During a presentation of the scrum principles this afternoon, participants were eager to discuss about what to put around a scrum process, feeling that something is missing in terms of well-designed architecture, thorough analysis of the domain and better knowledge about requirements.

Scrum is flexible and can fit into many different environments and uses, raging from product development, deliveries of customized software and maintenance inside an IT-department. It is also beginning to be spread into other areas than software industry!

So don't look for the silver bullet extension to scrum, but try to embrace the agile and lead principles when finding the right balance of planning your project.

One important lean rule:
If you need to decide on an important part of the system (e.g. your platform, database or ): Find out what is the latest responsible moment when the decision needs to be made. It is not easy, you will probably feel , but the longer you wait the more knowledge you will have the oppurtunity gain to support your decision, and you have the possibility to set start some experiments to search for alternatives. You might change your mind later regarding the latest moment, but that is the core part of agile practices: always be ready adapt to reality.

Don't be surprised if we write more on the lean and agile way of planning on this blog...

By Jesper Thaning

Wednesday night I had the opportunity to visit Valtech's premises in Paris. They are located just besides the Triumphal Arch and Champs Elysses, so this time I got a real Paris expericence (last time I stayed one night at a hotel near the airport - not exactly exciting). I did a presentation on Lean Software Development, to a group of Valtech Consultants and Greg Hutchings who was my original contact with Valtech. We had a good evening and a interesting discussion afterwards, while drinking french wine and eating pizza. Gilles, one of the pariticipants wrote about the evening in his blog.

By Bent Jensen

Last year in November I made a presentation on the Öredev conference in Malmö about my experiences with agile distributed development. In my years at SAS our team was at the remote end of a distributed development team, and I have since then helped a number of customers straighten out their distributed development efforts, with agile methods.

The presentation was captured on video and recentely the videos were made available. The video can see seen here

By Bent Jensen