A lot of articles and blogs describe how the customer journey should unfold and what gets in the way of achieving real success. Very few have been written about the problem of one of the most common steps for buying a technical product: the free trial. But free trials are often badly implemented.

The customers of Instruqt are mostly tech vendors who have products or features they need to sell. What Instruqt discovered is that success begins at the first touch with the product. As a tech vendor, you need to show your prospect the value of your product immediately. And the advantage of the free trial is that your prospect gets to know your product in their own environment. So, often this “first-touch” happens through the free trial. After 15, 30 or 60 days of using a product or service, the prospect can then decide if they’re actually going to buy it.

But showing the real value of your product with a free trial is really difficult. There are a lot of hurdles your prospect has to take before he knows how your product is solving his problem. In her article, Heily will show you how to overcome these hurdles.

Curious? Read Heily’s blogpost on LinkedIn.

There are situations where it’s beneficial to build different CSS files for the same web app. An often seen example is theming an application. When you’re using Vue with its single file component Webpack loader, you’re in luck! You get a lot of flexibility that makes it straightforward to build such a feature.

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This is the 3rd post in a series. You can find the older posts here:

• Physical and Digital tools for Scrum Masters and their teams
• More Physical and Digital tools for Scrum Masters and their teams

Based on LinkedIn and Twitter feedback on previous posts some additions from the field!

Using perforation reinforcement to stick things to the wall

This tip comes all the way from Japan. I love it how it uses something for which it wasn’t intended. These little circular stickers are normally used to reinforce perforation holes. And with the small dispenser, they can also be used as strong, small sticky tapes!

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History

In 2014 I started at Xebia in the business unit Agile Consultancy and Training (ACT). Colleague Nicole Belilos took me under her wings and helped me develop and grow within this group of Agile coaches. Together with Laurens Bonnema we formed a group who had experienced a lot of bad Scrum, fake Scrum, Scrum and…We wanted to do something about that, because we really believe in the power of Scrum, when done well. We started a cluster called Xcellent Scrum, a group within our business unit with a real focus on helping organizations in improving Scrum. We became certified trainers for Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org and we developed the Scrum Master Academy together with Jesse Houwing.

We encountered a new issue rising in the organizations where we were hired as Agile Coaches and part of Agile transformations. Scrum Masters who had the title or certification but were not able to facilitate Scrum to optimize its effect or who were not able to get teams and organizations further in Scrum.

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A couple of months ago I blogged about some of the tools and toys that live in the trunk of my car. I take these along everywhere I teach and coach. Since posting, people have suggested additional items that just must be in my toolbox.

Time Timer Plus

Time-boxing is an important component of Scrum. It provides focus towards a goal and prevents you from over-analyzing things. We use time boxes extensively in each Professional Scrum class.

This lightweight, large timer helps visualize the time-box clearly to the class without having to juggle tools on screen.

Thanks: Evelien Roos and Just Meddens for this tip.

Logitech R800/700 and Spotlight

I’m using a trusty old Logitech Wireless presenter R800/700. It’s easy to use, has a laser pointer that works no matter what you point it at and has a built-in timer that can be used to warn you when you’ve been talking for far too long.

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In every Scrum.org Professional Scrum Development class, we touch upon both technical and collaboration practices to help improve the development teams explore new options. In a recent class, we had two teams that, after two sprints, hadn’t been able to deliver any “Done” increment to show at the Sprint Review. They were plagued by all kinds of issues, merge conflicts, refactoring gone bad, lack of automated tests and everything else that happens in real life. I decided to introduce Mob Programming to see whether that could help them.

The first experience with Mob Programming is usually total chaos and I tried to prepare the team accordingly. Trying out any new technique – anything that’s out of your comfort zone – can result in initial chaos, it requires a bit of courage to move onward. For those of you that don’t have any idea what Mob Programming is, I recommend reading our recent article in XPRT magazine which gives an overview of it or watching a recent recording of Woody Zuill’s presentation.Read more →

You’re likely to have been asked the question: “we need to go faster, how many more people do we need?” Most people naturally understand that just adding a random number of people isn’t likely to make us any faster in the short run. So how do you scale Scrum to the limit? And what are those limits?

Meet Peter, he’s a product owner of a new team starting on the greatest invention since sliced bread. It’s going to be huge. It’s going to be the best. Peter has started on this new product with a small team, six of his best friends and it has really taken off. In order to meet demands while adding new features, Peter needs to either get more value out of his teams and if that is no longer possible, add more team members.

He and his teams have worked a number of sprints to get better at Scrum, implemented Continuous Integration even to deliver to production multiple times per day. It is amazing what you can do with a dedicated team willing to improve. But since their product was featured in the Google Play Store they’ve found themselves stretched to their limits. Peter has found himself in the classical situation in which many product owners and project managers find themselves. How do you replicate the capabilities of your existing team without destroying current high-performance teams? He contacts a good friend, Anna, who has dealt with this situation before and asks for her advice.Read more →

About 40 people gathered at the nlScrum meetup dedicated to physical and digital tools for the agile workspace. Tools that help developers, coaches and trainers to survive in the toughest environments.

We broke the evening up into a hybrid between an Open Space and your local Farmers’ market with people displaying their wares and the tools they use. Rosenboom showcased their office solutions including interactive smart screens and high-quality whiteboards among the usual assortment of markers and post-its. And Plantronics brought their collection of noise cancelling headphones for much-needed concentration or a well understood remote collaboration as well as a couple of their conference kits that link up to a phone or laptop to turn any room into a reasonably good conference room.

I had taken possession of one such tables to show the little things I carry around or have in the back of my car in case I might need them.

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The challenge

At my current assignment we recently introduced Azure active directory based single sign on(SSO). Since we are building a React app we were able to leverage the react-adal library and implementing SSO on the front-end side was a matter of hours instead of days.

This however did pose a challenge for our end-to-end tests. We aim to perform a cycle that is as complete as possible in our end-to-end tests and decided that a valid JWT token and its validation should also be part of that suite. Cypress is our end-to-end testing tool and this offers a recipe for testing applications that use single sign on. Unfortunately this recipe didn’t provide us with a working solution, mainly because the (react-)adal library utilizes cross origin iframes for (re-) authentication. Cypress also runs the application under test in an iframe so we cannot leverage the existing iframe detection offered by react-adal.

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Moving towards a microservices architecture

We see a lot of companies are moving towards a microservice architecture. The big pitfall of microservices architecture is to focus on the technology, how big the microservice needs to be, how many lines of codes, what entities do we put in a microservice, and using rest as the communication between them. But to succeed we need to focus on the problem space, by crunching domain knowledge and do domain modelling. EventStorming is a perfect fit for domain modelling, and almost all the microservices leaders seem to agree. Even ThoughtWorks finally put EventStorming on ‘adopt’ in their most recent rendition of their technology radar. But EventStorming has grown to be more than just a tool for domain modelling and to be successful and create autonomous teams you need to use EventStorming for more than only domain modelling.

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