Read about the days adventures here


By Bent Jensen

Roots of Lean 2010 is taking place next week. This week we are in Tokyo to prepare the trip, get over the jetlag and inhale a little japanese culture. Yesterday we went to a Sumo Stable to see the wrestlers train in the morning. My respect for Sumo Wrestling is now in a completely different place than it was before. To see the combination of strength, speed, tactics and flexibility in these big guys was impressive.





The serious stuff:

Every year we spend plenty of time to create a tour where we will se many different companies and get new angles to what lean really is about. The two last years, it was part of the program to meet with managers from Toyota, besides seeing the plant,  in order to  ask questions and dive deeper into what we had seen. Last year we were  lucky to meet Mr. Ishii - General Project Manager for Toyotas Software Division.  We had two very intense hours with him, where he openly shared how Toyota develops software, and what challenges they have. Recently Henrik Kniberg, from Crisp wrote this interesting account of that meeting.

This year we are not going to talk to managers from Toyota. They are too busy with other stuff - Instead we are going to meet a truckload of other fascinating companies and people. Starting Monday wíth a visit to the Leading manufacturer of Industrial Robots - Fanuc at the foot of Mount Fujii.

Stay tuned on this channel next week to read more.

By Bent Jensen

In database applications it is often important to ensure that your SQL uses indexes to avoid performance problems. Consider an SQL select statement like this

SELECT text FROM response WHERE questionId = 27 AND participantId = 38

If there is no index on response(questionId, participantId), the database needs to do a full table scan, and if the response table have a lot of rows, this will degrade performance. Such a performance problem might only be observed during testing on large amounts of data, which is not typically something a developer will do before every commit.

It would be useful to be able to detect this kind of problem much earlier, preferably during unit testing. Here I will describe one way to do this using Microsoft SQL Server and .NET:

SQL Server makes a lot of information accessible through performance counters, and one of those performance counters is incremented every time SQL Server does a full table scan. Utilizing that information, we can write a unit test that verifies that indexes are properly in place by asserting that the number of full table scans performed by a piece of code is equal to zero:

using(new AssertSqlFullScanCount(0))
{
   var responses = Response.GetResponses(q, p);
   Assert.That(responses, ...);
}

This code uses the following helper class:

public class AssertSqlFullScanCount : IDisposable
{
   private int expected;
   private long actual;
   private PerformanceCounter fullScans;
   public AssertSqlFullScanCount(int expected)
   {
      this.expected = expected;
      this.fullScans = new PerformanceCounter(
         "MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS:Access Methods",
         "Full Scans/sec");
      this.actual = fullScans.RawValue;
   }

   public void Dispose()
   {
      actual = fullScans.RawValue - actual;
      Assert.That(actual, Is.EqualTo(expected));
   }
}

Do you consider this kind of performance unit testing useful? How would you implement this kind of tests with Oracle

By Lars Thorup

If results are not the point - then what is?



March 10. we've arranged a talk by Lean Software pioneer Mary Poppendieck at IT-Universitetet in Copenhagen. Check your calendar and sign up - It's free! Check details here (in danish)

As you may now Mary and Tom Poppendieck has recently published their third book 'Leading Lean Software Development: Results are not the point'. Check it out at Amazon.



Mary and Tom is also doing a 2-day workshop i Copenhagen March 11 and 12. Check details here.

We hope to meet you there.
By Sune Gynthersen

A couple of weeks ago we decided it was time to join the 21st century and replace our old logo with a brand new one. To accomplish this task my colleague Kristian Dupont created a design competition on the "crowdsourcing" service www.99designs.com. In just a couple of days we got more than 30 quality drafts to choose from -- all at a very reasonable price. After some Google Spreadsheet-based voting, we finally decided on the one you see above.

What do you think about our new logo?

By Sune Gynthersen

At BestBrains we are strong believers in the Pomodoro-technique, as a pleasant way to improve our productivity.  This week we gave yet another presentation of the technique. For those who read Danish, there is a review here

Besides the Pomodoro-shaped alarm-clock we have now discovered another thing, that makes our Pomodoros even better. The Pomodoro T-shirt, as the one I'm wearing in the picture. It simply adds another dimension to your Pomodoro sessions. If you want one for yourself you can find it here at Amazon







By Bent Jensen

Is a quote from Jeff Jarvis' book: "What Would Google Do". If you suddenly find yourself out of business because your competitors has changed the game, and are light-years ahead of you, it might be because you were too busy milking the cash cow in the gold mine.

Many Companies, IT and software companies included, was in the last happy pre-crisis decade  of crazy growth, very busy milking the Cash Cow in the Gold Mine. The poor beast is not giving so much milk now. And if one is looking up it is clear the world does not look the same as it did before.

many software companies find out, that they completely missed being aware of the costs of running a software business. When the order-book was full,  the dedicated work of doing things better, lowering cost and improving quality was not on the agenda. Hire more staff (if you can them) and cut corners whereever possible,  was the practice of the day.

In the software industry as well as construction industry, the number of poor-quality, too late and too expensive projects grew rapidly. The only difference between construction and Software is, that in construction you always end up using what has been built, and thus getting some value out of the investment. Sadly that is not true for all software projects.

In the meantime a cost effective outsourcing industry has grown up, to do much of the work domestic companies used to do. A even larget threat to the worn out Cash Cows is that lots of, what used to be, expensive software solutions are available for free or very cheap on the internet. Google (here they are again) has created a strong competitor to Microsoft's Cash Cow: Microsoft Office Soute. While Microsoft was busy milking it, Google solved the real problem about real-time collaboration, sharing and version control. This will forever change the landscape of office applications, and Microsoft is way behind (as is Open Office and all the others still on the old paradigm).

I  was recently looking for software for doing on-line surveys. My search led me, among others, to these two companies: 2ask and Survey Monkey. My theory is that 2ask has been busy milking their cash cow (hopefully so), while Survey Monkey changed the business. For a tenth of the price Survey Monkey offers a fancy, slick application that allows you to build your own surveys very easily. Take a look for yourself, who do you want to buy from?

So what are you doing? Spending the time trying to get the old cow to give more milk, doing more of the same, of are you taking the opportunity to discover what business you really are in (another quote from WWGD), and finding ways to do that in a low-cost way?

And in our own kind business there has also been cash cows: Scrum certification classes (we do not do those) with long waiting lists and customers being willing to believe that standing up i a  circle 10 minutes every day would solve all problems. Maybe it is time to rethink that business too?

By Bent Jensen

Having worked with database applications for many years, I have come across a number of different object-relational mapping strategies and tools. However, most of them has had built-in design issues that caused me to dislike them after a short while. One of the latest was Castle ActiveRecord.

Fortunately - in the software industry - if you dislike something, you can code your own solution. After a talk with my colleague Lars Thorup and some inspiration by Christian Liensberger I decided it was time to create something that was simpler, more flexible, more testable and promoting better design. Frog.NET was born, and is now an open source project hosted on Google Code.

We have been using Frog.NET on an internal project for a couple of months now, and it has been great to get rid of some of the problems we experienced with Castle ActiveRecord.

Check it out here: http://frogdotnet.googlecode.com/

By Sune Gynthersen