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One of the biggest cause for complicated workflows and custom fields is the fact that Jira has never been a deployment tool, but the teams need the visibility of deploys. With this latest update to Jira Software Cloud we see improvements in this field with no less than four new features. DevOps teams or not, this will make life easier for everyone.
While there are several add-ons for Jira Software Cloud that will tie together repositories with Jira, this is now a standard feature in Jira. That means that it can be used with no additional cost (except for the Premium features if you don't have Premium of course), which lowers the entry point substantially. Hopefully this will mean the end of operations based statuses in the workflow and custom fields to hold release data.
Code in Jira
This feature allows you to connect your repo to Jira so you can visually see the repos in a new tab in your project called Code. Doing so if fairly easy, especially if you use Bitbucket, but adding Github for example takes only a few minutes. The biggest benefit of this feature for me however is that you will see the repo information in the Jira issue itself. This provide a lot of information to the viewer on where this issue has been committed.

 
Deployments in Jira
This is where things get interesting.  With Code in Jira above you can see where your code packages are and their status. With Deployments, you can see where those packages also have been delivered to. This provides a very nice overview of where your code currently is available, which is what most people want to know when they try to build this into their workflows or work views.
 
Premium Features
The last two features are only available for the Premium version of Jira Software Cloud. Normally I don't like to have features split between a standard and a more expensive version, but these two features are all about measuring which I think is fine to have as a bonus if you need the more expensive version.
Deployment Frequency

 
Cycle Time

 
My Thoughts
This is a very good addition to Jira Software Cloud that have been needed for a long time. While I think the Premium features is mostly for numbers people and not really for the daily work I think this still is a solid addition. I would like to see the deployment information on the issues and it needs a connection with Insight, so I can connect deploys to my assets.
There is a lot of potential here and I look forward to seeing this taking further in the future.

Estimations for software development seem to be the bane of almost every company, but why is that really? Why is it so difficult to approximate the time and effort required when we do this all the time? There are a few reasons and in this article I will go over how I do my estimations and give you some of my experience on how you can maintain a 90% accuracy in any project.
For a good estimate you need to start with one very important thing: define if you estimate based on time to complete or  time to deliver. These are very different because the time to deliver will be substantially higher and much more prone to variations. This is because in the daily work you will be dragged into meetings, have people distracting you and so on. For good estimations we always estimate on time to complete as our basis.
Stop doing happy estimates
The worst thing you can do is making happy estimates. These are estimates based on the utopia that everything will work smoothly and you will be left in total isolation to focus. It never happens and Murphy is always present. Happy estimates may seem good because the product owner love low estimates, but they hate when you fail to deliver.
Happy estimates usually happen when an architect is stressed and throw out a guesstimate on the fly. It will almost always bite you in the butt because not only will everything seem easy to the architect, so they will underestimate it, they also never consider Murphy.
You do not estimate to be nice, you estimate to give a realistic view on when something can be available in production. If you have a hard time to stop making happy estimates, then implement this very simple rule:
"Any time that is needed beyond the time you have estimated you will do in your own time without payment"
Take your time doing estimates
An estimate is not a guesstimate that you throw out on a high level requirement. An estimate is your promise on when you can deliver and as such you should take your time and think that through. Don't sit around doing arbitrary guess work in a planning poker or play with t-shirt sizes unless you want to avoid doing any estimates at all. That type of guesstimating is for high level requirements, so make sure they stay there.
Break down the requirement and use your experience to guide you to a first number in your estimation. This estimate is how long it will actually take to sit down and build based on the requirement. Make sure that you ask questions to clarify where needed so have the information you need. This is also a good time to start working on a solution design to make sure you have considered things that may not always be apparent. For example validation of data in integrations or extending a JavaScript validation for a new form.
When we have done this, the number is still wrong, but we need it as a starting point.
Add the things you forgot
Now that you have done your estimate, many think they are done. That is rarely the case, so let us add the things that is not included yet. The most obvious problem that I see a lot is that the estimates is usually done by the most experience person, which also usually is the one that work fastest of everyone in the team. So what we do is to look at the estimate and the team, then we adjust based on what the slowest person in the team think is appropriate. This way we know that the base estimate is reasonable for everyone on the team.
The second thing we do is to consider Murphy. Things always happen and based on the complexity we increase the estimate with 20-100%. Not having room for mistakes is in itself a very big mistake. It will almost always happen and if it does not happen for this particular task we will either be able to resolve things faster than expected, or we have more time for other tasks. Either way that is a positive thing.
The third thing to look at are testing. All code should have unit tests and it is often forgotten in the estimate. You also have non-functional requirements such as loading times and browser support that you must consider. As a developer you are also responsible for testing the code and this should be added as a second estimate. For many estimates this alone will add 20-200% or even more to the estimate. This is especially true for frontend development where you often have 18+ variations just for devices and browsers.
These three very simple things easily multiply the original estimate two to three times.
Now let us consider your efficiency!
A factor that is very often overlooked is efficiency. No person in any team will ever have 100% efficiency in the sprint. I do not mean your focus level during the day, even if that also is a factor, I am talking about those pesky things that break your concentration. Things like meetings, stand-ups, code reviews and all those "I just want to ask a quick question", cost a lot of your time during the day. In my experience most teams will have an efficiency of around 40-60% depending on how often they are disturbed.
Depending on if your product owner understand estimation or not you can choose if you add the efficiency in the estimate, or if you have that as an external factor in the sprint itself. If you are new to this part of the estimation I suggest that you start with 50% efficiency and then adjust over time as you get better at estimating your efficiency.
With this step we now add a second two time multiplier and you are now close to a realistic estimate.
This may seem like a lot
This may sound like the estimates always will be very high compared to how you are working today, and you are right. This is why you always feel stressed and why you fail to deliver on promise in every sprint. It is why we invent things like story points to mitigate our inability to take responsibility for things we can't estimate properly. Realistic estimates are just that and if your estimates are far lower than what you get doing estimates this way, then remember this very simple rule:
It is always better to overestimate and over deliver than to underestimate and under deliver.
 
The Quick Summary
Make estimations in actual time to complete, not arbitrary measurements. Take your time to understand the task at hand and stop guesstimating. Adjust the estimate to fit the slowest person on your team. Add task for testing and make estimation separate for that. Remember that things always go wrong, so make room for that. Make sure that your efficiency is considered and calculated into the time to deliver.
Making good estimates is based on experience and knowledge. This means that like other skills you can get better at it. If you constantly work with arbitrary measurements like story points and you constantly fail with no change to your estimation process, then you should stop doing that. Not only will you fail at a crucial part of your work, your inability to provide accurate estimates actually cause harm in the form of stress and frustration. It is up to you if you want to spend your time in constant failure or constantly provide estimates that are realistic and dependable.
Learning to make good estimates is not rocket science, just common sense and experience.
So start doing it today.

Product owners often get blamed for not understanding Agile and for not providing clear requirements. Is this their fault though, or are you not providing the correct feedback to help them improve? Agile teams often work with the product owner absent, especially in the retrospectives. If that is true for your team, who is actually at fault then?
I hear this all the time. "The product owner" is absent or "the product owner can't give a straight answer on what I should do, it changes by the minute". This is especially prominent in project based organizations where Agile means that you just remove the requirements phase in your waterfall process to make things fall down to the development team faster. Agile becomes ad-hoc and chaotic and it is all the product owners fault. Right?
This is a problematic attitude and one that to me clearly means that the team is not really Agile, but still work as a receiver instead of the engine it should be. Although in most organizations there are two processes and the development team always is the receiver of strategic goals, they should not be a passive one.
Not being passive means that you put demands on what you receive.
How you receive a new business need, what information you need and how you work together with the product owner is not something that you passively sit around and complain about. It is the core of what the retrospectives are for! I would bet that in most teams where you have issues with the product owner you do not include that person in your retrospectives? Do you even provide feedback or set up activities to help the product owner improve together with you?
If the product owner is not included, then could the issue be with you and not the product owner?
The product owner is a part of your team. This means that you are responsible to speak up and ensure that everyone in the team is working in the way that best benefit the team. This means that you should provide feedback if the product owner is absent or if you do not get the information you need. This should be done in retrospective, just like you do it with every other feedback concerning your work process and collaboration in the team.
 
Easy to say, but our Product Owner does not care.
I know, this happens all the time. The product owner is tied up in meetings all day and just ignore your feedback. This is where you need to play hardball and provide empiric evidence that the issues you have is not your fault and that you have done your job to try to improve this. The First step is to go above the product owner and point out the issue to the people above. Sometimes that works, but it may not always be an option.
In the sprint planning you should be very clear on what information need to be present for you to accept a user story. Remember that once you put the user story in the sprint, you have accepted the user story and you are responsible for the consequence for poor requirements. Never accept a user story that is not clear enough for you to work on. It is the responsibility of the product owner to ensure the user story can be accepted by the development team.
If you use Jira then your next step will be to push back everything that is unclear to the product owner. This is done by assigning the product owner to the issue, put the issue in blocked status, or flag the issue if you do not have a blocked status and then comment saying that you wait for the product owner to respond. Once done, leave the issue and move to another issue. This will effectively remove the priority for the first issue as it will now be done after whatever issue you pickup next.
This will allow you to move responsibility to the product owner and point out the issues you are having. It also allows you to get statistics on waiting times the team have due to the product owner not doing their job.
 
Failure is on the team, not the product owner alone
Just as the entire team is at fault if the scrum master or a team member is dragging the team down, the same goes for product owners. You manage it through the retrospective and constructive feedback. Help the product owner to be the team member you need hem to be. If that fail, then you as a team will fail as well.
Make demands, just as you would for any other team member. Make sure their calendar have all stand ups booked, all retrospectives should be holy times and if they run around for meetings all the time, have them block time in their calendar for the team. You would not accept a developer to not do their job, so don't accept if the product owner is not doing theirs either.
At the end of the day, remember that no product owner want to be a bad one. They often get dragged into activities where their role is poorly defined, so they need help to define what you as a team demand of them. This will make it more clear to them how to prioritize their time, or find a replacement to make sure you get the team member you deserve and need.
Never sit silent with a clenched fist in your pocket.
Speak up and offer constructive solutions and you will be surprised how willing many are to solve the situation with you. Teams work together and since we still have not developed telepathy we need to verbally communicate and express our need to work better together.
Product owners are not outsiders, they are valued team members.
...or at least they should be.

Salesforce announced on January 1st that they have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the very popular communication and collaboration platform Slack. The price tag for this acquisition is a staggering 27.7 billion us dollars. This is the biggest software acquisition of 2020 and it will have a big impact on the communications market for 2021.
This is no small acquisition by any means and with Slack becoming and integrated part of the Salesforce Customer 360 suite it will make ripples across the communications and collaboration ecosystem for sure. Slack have been loosing ground to Microsoft's Teams in the last years and it will be interesting to see what the future holds for Slack with this acquisition.
For Salesforce, I think this is a great acquisition as it will add a very popular and useful communication service into their products. They also get a huge customer database with millions of Slack users that they can try to convert into Salesforce customers. Hopefully this will also make their Salesforce Customer 360 suite more attractive because they will need to bring in quite a few customers to cover that price tag.
For existing Slack users I don't think there will be much that will change in the short term. I assume Slack will still be available as a standalone product, just like for example Trello was when Atlassian purchased them. Speaking of Atlassian it will be interesting to see what this means as Atlassian have been closely collaborating with Slack since Atlassian cancelled their own chat based collaboration  tools Hipchat and Stride that was sold to Slack in February 2019.
This acquisition surprised me a bit to be honest, but from a business perspective it makes sense from both lack and Salesforce perspective I think. It will be interesting to see what this means and if we might finally see a proper enterprise version of Slack or if Slack will slowly phase into Salesforce products and vanish...
 
 
 

Vaam.io is a Swedish “video as a message” service that was started by Josef Fallesen, Hampus Persson and Gohar Avagyan that I worked with on the H&M project. Vaam is a very easy to use service that has a lot to offer, even though it is still very new and under rapid development.
I first noticed Vaam.io on LinkedIn and since Gohar is an amazing designer I looked into it. What I found was a service that is incredibly simple to use, yet very powerful. It has a lot of potential and I will make use of it here on the site as soon as I figure out the best way to use it. I have some ideas on how to implement it, but there are some technical issues I need to figure out first. This is on my end though, not with Vaam.
So, what does Vaam do? Simply put it allow you to record yourself while interacting with whatever you have on your screen. So it can be used as a presentation or as a quick message as you can link directly from your Vaam library.
Once you have recorded a message, then you have several options already, and more are on the way. You can download the video of course as well as sharing the recording in multiple ways. One interesting feature is to link as a Gif for emails and things like that.
In order to use Vaam today you need to install an app that is currently only available for Chrome. Once installed you simply click a button and start recording. Once done your recording is automatically added to your library and you can share it or delete it if you did not like it.
As with all startups the team behind Vaam are very active, and they have invited people to a Vaam slack where the so called Vaambassadors provide feedback and discuss features with the team.
I think Vaam have a bright future ahead and Vaam.io and the team have secured plenty of funds already.

This is a guide series that will go through everything you need to know to set up and customize your own blog using Invision Community from Invision Power Services. This guide will be updated with new articles or new information when new releases are made that affect the guides.
This guide contains the following articles:
Introduction (this page) Databases & Custom fields Adding Databases to Pages Adding CSS and JS to Pages Article View Template design Article Listing Template Design Article Category Listing Template Design Article Form Design Article Block Design Database Relationships This guide should give you all the information you need to get a good start with creating your own designs with Invision Community and its Pages application. If you want a quick start however and get a great looking design up and running in 10 minutes, then you can purchase a license for Invision Community and buy the plugin Pages SuperGrid by opentype.
For this guide you will need a license for Pages, which is the application that allow you to work with Pages and Databases. I will make references to the Forum application as well, but you do not need that if you do not want to. The information in the articles will not go deep into how to make your blog compatible by using standard classes as that is a pretty big topic and I usually just build for myself, so I do not have to worry too much about that.
If you have any questions or see a topic not yet added here, please drop by the forum and let me know.

Today Atlassian announced the new package for their ITSM solution. The new package is called Jira Service Management and it is a bundle of Jira Service Desk, Opsgenie. This is a pretty sweet package and it is quite powerful for anyone who want to combine Agile and ITIL4 as a power combo for the future.
This is quite the change for Atlassian and it is probably to compete with ServiceNow that has had a stronger ITSM solution as their main selling point. This new service package, and especially the new name for it, will probably pave way for more companies to look at Atlassian even for their ITSM solutions.
This new package, combined with Jira Software, Confluence and Bitbucket now means that you get a complete package for ITSM and Agile methodologies. There will be improved integrations with Insight, the asset management solution Atlassian purchased from Mindville earlier this year. This will greatly improve the usefulness of the Atlassian ITSM package.
This comes at a pretty good time as I am building this for several clients, and they will be very happy about these new changes.
 

Color psychology is a topic often brought up when discussing conversion rate optimization. It often comes up as a sort of law of what colors to use, which is based on an article online or some generic description in a book. Color psychology however is far more complex than that and a recent article by Talia Wolf at GetUplift is the best introduction to that complexity I think.
The fact that colors can affect us should come as no surprise to anyone. There are a lot of studies that show that this is true. How they affect us however is still a bit vague and seem less important to a lot of people working with it. This is a big mistake because just like music has an impact on our minds, colors also affect us based on association and everyone has different associations.
Just as Talia brings up the different association differences in her excellent article, like the fact that white is both purity and death, there is also associations based on age and even personal preferences. You also have a whole science behind the different versions and shades of the colors where for example one shade of green can be seen as healthy and full of life and another will associate with pestilence and death.
Talia also briefly touch on the fact that color psychology should not be used alone. It should be considered together with other association factors like typography, iconography and overall tonality. In conversion rate optimization it should also be accompanied by other CRO tools like direction of movement, familiarity and the gestalt laws to direct and highlight the actions we want the users to take.
If you want to know more, then head over to GetUplift and read the full article "Color psychology: The complete step-by-step guide" by Talia Wolf.
You will not regret it.
 

The Swedish consultant agency Knowit acquire Creuna, a nordic digital agency and form the largest digital agency in the nordics. The combined work forces will be gathered under Knowit Experience. The acquisition is conditional on approval from the Norwegian Competition Authority, which is expected to be received during the fourth quarter of 2020.
How this will affect the market is still too early to predict. It will depend on how well Knowit matches Creunas way of working and what support will be provided in the merger. I suspect there will be some Creuna profiles moving on shortly, but in the end I think this should be a good match for Knowit. Just like Fjord was a good match for Accenture when I still worked for Accenture.
Read the full press release (in Swedish):
https://www.knowit.se/pressmeddelanden/knowit-forvarvar-creuna-och-blir-nordens-storsta-digitalbyra/