What I liked most about the job ad was the last part:

We’re hiring you for your mind. Please showcase it by answering some of the following questions in your cover letter:

• What is a recent programming insight you discovered and what was intriguing about it?
• Why do you want to work with us? (be specific!)
• What Open Source communities/projects are you a part of and why do you like them?
• Tell us about a time you brought initiative to your team and made a positive change.
• What modern programmer do you admire and why?
• How do you learn and keep up with the field of computing?

These questions really appeal to me!

After two days of workshops, Wednesday was the conference day. Two sessions specifically addressed distributed Scrum: having teams, or part of teams, in different geographic locations. The presentation by Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland was great but also a bit utopian while the other, by Arto Vihavainen and Muqeet Kahn from Qvantel, was not only interesting but also very down to earth. Tobias Fors from Citerus had a very the best presentation slides and Henrik Kniberg told a great tale of Scrum and XP adoption.

Next year’s conference, obviously Øresund Agile 2009, will be in Copenhagen on May 12-14. Add it to your calendar right now!

Update Photos and comments from BestBrains.

• Don’t use TDD, it destroys architecture because it makes the programmer focus on individual methods, losing the bigger picture on the way
• Don’t bother with unit tests, they make a bigger code base (equal amounts of application and unit test code is not unlikely), meaning more defects! The system tests should be enough
• A subset of system tests that run in less than ten minutes should be used as a smoke test.
• For interactive systems he was able to unify Agile software development, Model-View-Controller(-User) and Object Orientation.
• MVC inventor Trygve Reenskaug was referred to a few times, and Jim told us that Trygve’s Data-Collaboration-Algorithm (DCA) was going to be the next big thing in software development! (This will be the seventh hit or so on a Google search for "Data-Collaboration-Algorithm". Maybe I should make a dedicated blog post about it.)
• Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are bad because they add new languages to learn when new people should work on a system, and it takes years to create a good language.
• UML could be used to visualize a system, but should be generated from source code. Quote: "No hand should ever touch a UML diagram."

Food for thought, isn’t it?

The list above is unfortunately a little short on things that Jim advocates but I need some good sleep before the Accelerated Agile workshop tomorrow and my writing would not be half as good as hearing him saying it.

According to Ola Bini’s ThoughtWorks comes to Sweden and Marcus Ahnve’s Joining ThoughtWorks, Starting Office in Stockholm they will be the ones manning the ThoughtWorks Swedish office that opens in June.

By the way, Ola Bini is the 6th best Swedish developer according to Computer Sweden. Ivar Jacobson has the well deserved top spot! I wonder what it takes to get on the list in a few years…

The Scandinavian SCM day is an opportunity for people from academia and industry with a passion for Software Configuration Management to get together once a year to discuss SCM, exchange ideas and share problems.

The reason I tag this post with "Agile" and "Scrum" is that two of the presentations have "Scrum" in the title and I’m pretty confident that they are not the only ones to mention agile development methodologies in relation to Software Configuration Management.

The Scandinavian SCM day is held at the university in Lund, Sweden.

Either browse the slideshow or read more below!

It sure is a nice box!

You can almost become a Scrum Master only by reading on the back.

Removing the cover reveals The Softhouse Scrum Poster, stickers and a packet of blue tack. I will propose that the blue tack should be in the orange Softhouse color for future versions of the Scrum Master kit!

Next comes a whole bunch of burndown charts. They are also available in PDF format on the Softhouse Scrum Master Kit page.

The picture above shows the bottom of the treasure chest with two planning poker decks, an hourglass, a stack of index cards and an index card box.

There are also a couple of Scrum in five minutes leaflets, a User Guide and all task bord signs imaginable.

Finally, a sneak-peak in the User Guide…

The Øresund Agile 2008 conference runs 9-11 juni in Malmö, Sweden. Full conference program will be available on March 15.