope to see you all again next year! ;-)