‘’At the end, it is time to roll it all back up again: What is the core of Crystal Clear, and what are the add-on practices that get the team farther into the safety zone? This chapter is very short.’‘

Crystal Clear is a highly optimized way to use a small, colocated team, prioritizing for safety in delivering a satisfactory outcome, efficiency in development, and habitability of the working conventions. The brief description of Crystal Clear for level-3 practitioners is just this:

The lead designer and two to seven other developers … in a large room or adjacent rooms, … using such as whiteboards and flip charts, … having easy access to expert users, … distractions kept away, deliver running, tested, usable code to the users … every month or two (quarterly at worst), … reflecting and adjusting their working conventions periodically.

The people set in place the safety properties below using the techniques they feel appropriate. The first three properties are required in Crystal Clear; the next four get the team further into the safety zone.

1. Frequent Delivery
2. Reflective Improvement
3. Osmotic Communication
4. Personal Safety
5. Focus
6. Easy Access to Expert Users
7. A Technical Environment with Automated Tests, Configuration Management, and Frequent Integration

All the other pages in this book only expand on this page.

Because we don’t record the open spaces portion we are able to participate, although a majority of the presentations are done in Norwegian, the open space discussions were conducted in English when ever necessary. Check out the Smidig 2007 videos from last years conference, Warning: there are only a few in English so if your Norwegian is non-existent you’ll have a hard time getting much out of them.

After flying from SLC to Milwaukee to Amsterdam to Oslo we arrived and were picked up at the airport. We immediately headed into to Oslo to DoGA to get things setup, so we could start recording the next morning. Thanks to North West airlines two of our cases of gear did not make it.

So we were missing a lot of cables, power supplies, all of our tripods, and some other necessary components. Thanks to all of the organizers we were able to collect enough fire wire cables, power adapters, and other misc cables to make things work, all except for the power supplies for our cameras.

Luckily we had the talented help of Howard Gittela, who miraculously was able to go shopping at 7:30 AM the next morning, and return with gear and equipment and build power supplies for all five of our camera’s. So the first hour we had audio and slide capture, but by 10:00 AM, we were able to record video as well. An accomplishment that we could not have pulled off without the incredible resourcefulness of the Smidig organizers.

There really was no language barrier at all, at least until the presentations started. Then the majority of them were in Norwegian. It was a great conference, and I meet some incredible people. Learned a lot about conducting our business internationally. Next trip we will secure an international broker to ship our gear in ahead of time, we will arrive at least one business day before the conference starts, so that we can buy any missing/damaged gear. Having been through the ATA Carnet hoops once, I’m better prepared for that again.

Once the conference was over we had an extra day to spend in Oslo, Carl hung out with a friend of his in Oslo, and I pretty much headed out for a walking tour on my own. Visited the local Games Workshop store then headed to the Royal Palace, went by the US Embassy, then to Frogner Park (the Statue Park), and then on to the Viking Ship Museum. It was an all day adventure approximately a 8 plus miles round trip. You can see my photos from the trip on flickr.

Now to finish processing the videos and get them online. See http://smidig07.confreaks.com.

Carl and I as Confreaks, LLC are going over to record the Smidig 07 conference. It is a Norwegian conference on Agile Software Development. See http://www.smidig.no for details.

Videos for the conference will be posted in December.

Edit: Videos are available at http://smidig2007.confreaks.com, all but four (if memory serves me correctly) are in Norwegian, but if you look you can find those few in English, unless of course you can understand Norwegian.