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KALM (Keep, Add, More, less) is a retrospective activity that fosters the conversation to the current activities and the perceived value. It helps team members to understand each other perceived value on such practices.
 

• Keep – something the team is doing well and you recognize the value on it.
• Less – something already being done; but you rather do less of it.
• More– something already being done; and you believe will bring more value if done even more.
• Add – a new idea, or something you…

If you're reading this blog, I'm hoping you're somewhat familiar with the concept of user stories (if not, here's a good place to start). 

A key concept around user stories is that they should ideally embody 7 properties, which are usually represented by the acronym INVEST.  What's NOT often talked about is that creating stories that follow all 7 of the guidelines in the INVEST acronym simultaneously is actually pretty hard.  The various "generally good" properties can often be in tension, and getting stories to follow one can often mean trading off another. 

I don't think enough time is spent…

Last August I completed my tenth year with ThoughtWorks, and we have a tradition to let people take a three-month long sabbatical leave after ten years. Mine got postponed a bit but now I’m off, until August.

During my leave I’ll take it easy, spend more time with the family, but I’m also going to make some progress on the Softvis project that Jonathan McCracken and I started a long time ago. You can see the first steps here: softvis.github.io. More in three months. Hopefully.

If you are interested in writing up a visualisation and contributing it…

As mentioned in my last blog, the newly launched Mingle SaaS runs entirely on the AWS cloud, for which we designed the architecture from scratch. Rethinking our approach to environments in the development and deployment process, has allowed us to shed a lot of problems experienced in traditional data center environments. Following the principles described here has increased the reliability of our system, streamlined our deployment process and sped up our development. There are three principles we follow to ensure that we maximize these benefits.

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