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The Agile Revolution — Technology
The Agile Revolution

Join Craig, Tony and Renee on a journey through the world of Agile as they look at recent blogs related to Agile, investigate practices and techniques, look at tools and answer your questions. The revolutionists focus on not just Agile as it relates to software development but also how it applies to business, transition, culture, people and a whole lot more!

Copyright: © Copyright The Agile Revolution

Latest Episodes:

Episode 194: Business Agility Sparks at Lithespeed with Sanjiv Augustine Apr 06, 2021

Renee and Craig are at Agile2019 in Washington, DC and catch up with Sanjiv Augustine, author of “Managing Agile Projects” and “Scaling Agile” and founder and CEO of Lithespeed:

Craig’s InfoQ interview with Sanjiv
“Leadership is about managing change while management is about managing complexity… you need to be both”
Lithespeed = flexible speed
“Reinventing Organisations” by Frederick Laloux and the Morningstar model
The Agile community is excited about the benefits of the teal level but not the responsibility
Business Agility Sparks – need to shift left from IT to the business and shift right to DevOps and shift up into leadership
What makes you successful at the executive level is working with others
Agile Value Management Office (VMO) is a cross functional leadership team that manages the flow of work from end to end
PMO is more oriented towards best practices process, whereas the Agile VMO is more about flow of work to a business outcome (rather than output)
Collaborate with external auditors to determine what documentation is really needed and the controls required
Basic agile transformation model – build a true end to end value stream team, implement lean discovery and dual track discovery / delivery and an Agile VMO
Agile VMO is needed when there are obstructions to the flow of value
Dynamic strategy (top down, bottom up and outside in) and decision making velocity (speed to make a decision) and ensuring leadership is not a bottleneck to decisions
We still have work to go in taking Agile to other parts of the organisation and taking it to the executive and the board room
“Only the paranoid survive” – Andy Grove
“If we are in danger of being disrupted, why don’t we disrupt ourselves” – Andy Grove

TheAgileRevolution-194 (43 minutes)

Episode 193: Agile Australia 2019 Vox Pop #2 Feb 15, 2021
Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and once again chat to some old friends from the Australian Agile community:

Keynotes from Ali Walker and Marty Cagan

Elabor8 (nice plug Tony)

Sharon Robson from enterprising agility – enjoying the recognition that Agile adoption starts from the top down, agile at scale is about the thinking and thought processes being applied throughout the entire organisation, looking forward to Sandra Davey on “Upon retrospective: the board went Agile“

Steve Lawrence – a member of the “11 club”, agile should be a mechanism to create greater value not reduce headcount, every small step you take is a step forward

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TheAgileRevolution-193 (18 minutes)

Episode 192: Agile Australia 2019 Vox Pop #1 Feb 15, 2021
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and run into some old friends:

Cathy Tang – “stroke the ego and crack the whip”, making the leap from logistics to Scrum Master

Rachel Slattery – Agile Australia Director and Director of Slatts Group, surprised by the large number of new attendees

Keynotes by Emma Murray and Jez Humble

Hayley Pepper from Sunsuper – enjoyed talk by Roger Almeida “Lessons from leading a “you build it, you run it” team” about platform teams

Charlotte Hinton from Service Innovation Lab and organiser of AgileWelly – each year we hear similar problems and are we making traction, enjoyed talk by Sarah Taraporewalla “Complex is easy, it’s simple that’s hard“

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/theagilerevolution-192.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-192 (14 minutes)

Episode 191: Accelerating DevOps with Jez Humble Jan 15, 2021
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and after many years of chasing him around finally get to speak to Jez Humble, co-author of many fine books including “Continuous Delivery“, “Lean Enterprise“, “The DevOps Handbook” and “Accelerate” and they discuss:

Accelerate is based on a research program where practices are validated on the impact they had on various organisations

Agile Australia keynote “The Key to High Performing Tech Organizations“

There is enormous scope to extend the Accelerate-type research to the rest of the value stream

“Thinking Fast and Slow” – Daniel Kahneman shows that you can measure psychological and behavioural science

Project Aristotle by Google – were able to replicate results around culture

State of DevOps Report

Jeff Smith at Suncorp

We all want to ensure that people and data are safe – need to find better ways to achieve control objectives that don’t slow people down

“Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests” – Nat Pryce and Steve Freeman

Unless you spend weeks or months doing test first it is very hard to get into

UC Berkeley classes

Rebecca Parsons drops in!

Trunk Based Development argument

The books and frameworks help but you need try and fail by yourself

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/theagilerevolution-191.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-191 (27 minutes)

Episode 190: Talking Agile Live From The Man Cave with Serge Beaumont Jan 08, 2021
Renee, Craig and Tony are together to chat with Serge Beaumont, Principal Agile Coach at Xebia, live from his man cave and despite showing their lack of mathematical skills in relation to dice they chat about:

In relation to culture, if the human connections are there you can handle just about anything

A foundational cultural aspect at Xebia is that they implemented Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE) – every second Tuesday the team has dinner and then has a mini-conference of about 20 streams

Xebia were at the foundation of the ING Agile transformation

Gloomhaven

Rode PodMic

You need leadership that truly believes in culture as a powerful thing

Renee does story maps like trees and Serge prefers to ensure that he finds his epic on the horizontal slice rather than using the activities on the vertical backbone, building towards an MVP

All backlogs should be tree structures

An epic is a user story that is too big

Deltas go in the backlog and constraints go in the definition of done

two rules for scaling – autonomy over coordination and Scrum is a fractal

Scrum@Scale

If you think you can assume a big framework forever, you are not Agile – you need to change constantly and not take the rules too seriously

“If SAFe is the only thing they will do to accept Agile, I’ll take it…”

HIP sprints – Hardening Innovation Planning sprints

Bol.com agile transformation – now have a variant of holacracy in place called Spark

TomTom agile transformation

Webinar “Coordinating multiple Scrum teams in times of remote working“

Webinar “Preventing And Dealing With Burn Out From Someone Who Has Experienced It All“

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TheAgileRevolution-190 (51 minutes)

Episode 189: The Alistair Cockburn Fan Club with Martin Kearns Jan 04, 2021
Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and they (finally) catch up with Martin Kearns, the Chief Digital Officer at Innodev and co-organiser of Scrum Australia, and they chat about:

Alistair Cockburn gets mentioned at around the 2:30 minute mark, and Martin was responsible for first bringing him to Australia

Being coached is being open to an experience you aren’t controlling

Certified Agile Leadership

Agile is always going to hurt, need to prepare for pain and enjoy it

Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation – need to understand the environmental factors that are forcing Agility into organisations

Knowledge of customers is more superior than ever before – due to education and social intelligence (Target inappropriate clothing for children)

VUCA is here to stay – accept that you need to listen

Australia Post is a good agile example organisation – reinvented themselves through identity services, travel insurance, etc

Australian government has a greater openness to Agile than the private sector – Energy Safe Victoria understand purposefulness

FailAgility

Agile Contracts

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TheAgileRevolution-189 (29 minutes)

Episode 188: Doing Agile Right with Steve Berez & Tony Christensen Dec 30, 2020
Tony and Craig catch up with Tony Christensen and Steve Berez, co-author of “Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos” as well as from Bain & Company and they chat about:

Saw a lot of companies doing agile wrong and a lot of pain suffering and probably worse off than when they started – book is to try to share learning and get agile on the right track

The conditions for agile to flourish need to change, particularly beyond team level

RBS – one of the key impediments was funding, changed to funding persistent teams

Most organisations have a dissatisfaction with their financial process – need to have an honest conversation around the pain points of trust and process and seeing the promise of early return

Bosch – were not innovating as quickly as they needed to, now using Agile for product design, manufacturing process and supply change operations – use Agile wherever a change need is required

Best way to manage a transformation is in an agile way – problem is unfortunately a transformation has to be funded using the existing processes and adapt the process as you go

Where Agile works well is where it is more organic – give the teams the tools for success and get out of the way

Saab Gripen Fighter Jet – built using Agile

Set the ambition to be a continuous internal learning organisation

We need good recipes – Toyota and Spotify are good examples – sharing is of benefit to each other

Persistent teams are recommended to get the best results. – there is a compelling economic argument for this as well

How Agile Is Powering Healthcare Innovation – healthcare has had to innovate at a much more rapid pace than traditionally due to the global pandemic – built around small empowered teams that are focussed on the problem

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TheAgileRevolution-188 (54 minutes)

Episode 187: Domain Driven Yak Symmathesy with Jessica Kerr Dec 28, 2020
Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat to Jessica Kerr, software developer, consultant and symmathecist (look it up or listen to the podcast) and apart from our first live podcast sneeze they talk about:

YOW! 2018 keynote “The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming“

YOW! 2018 talk “Shaving the Golden Yak“

Great teams make great people – if you want to become great as a developer, focus on the team

You can’t document what is obvious to you – whenever you say the word obviously, replace it with “I cant explain it, but…”

Yak shaving – all the tasks that you do that get in the way of your work

If you are an agile person but you wish agile had more code in it – go to the Domain Driven Design community

We need to embrace complexity in the business domain – the code should be a tool to learn about the business domain

Code doesn’t wait for design, it participates in design

Atomist – automation for DevOps

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/theagilerevolution-187.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-187 (30 minutes)

Episode 186: Managing the Unmanageable with Ron Lichty Jul 13, 2020
Craig fires some questions at Ron Lichty, co-author of “Managing the Unmanageable” and the “Study of Product Team Performance“:

Author of machine Language programming books “Programming the Apple IIGS in Assembly Language” and “Programming the 65816“

Managing the Finder team at Apple – hired for stellar C++ coding ability and customer empathy

Software development is a team sport – including QA, a dedicated product manager / product owner and designers

After Dark and Flying Toasters at Berkeley Systems

“Managing the Unmnageable” is 9 chapters and around 300 rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom (the creamy centre), the tools used to manage software development teams plus the authors own insights

There were very few books (7 at the time) on managing software developers (unlike project management and agile)

Fred Brooks – “The Mythical Man-Month“

Situational Leadership – opens your eyes to delegating and supporting the people on your team

The most important rule – always be recruiting

The Study of Product Team Performance – effective onboarding correlates with the highest performance teams (yet 7% consider this to be a best practice)

Self organising teams are where every single member of the team is a leader from their expertise

A team created definition of done may be one of the most important practices in Agile

The frequency of standups correlates with the performance of the team

The Daily Standup was not intended to be a status meeting but rather a replanning meeting

Teams that have stories for their entire backlog are correlated with the highest level of team performance

Steve Bockman – “Practical Estimation” and “Predictability“

Pragmatic Institute framework – the skills of a Product Management

Ambiguities in the requirements typically popup in the middle of the programming, which is why it is so valuable to have a Product Owner nearby to address these

Software development is a team sport – what gates teams is collaboration and communication – we need to nurture and provide support for that to thrive

We have two ears and one mouth and we need to use them in that proportion

We can’t over communicate in software development

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TheAgileRevolution-186 (49 minutes)

Episode 185: Heart of Agile Academy with Alistair Cockburn & Soledad Pinter Jun 13, 2020
Tony, Renee and Craig speak to Alistair Cockburn and Soledad Pinter about the newly launched Heart of Agile Academy:

The Heart of Agile Academy is the opportunity to reset Agile learning with a clean sheet of paper

The core design decisions were to remove the classes being tied to a title and to be better at the specialities that make up the Heart of Agile

Heart of Agile is just four words or focus areas: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect and Improve

Alistair and Ahmed Sidky tried to solve this problem in 2010 when they launched ICAgile

There are over 3,000 different certification programs for Agile

The Academy has courses at different levels that are taught by Agile experts from around the world (and in multiple languages)

There is an accreditation ladder and process for bringing on new courses and trainers

Designed to be a marketplace for Agile classes and open for business now!

The values of the Heart of Agile community are openness, dialogue and humanity

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TheAgileRevolution-185 (50 minutes)

Episode 184: Agile Virtual (Pizza) Summit with Adam Weisbart May 22, 2020
Craig, Renee and Tony catch up with old friend and “irregular” guest Adam Weisbart about Agile Virtual Summit, Recess retrospectives, Build Your Own Scrum and making your own pizza.

Renee realised Washington state is nowhere near Washington, DC

Agile Virtual Summit 1-5 June 2020 – a collection of great speakers and registration is free!

Distributed retrospectives – important that people give a voice-over to the items that they add

Tips for Remote Agile ceremonies – recreate being in the same room with technology as much as possible, avoid the asynchronous Slack bots, actually standup,

At Slack, you are not allowed to hold a meeting via Slack!

Recess – retrospectives in a box!

Making virtual retrospectives fun – change them up, craft retrospectives into a story (Recess does this), remember the future (where would you be if you had the most awesome sprint ever)

The next thing in Agile just sounds like Agility!

No apologies meeting rule for children, dogs or ringing the bell…

Build Your Own Scrum in a virtual world works well on Miro and Mural (and the exercise started as an accidental panic!)

Build Your Own LeSS

Bad Scrum Master Video

pizzamaking.com is the nicest place on the entire internet

‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here’s why that happens

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TheAgileRevolution-184 (57 minutes)

Episode 183: Let’s Not Waste A Crisis – Live at Agile Brisbane April 2020 Virtual Meetup May 11, 2020
One of the strengths of the agile approach to delivery is flexibility in responding to changing circumstances, and there is no better example of this than the current lockdown. I’m sure you have heard the political adage: “Don’t waste a good crisis.” which allows us to reflect on how ways of working are currently being impacted. The Agile Brisbane community joined Tony, Craig and Renee for this online fireside chat to explore concepts around the state of agile now, and what we can carry over to the post-COVID world.

Thanks to John Stathakis, Dave Pryce, Andy van der Gugten, Michael Hunyh, Patrick Fernando, Wei Yin, Lawrence Noun, Gautami Shetty and everybody else who joined the conversation.

A lot of organisations are shifting their strategy and looking to digital in a stronger way than they did before

Remote amplifies everything you do when you interact with people

Once upon it was agile teams, now all teams are agile – they just struggle to operate in an agile mode

Conversations are more asynchronous now and single disruptions amplify a level of discomfort – we are not seeing the right level of tools

Need to think about the social styles of the people you are dealing with

You can work efficiently but not effectively

Working from home now is not the same as it was before – you are working AT home

“We need to be able to do the same with less”

This is the opportunity to look at the waste and focus on the value

This has allowed us to get access to people and places we had not been able to do this before

People put pressure on themselves to work harder as we lack the ability to sense the need that our teammates need help, but we have solved the amount of distractions we get during the day

The heart of agile is people, and if we can’t help people what are we doing?

This crisis is sending us a message to slow down and focus on what matters – as businesses and human beings

Reinventing Organizations and the fact some organisations have been forced to move up a level out of necessity

Are organisations responsible for providing a good workspace that meets workplace health and safety when we work from home?

With disruption comes opportunity – look for the collaboration, lean, tooling and continuous improvement opportunities

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TheAgileRevolution-183 (58 minutes)

Episode 182: Unlearn-ing with Barry O’Reilly Apr 16, 2020
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and (despite a bin rolling by) sit down with Barry O’Reilly, co-author of “Lean Enterprise” and author of “Unlearn” and they talk about:

Reminiscing about Barry’s resume that includes CitySearch (and its competitor Zip2 owned by Elon Musk), Snake, Wireless Pets on Nokia and Lilo & Stitch using J2ME and eventually onto ThoughtWorks

Lean Enterprise was written after “The Lean Startup” was released but to explain how it works if you are not a startup and increase experimentation in organisations

When people can design good disciplined experiments, you have system to break down problems and grow your system and people

Fortune 15 executives and successful startup leaders don’t sit around and ask “if we are doing the framework correctly”- they have their own system, in the same way as Toyota created their own system

If you choose an off-the-shelf framework it is just a starting point – you need to evolve your system of work to your context to have a competitive advantage

ExecCamp – take execs out of their business for up to 8 weeks with the aim to disrupt themselves in a safe environment

Unlearn – we are in an industry where we need to learn but that is not the limiting behaviour, it is our inability to unlearn our existing behaviours that holds us back from getting breakthroughs of higher performance

YOW! talk “Why Great Leaders Must Unlearn to Succeed“

Mean time to discovery – how quickly can you see that an assumption is invalid so that you can then make better decisions

How often are you spending time with customers, how are you getting customer feedback and how are you feeding that information back into your system of work to improve it

Think big but start small and learn fast – safe to fail experiments

Agility is hard…

Everybody has a need to unlearn

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TheAgileRevolution-182 (37 minutes)

Episode 181: Change it with the BOSSAnova with Jutta Eckstein Mar 26, 2020
Craig and Tony are at YOW! conference in Brisbane and chat with Jutta Eckstein, author of “Agile Software Development in the Large“, “Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams“, “Retrospectives for Organisational Change” “Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in Your Project Portfolio” with Johanna Rothman and “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption” with John Buck

Smalltalk and pattern languages was where a lot of the early work and a lot of the early players converged

Scrum had great marketing and certification over Extreme Programming

Agile Software Development in the Large came out in 2004 and was probably way before its time

Craig Larman and Bas Vodde book “Scaling Lean & Agile Development“

IBM book “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum“

A framework is not really necessary, stick with the Agile values and principles regardless of your context

Heart of Agile (and Tony’s rant on scaling)

40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes

Retrospectives are great for any sort of change, not just software

There is no way of becoming Agile as a company without the CFO on board and moving from yearly budgeting – beyond budgeting assists from both the money side and the strategic side

Sociocracy looks at the organisation from the structure side – we need to build structures that allow us to make decisions more quickly through double linking and built in feedback loops

Open Space techniques are essential for facilitation and product liftoff and about using the passion of the people for innovation of your products

If you trust people maybe its cheaper than checking procedures

Need some background, come up with a hypothesis, design some experiments and measure

Experiments need to be safe to fail – either if the hypothesis is not true or the outcome is not valuable

Not “safe to fail” but “failing safely” or “safe to learn”

Publish your experiments so people can learn from each other (even if only internally)

agilebossanova.com – collecting stories

Agile Alliance Speaker Reimbursement initiative – support for Agile meetups and conferences to bring in external speakers and go towards cover travel reimbursements

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TheAgileRevolution-181 (41 minutes)

Episode 180: Extreme Programming & 3X Explained with Kent Beck Feb 20, 2020
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and have a rockstar moment and catchup with Kent Beck, the creator of Extreme Programming, the pioneer of xUnit and author of numerous books including “Extreme Programming Explained” and “Test Driven Development“:

Extreme Programming (XP) was born at Chrysler by letting go of conventional wisdom and pushing practices to eleven

Software development is a social process, not a sum of individuals process

Nobody cares about certificates, we care about competence

It’s time for a renaissance and reboot of XP – this time it needs to be inclusive and no barriers to entry

We know how to make a difference – it starts with execution and continues to empathy

Big tent agility can become an excuse not to tackle hard problems

“Not thinking about all the legs on the stool leaves you sitting on the ground” – some of the legs of agility require a fundamental change in belief

As a programmer am I responsible for my code running – once you have that belief, unit testing falls out of that

TDD is a set of feedback loops and an incentive system to encourage confidence and certainty

Test, Commit, Revert takes TDD further – run the tests, if they pass you commit and if they fail you revert the changes – incentive to take small steps

“Silence is the sound of risk” – you need feedback (unless you are perfect)

XP was a better product, but it lost (round one)

Electric or blade?

If XP starts with the premise that we want a process that anyone with talent and skill can contribute and grow at maximum velocity, the rest will take care of itself

Agile as a name is so attractive, nobody doesn’t want to be agile – the brand of Extreme Programming means if you are not extreme you are not going to say that you are

The fundamental question to ask first is “what do we have to lose” – if you have nothing to lose you need to try short and crazy experiments to find things nobody else is doing

3X model (explore, expand, extract) – YOW! keynote “3x Explore, Expand, Extract” – depends which part of the curve you are on as to which tools in your bag you should use, rules of the game change depend on whether you are looking for a new source of value (explore), growing fast and trying to keep up (expand) or continue growing to pay for new explorations (extract)

poker vs software development

we will win with community and inclusion

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TheAgileRevolution-180 (45 minutes)

Episode 179: The Heart of Agile Distilled with Alistair Cockburn Jan 14, 2020
Tony and guest host Phil Gadzinski talk to Alistair Cockburn for a brief overview and understanding about the Heart of Agile (and the link to how it all started in Australia):

Scrum training had turned into training wheels and consistency – wanted to get back to the essence of Agile

Progression from shu (follow techniques), ha (collect techniques) and ri (fluency) – wanted to move to a fourth stage – kokoro (heart or essence of being a samurai – master the basics)

Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve – simple and direct, just do this and you will get all the benefits out of Agile

Normally you start with collaborate (because it’s the easiest and most obvious place to start) but there is no real starting point

Deliver is misunderstood – forget software and product, we are delivering decisions, it is the molecule of our work, every decision needs to see the harsh light of day so we can find the bad decisions early

What is the smallest that we could expose to review to try and correct decisions early before we build too much (directional decisions)

Create a culture of listening

This interview was originally recorded as a video for the Agile Brisbane meetup.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/theagilerevolution-179.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-179 (17 minutes)

Episode 178: YOW! Speaker Vox Pop with Randy Shoup, Dean Wampler, Mark Hibberd, Dave Thomas & Michele Playfair Jan 07, 2020
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and wander around the hallways talking to different speakers, hosts and attendees:

Highlights included Kent Beck keynote “3x Explore, Expand, Extract“, Anita Sengupta keynote “The Future of High Speed Transportation“, Brendan Gregg keynote “Cloud Performance Root Cause Analysis at Netflix” and Jessica Kerr (keynote “The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming” and talk “Shaving the Golden Yak“)

Mark Hibberd and Andrew Newman – Mark’s YOW! talk “Failure and Change – Principles of Reliable Systems” and enjoyed Kents keynote and the 3X framework which is easy to understand and important for hiring whilst Andrew has noticed how many fewer ORM and Java talks we have at YOW! now and enjoyed and was convinced by Anita’s keynote

Randy Shoup – his YOW! talks(“Attitude Determines Altitude – Engineering Yourself” and “Breaking Codes, Designing Jets, and Building Teams“, the importance of confidence, learning how to learn and imposter syndrome

Brendan Cleary and Pete Manion from Tabcorp – got value from Jessica Kerr’s keynote and talk, Brendan’s Gregg’s keynote and the aspirational bar that has been set

Dave Thomas – celebrating 10 years of YOW!

Michele Playfair – 2 step journey in Agile (those playing catchup and those that are faster moving looking into newer things like sociocracy and holocracy), enjoyed Jessica’s keynote and Avdi Grimm’s “#nocode” talk suggesting that you are still a developer if you are gluing things together

Dean Wampler – YOW! talk “Streaming Data with Kafka and Microservices” which is about how to use fast data to process things in real time, enjoyed Kevlin Henney’s talk “1968“, Dave Cheney’s talk “Lessons Learned Building Kubernetes Controllers” and Mikael Vidstedt’s talk “Java in a World of Containers“

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TheAgileRevolution-178 (33 minutes)

Episode 177: The Human Side of Agile for Non-Software Teams with Gil Broza Dec 31, 2019
Renee and Craig are at Agile 2019 in Washington, DC and talk to Gil Broza, Agile Mindset and Leadership Coach / Trainer at 3P Vantage and author of “The Agile Mind-Set“, “The Human Side of Agile” and “Agile for Non-Software Teams” and they talk about:

Agile 2019 talk – “How to Help your Non-Software Colleagues Adopt Agile“

Outside of software, they notice Agile and want what they have – a different team experience and doing things better

Focus on a principle based transformation rather than practices – have conversations early and often on how we want to be and how we want to operate

The Agile Manifesto principles are partial and software heavy, the values and beliefs are the root and leadership should keep these alive

26 principles in “The Agile Mind-Set” book and includes transparency (which is harder in areas like HR and Finance)

Craig’s Agile 2010 talk “I’m The Business & Agile Was My Idea” (and we were before our time!)

The practices really don’t matter and there aren’t really equivalents outside of software

We are obsessed with the how in Agile (the implementation), Lean has always been about principles

We have crossed the chasm of Agile at team level but not at scale – or have we? Nail it before you scale it!

Ceremonies mean people turn up and go through the motions (The Scrum Guide says events), use workflow instead of process (which means I do work and send it in for approval), work item or task instead of user story (Scrum calls them backlog items)

The common denominator between software and the rest of the organisation is the principles

If you don’t think differently, doing differently won’t matter

Renee recommends “The Human Side of Agile” as well as “Coaching Agile Teams” for new Scrum Masters

Heart of Agile (Gil is not familiar with it so Renee and Craig channel their inner Tony to explain it!)

Oath of Non Allegiance

Are you coaching around values, principles and mindset or practices?

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TheAgileRevolution-177 (57 minutes)

Episode 176: The Lost Tapes – Kanban For One with Sandy Mamoli Dec 21, 2019
In this previously lost and unreleased podcast from 2012 (we found it on a SD card that was thought to be lost forever), Craig catches up with Sandy Mamoli at Agile 2012 in Dallas, Texas and chat about Personal Kanban and how everything is bigger in Texas. It’s amazing how much hasn’t changed in this time!

Agile 2012 talk “The Evils of Multi-tasking and how Personal Kanban Can Help You“

Personal Kanban helps solves personal multi-tasking through giving you permission to single task

The Kanbanfor1 board limits work in progress by limiting the amount of space you can place a sticky note in the work in progress column

Jim Benson “Personal Kanban” book

It’s easy to get started and requires no permission to do and is a sandbox for Kanban

Coaches Clinic topics – testing in Agile, product ownership

Jeff Patton talk “The Product Owner Role is a Stupid Idea“

Wikispeed and Joe Justice podcast

AgileWelly and state of Agile in New Zealand

Luke Hohmann talk “Fixing Broke(n) Governments Through Serious Games“

Gaylord Texan is huge!

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TheAgileRevolution-176 (14 minutes)

Episode 175: Self Selecting Teams & Olympic Lessons with Sandy Mamoli Dec 21, 2019
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat with Sandy Mamoli, Agile Advisor and Coach at Nomad8 and co-author of “Creating Great Teams” and they chat about:

Nomad8 is a managerless agile coaching collective in New Zealand, based on the Crisp model

The lost podcast

Kanbanfor1 (and Jim Benson – Personal Kanban)

“Creating Great Teams” book with David Mole – based on the journey at Trade Me, if people can organise themselves for a Ship It day it should work for everyday work

You do not need to change reporting structures to make self selection work nor does the size of the organisation matter

Original paper on Self Selection

Larger companies should probably split to tribes of no larger than 150-200 people

Heidi Helfand – “Dynamic Reteaming” book and podcast

Should do self selections again every 6-9 months

Team structures can change during a self selection as required

You usually need multiple rounds of self selection, rounds are usually about 10 minutes long

YOW! 2017 talk “How the Olympics Can Make You a Better Person” and Agile Australia talk

“Be the worst player on the best team that will take you” – allows you to amplify learning

AgileWelly

State of Agile in New Zealand – along with Australia are ahead of the USA due to smaller companies, age of companies, less fear and more innovation

Agile Principle and Modern Agile and Liftoff cards

Holocracy – pushing decisions into circles has allowed fast and good decisions, this will continue to evolve

#JAFAC conference

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/theagilerevolution-175.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-175 (40 minutes)

Episode 174: Dynamic Reteaming with Heidi Helfand Nov 22, 2019
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and talk to Heidi Helfand, Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies and author of Dynamic Reteaming and they talk about:

YOW! 2017 talk “Dynamic Reteaming: The Art & Wisdom of Changing Teams“

The general belief is the best teams are the ones that are stable and don’t change, but the opposite is often reality

Dynamic Reteaming is inevitable, you might as well get good at it

Tuckman added adjourning later, as an acknowledgment that things don’t stay the same

Teams by percentage gives dynamic reteaming a bad name – this is an antipattern

Good agile practices tend to help the ability to dynamically reteam

Ties nicely into Modern Agile, particularly experiment and learn rapidly as well as make people awesome

Dr. Spok – the “single point of knowledge”, may he live long and prosper!

Shared experiences and fun are great ways to break down the barriers and build community

Drexler/Sibbet model

GTKY – Getting to Know You Lunch – budget to encourage people to get to know each other, especially in companies that are growing fast

Innovation by Isolation Pattern – GoToMyPC was created this way

Dan Pink – “Drive“

Sandy Mamoli – “Creating Great Teams” – “what would you if you weren’t afraid?”

Dan Mezick – “show a new idea and invite people to try it”

Craig Larman – “you need to own ideas and not rent them”

Episode 106: Turning the Agile Ship Around with David Marquet and intent based leadership

What is the sweet spot for freedom where the things I want to to do match with the goals of the company and freedom for learning

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/theagilerevolution-174.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-174 (38 minutes)

Episode 173: Modern Agile (Is Not A Framework) with Joshua Kerievsky Nov 12, 2019
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and catch up with Joshua Kerievsky, CEO of Industrial Logic and founder of Modern Agile and they talk about:

Episode 20: Lean Start-ups with Joshua Kerievsky

Industrial Logic and the Extreme Programming Playing Cards

If you are a consulting company and don’t have your hands dirty building a product, you are missing out – try it out on yourselves before you try it out on your customers

Episode 116: The Heart of Modern Agile

Modern Agile recognises that there are other people who are not building software who also want to be agile and want to leverage the agile and lean concepts

Modern Agile principles – Make People Awesome, Make Safety a Prerequisite, Experiment and Learn Rapidly and Deliver Value Continuously

Lightweight methods movement came out of minimalism, but now we are in the Agile Industrial Complex – Agile has lost its simplicity and lightweight qualities

People need recipes to get started but we often get stuck on these

Forrest Gumping – stupid is as stupid does!

A lot of methodologists don’t pay attend to economics – be too idealistic and you won’t make money

We are in the business of helping individuals be agile, not organisations

Make people awesome is about being obsessed with our customers and making each other awesome in our organisations

Kathy Sierra – “Badass: Making Users Awesome” – focus on making the user awesome, not the product

Make safety a prerequisite – anzeneering – you can’t make anyone awesome if you can’t protect them

Project Aristotle – psychological safety is important for high performance

Modern Agile Meeting Agreements Poster

“Modern Agile is not a framework” – sing along!

* “The leftovers” – we value the things on the left over…

Modern Agile activities catalogue

Modern Agile Show

YOW! 2017 talk “Modern Agile“

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/theagilerevolution-173.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-173 (41 minutes)

Episode 172: Business Agility & DevOps Health Radars with Sally Elatta Oct 17, 2019
Craig catches up with Sally Elatta, president of Agile Transformation and the founder of Agility Health Radar and they chat about:

Companies struggle to get the metrics to know if their agile transformations are making a difference, hence the creation of Agility Health Radar

Business Agility pillars – customer seat at the table, lean portfolio management, organisation structure and design, agile framework, leadership and culture, make it stick, technology agility and agility metrics

DevOps pillars – faster value delivery, higher quality, culture of improvement and building the right product

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/theagilerevolution-172.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-172 (27 minutes)

Episode 171 – Beyond Legacy Code with David Bernstein Oct 07, 2019
Craig is at Agile 2017 in Orlando, Florida and speaks with David Bernstein, author of “Beyond Legacy Code“, and they chat about agile technical practices:

Agile does have something to with software development

Agile 2017 talk “Create Software Quality

The real value of Agile is in the technical practices so we can build iteratively, but still very few people practice them

The future is already here, but it is not very well evenly distributed – the same applies to Agile

Companies are being consumed by their technical debt and they don’t even recognise it

What is always cheaper in the virtual domain is building quality

Continuous Integration makes the most painful thing in software development (integration) our greatest asset – this in turn gives us feedback

We don’t necessarily know there is a better way to do things – but there is a better way to do things

We traditionally think of software as a write once event, but it is write many – users want it changed

We think procedurally so object oriented code often ends up being procedural with a class statement wrapped around it

Test First Development – very few developers know how to write a good test because they haven’t been taught, it was intended to assist with refactoring

Studies show about 10% of people follow the Agile technical practices like XP, and only 10% of those are doing it correctly

The mindset of testing is different to the mindset of coding and they are mutually exclusive (in the same way we need editors when writing a book)

Refactoring is at two levels because we learn in chunks – we need to do while doing test first as well as in the large

“The Art of Agile Development” – spend 10% of your time refactoring

Communication – say what, why and for whom before how – we think in implementation

CLEAN code – cohesive, loosely coupled, encapsulated, assertiveness and non-redundant

Need to understand what quality means in software

Troy Magennis talk “I love the smell of DATA in the morning (Getting started with Agile Data Science)“

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/theagilerevolution-171.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-171 (34 minutes)

Episode 170: Agile Our Way at Flinders University with Kerrie Campbell Sep 15, 2019
Craig is as LAST Conference in Canberra and with guest co-host (and co-founder of LAST) Craig Brown they talk to Kerrie Campbell, the CIO at Flinders University in Adelaide and they talk (amongst some unscheduled cup stacking) about:

LAST Keynote talk “Flinders University Transformation“

Leadership through seeding rather than driving by changing language, building mindset and removing impediments

Open the kimono and leaders do Agile by example and muddle through it publicly

Story telling to move through the change

Eliminating the PMO – don’t need a middle man to get in between the IT and business to slow you down and sort out the projects if the team is cross skilled and cross facilitating

Disrupted finance through asking for a five year envelope of money and working and modelling the work that is ready to be done

Heart of Agile takes the complexity out of Agile – deliver, trust, reflect and improve

The CIO needs to fix the chaos of systems and make them more simple so we can get closer to the customer and work on their innovations

State of Agile in Adelaide (and a shout out to the Agile Brisbane and the Melbourne Agile and Scrum meetups)

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/theagilerevolution-170.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-170 (21 minutes)

Episode 169: A Slice of Agile Pi with Betsy Kauffman and Oscar Rodriquez Sep 03, 2019
Craig is in Charlotte, North Carolina and catches up with Betsy Kauffman from Agile Pi and Oscar Rodriquez and they chat about:

40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes at Charlotte Agile Network meetup

The role and the state of Agile coaching

Agile Practice Guide

ICAgile, the ICAgile Certified Expert In Agile Coaching (ICE-AC) and non-framework Agility

Agile and crossing the chasm

The state of Agile in Charlotte and the compliance conundrum

The PMI-ACP is starting to more and more be a job requirement and one benefit is it’s ensuring a wider knowledge of Agile practices exist

The state of Scrum Masters

Meet the organisation (and people) where they are at

OnAgile 2017 Roman Pichler talk “Building a Product Users Want” then straight after Colleen Johnson talk “Death of the Product Roadmap“

It’s a messy complicated world!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/theagilerevolution-169.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-169 (56 minutes)

Episode 168: Agile 2019 (Un)bagging Aug 09, 2019
Craig and Renee are in Washington, DC at Agile 2019 and ahead of day one have some fun and decide to open up the swag bag after collecting their badges and see what is inside:

Air Force One Experience next to the conference hotel in National Harbor

Women In Agile 2019 conference tshirt

Octo Consulting and Lockheed Martin webcam covers and/or popsocket

ICAgile pen

Express Scripts blue tape

Freddie Mac gum (because great teams stick together)

Excella bottle opener

Scrum Inc mobile phone credit card holder

Scrum @ Scale metal straw (which Renee thought looked like a recorder case)

Scaled Agile wooden phone holder

PMI metal straw (which Renee thought was a pen)

Paperwork from Planview (giving away a Yeti Hopper), Lockheed Martin, Insight, Nisum, LitheSpeed (and the theagilevmo.com), Cprime, Esther Derby and her new book “7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change“, Adventures with Agile, Nureva, Express Scripts, The Braintrust Consulting Group, Synerzip (#DontGoChasingWaterfalls), ICAgile (Craig is Certifiably Awesome), Rally, Scaled Agile, Scrum Alliance, PMI, AgilityHealth, CollabNet VersionOne, ServiceNow (and the Ring video doorbell), Fans of LeSS, Deloitte Government Trends 2020, BP, Coveros (and TechWell), Comparative Agility, Scrum.org, CertiProf, UST Global, IIBA (Agile Extension to the BABOK), Netmind, Atlassian, Easy Agile

This podcast brought to you by Unbound DNA

Apollo 11

The ScrumStudy Guide

Clean Language and Judy Rees “Clean Language” book (Renee wants to start the foul language movement)

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TheAgileRevolution-168 (48 minutes)

Episode 167: Unlearning and the Improv Effect with Jessie Shternshus Jul 07, 2019
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and with guest revolutionist Toby Thompson (who was sitting at the table and initially didn’t want to speak on the podcast but then we couldn’t keep him quiet!) catch up with Jessie Shternshus, CEO at The Improv Effect and author of “CTRLShift“:

Agile 2015 keynote “Individuals, Interactions and Improvisation“

CTRLShift – 50 games for different types of days you might be happening

Agile Australia keynote “Unlearning: The Challenge of Change“

When you are facilitating you need to know your audience and believe in what you are doing – to get people involved, do things in small groups in partners so nobody has the attention on them initially and then build them up to group activities

Make people safe and get them to laugh – then you have them for the ride

Tony imitates a dinosaur (which we keep telling him doesn’t work on a podcast)

Introduction Tiebacks – introduce yourself as the facilitator and then when it comes to your turn tie your introduction back to the person who came before you

Game ideas come from twists on old games or from things people say

Last Letter Conversation – use the last letter from what someone just said to be the first letter of what you say

Improv Encyclopedia and a bunch of books are good resources but are usually made for actors (so you need to amend for the workplace)

“Improvisation For The Spirit” and “Improv Wisdom” are books more geared towards people and everyday life

Agile Australia keynote from Martin Fowler “Agile in 2018” around faux agile

Our brains have a hard job letting go, need to help people figure out what’s in it for them (the haveta versus the wanna)

The Backwards Brain Bicycle

Helping people change comes back to listening and empathy

Walkshop – 4 day hike for leaders to help them unlearn and connect

Unlearning – need to find experiential learning that helps people unlearn – backwards number game or name things around the room differently

Mayor of Weirdsville – dealing with pushback, pretend you are the mayor, make a proclamation and then the rest of the town has to poke holes in your idea

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/theagilerevolution-167.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-167 (25 minutes)

Episode 166: A Trip Down Agile Memory Lane with Jeff Smith Jul 04, 2019
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and talk to their former leader Jeff Smith, EVP and COO at World Fuel Services and former CEO of Suncorp Business Services:

Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services

Scale of thought is more important than scale of people

The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen

Suncorp Building Quality In program

It all comes down to great people and working through problem

It’s hard for companies to build great leaders that are interested in building great teams

Jeff Smith keynote “Leading an Agile Company“

Availability is not a skillset

Thinking from a team point of view is important – at World Fuel for example, the MTR dropped 80% due to this approach

Don’t waste time on people who don’t want to follow what you want to do

Most companies surround themselves with the companies being disrupted, not the disruptors – need to work with people and companies who want to change the game

You learn a lot from being around better people

For ANZ, the key to their Agile journey has been that CEO Shayne Elliott was willing to spend time outside the organisation and learn

You need to be structured to support end to end cross functional teams formed around the work – the structure of the team matters

The next disruption is the physical versus virtual world, in particular what happens to things like networking appliances

It’s easy when something is new to find ways to shut it down, its harder to keep it going

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/theagilerevolution-166.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-166 (33 minutes)

Episode 165: Two Years and Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad Jun 22, 2019
Craig and Tony sit down for a personal chat with the microphone turned on for the first time in 2 years (that is not an interview) (wow, time files…), unfortunately without Renee who was out sick:

State of the nation is a lot of dark / fake Agile and lack of collaborative connective tissues

Fail Agility – Craig and Tony’s keynote talk (Episode 150)

The word Agile is done, we are trying to harness agility

Heart of Agile – a reflective improvement framework that helps you find your way forward

The Agile Manifesto tells you the what, the Heart of Agile tells you the how

The Agile Revolution Podcast with Alistair Cockburn (Epsiode 49)

40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes diagram

Collision 2019 Toronto – Justin Trudeau, Capital One, BMO, Ev Williams, Timbaland, KFC

Stability in leadership and the stake in organisational success is important for success in agile transformation

1982 Up In Lights

Masterclass

Agile Australia 2019 Sydney

XP 2019 Montreal

Craig is reading “Joy Inc.” by Rich Sheridan after a recent visit to Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, MI.

Tony is reading “The Responsibility Process” by Christopher Avery and is considering sitting through The Leadership Gift Program

The Agile Revolution podcast with Christopher Avery (Episode 114 and Episode 138)

Brightline Initiative – connecting leadership to strategy, “Strategy@Work” book

OKRs – Tony suggests “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr and Craig suggests “Radical Focus” by Christina Wodtke

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/theagilerevolution-165-1.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-165 (69 minutes)

Episode 164: Agile Australia 2017 Vox Pop #2 Jun 13, 2019
Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and finding random folks to talk to at the conference:

Sarah Romeyn from WorkCover Queensland – enjoyed Pete Steel talk “Developing an Experimentation Culture” and Sherif Monsour talk “The art of building a roadmap“

Rachel Slattery from Slatterys (organiser of Agile Australia) – 1,200 attendees (a sellout) at the conference, such a good level of goodwill in the Agile community, half of the conference are new people and 60% hear about it through word of mouth, all flavours of ice cream (even coconut apparently…), AgileAus hub for all things Agile in Australia

Melissa Perri keynote “The Build Trap“, teal organisations tend to form like that at inception, other organisations have the people but the process to get there is still hard

Adam Boas and Andy Kelk from Marketplacer – enjoying the deep dive sessions as a way to talk to speakers you normally don’t get the opportunity to talk to, outcomes over output is a key theme at the conference

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/theagilerevolution-164.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-164 (19 minutes)

Episode 163: Agile Australia 2017 Vox Pop #1 Jun 10, 2019
Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia 2017 in Sydney and wander the very busy hallways catching up with attendees and with old friends:

Sieger de Vries – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk “The future of Agile in the enterprise: has the war been lost?”, distributed Agile and use of partnering is here to stay

Mia Horrigan from Zen Ex Machina and Joseph Gard from Australian Taxation Office – lots of Agile interest in Canberra around scaling Agile and leading the change in government, enjoyed Barry O’Reilly keynote “Lessons deploying Lean Enterprise“

Venky Krishnamurthy from The Empirical Coach – LeSS is purely based on evidence from experiments that was created into a framework, enjoyed Jez Humble workshop and keynote “Continuous Delivery Sounds Great But It Won’t Work Here“

Steve Scotson from 4impact – enjoyed the high standard and breadth of subject matter around innovation and organisation change

Karyl Crick – more managers should come to these events to see how Agile can help rather than just listening to the people above them, enjoyed Esther Derby keynote “Leaders at all Levels” and Stuart Mitchell talk “Agile Governance: Evolution or Revolution“

Sally Greenwood – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk, the advocates at CommBank already existed they just needed to make it happen, “it’s not about scaling agile up, it about descaling the organisation”

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/theagilerevolution-163.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-163 (27 minutes)

Episode 162: Leadership and Coaching Beyond the Team with Esther Derby Jun 03, 2019
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and catch up with Esther Derby, co-author of numerous agile books including Agile Retrospectives and Behind Closed Doors. We also ask the question whether Tony is cool or not….

Agile Australia keynote “Leaders At All Levels“

Leadership is the ability to adapt the environment so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem

Need to develop the people we are leading as well as the environment

Need a bigger overlap of the knowledge in organisations so that we can make better decisions

Systemic failure that we assume because you are good at something (like software development) you will be good at management / leadership – they are very different skills

Three C’s – clarity (people know what to work on and how it fits into the big picture), conditions (the means to do the work and access to resources required) and constraints (guidelines to know to act and decide) – things you need to consider if you want to move a complex, adaptive system and build empowered teams

Need to focus on the work that needs to be done not just on the little boxes or our job description

Ask the question to leadership – what are you willing to change?

Coaching Beyond the Team workshop with Don Grey

Whilst smaller organisations can focus on the team, bigger organisations have to focus on the systemic level to make any visible difference

People are interested in the allure of the Agile benefits and what to cherry pick in relation to practices, the same happened with TQM and Lean – need to ask what next shift will help you deliver value to your customers

The millenials will be a big disruptor to management practices

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/theagilerevolution-162.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-162 (32 minutes)

Episode 161: State of Agile in Singapore with Stanly Lau May 07, 2019
Craig is at YOW! Singapore and catches up with Stanly Lau, organiser of the Agile Singapore conference and the Agile Singapore meetup:

Bas Vodde was one of the early advocates for Agile in Singapore

The state of Agile in Singapore has progressed from “doing a standup” in 2010 to now many companies thinking about how they develop software better

A lack of knowledge in design principles by new software developers seems to affect how they tackle problems

The art of being able to sit down and pair in a team is an art that is being lost in the Agile community

You can learn a lot about a team by looking at their codebase

Good agile development practices require know-how and habit – does not come by nature

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/theagilerevolution-161.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-161 (26 minutes)

Episode 160: Agile Lessons From My Younger Self with John Sullivan Apr 23, 2019
Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and has a chat with John Sullivan, the CEO at Elabor8, and they talk about his Agile journey in Australia from ThoughtWorks to Sensis to Qantas to MYOB and the challenges and learnings along the way

The Agile Revolution episode 159 “What Colour Agile Would You Like Today with Nigel Dalton”

“Extreme Programming Explained” by Kent Beck

Sensis was a very early corporate in Australia that adopted Agile from beginning to end, moved teams out of the building so they could work uninhibited in an Agile way

The technology teams almost always aren’t the problem with product delivery – it is the product team taking an idea from the top to the bottom of the organisation and getting it in a form that is fit for customers

Not happy Jan! – Sensis had their focus on print and was not willing to disrupt

You need sponsorship and objectives right from the top if you want to make change – otherwise there are reasons why you do what you do and you won’t change

Do the things that are the hardest to do because then that gives you the freedom to do the things you want to do

Need to stop thinking about Agile as an institutional process

You can’t focus on the practices, you have to become Agile and then adopt practices that are the right thing to do

In relation to feedback, you need to value people’s effort and return something of greater value than what they put in

A real Agile digital transformation is about the shift to provide something that people want to use and then we can monetise it, which means you need to build something people need not what you think they want

Need to put teams together for a customer journey as opposed to divisional handoffs – that is an Agile digital transformation

John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk – “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations”

The theory is that the twelve principles were written to be too strict to apply and too heavy to consume at the time – the manifesto was written to be flexible around those principles – now the manifesto gives people too much slack

The Agile Revolution episode 119 “Agile (Raccoon) is Dead with “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas”

John Sullivan’s YOW! CTO Summit talk “A Common Vision is a Matter of Principle” where he mentions that platform manifesto

We need to stop trading off doing the right thing because the shortcuts drag down the productivity and it becomes an anchor – do the right thing right now, pay the cost, take the ownership and don’t give in on the principles

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/theagilerevolution-160.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-160 (51 minutes)

Episode 159: What Colour Agile Would You Like Today with Nigel Dalton Mar 16, 2019
Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and is sitting with Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group and the Australian “Godfather of Agile” and they reminisce about:

Anita Sengupta’s YOW! Hong Kong keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration“

Akin’s Rules of Spacecraft Design – “don’t mess it up, there are people involved”

Nigel Dalton’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Agile is the Last Thing You Need“

The two early experiments of Agile in Australia – Lonely Planet and Suncorp

The success of the REA technology teams today was the move into multidisciplinary teams where the influence comes from product – it was a difficult decision and chaos at the time

John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations“

ANZ is disrupting the power base of senior management – Shayne Elliott video about their way of working and Bluenotes podcasts, inspired by ING

The wish for REA is for new hires turn up and say they came to work here “because I heard the managers are awesome”

Google Project Aristotle brought honour back to the role of manager

“The Mythical Man Month” – Frederick P. Brooks

Love Spotify for their humility, honesty and contribution to the industry, their high impact video series, “if you had a music streaming startup that was well funded based in New York and Stockholm with 700 people, then the Spotify model is perfect… If you don’t, you need to think about that for yourself.”

Data debt is going to be a huge issue in the future

Mark Hibberd’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Lake, Swamp or Puddle: Data Quality at Scale“

REA solved scaled prioritisation across lines of business works via a product council that meets monthly, they prioritise the work and re-allocate teams

Guilds are an internal meetup, taking a senior level interest by turning up and sponsoring a small budget ($2,000) for pizza or to bring in speakers is essential for success

Building architecture is a hot topic – open plan versus the Fog Creek “office for every engineer” – have found that you need overhear the conversations as everything moves so rapidly, had to sacrifice flexible work spaces as the number of employees grew

It’s interesting to see how some of the early Agile success stories have declined – have a change in leadership and the organisation changes

“Change the habits and change the work process and you get culture change for free” – Deming

The REA culture is likely to survive a change in leadership because the ownership of the way of working has been spread to all areas of the business and people get tech

Transformation doesn’t happen overnight – REA is 5 years in and probably 20% of the way

“The Machine That Changed The World” blew the lid on the Toyota culture – Jim Womack reflected recently that he really wanted work and workplaces to be better

Reflected on why it was so hard to get meetups happening in the new REA Melbourne building and realised that no other professions have meetups, it’s a differentiator of working in tech, a healthy community of free sharing

“Extreme Programming Explained” – many of the early adopters were inspired by this book

Blend of Lean systems thinking and Agile is likely to come back around again – we need to cross the streams

The Agilista frameworks methodologies like Kanban, Scrum, SAFe will become LeSS important #dadjokes

Starting to get comfortable about having conversations about productivity – immense gain to be had across the whole flow

John Shook – “Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping” – need the technical brains to read that book

Diversity and Inclusion is the solution to the shortfall of people working in tech

Sir John Bagot Glubb – “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival” – it explains everything!

It’s time for Australia to double down on science

How do we make our biggest companies be more innovative?

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TheAgileRevolution-159 (49 minutes)

Episode 158: Jugaad Agility with Naresh Jain Feb 11, 2019
Craig is at YOW! Lambda Jam in Sydney and speaks with Naresh Jain, co-founder of the Agile Software Community of India (organising body of Agile India), conference organiser of many other software conferences in India and creator of ConfEngine and they chat about:

The original Test Infected article

Cruise Control started as an idea to write a cron job to check out code, compile and run tests

Without good processes and tools the individuals and interactions become much harder

Agile India conference – running since 2005, one of the earliest Agile conferences

Agile is a given way to do things, but we are still not seeing the benefits – need to build capability in user first / product thinking, need autonomy to deliver end-to-end customer value (startups within a startup), need to build a learning culture and expert people / craftsmanship and need to focus on continuous delivery

Modern Agile (and Naresh’s input into the original article)

Indian Agile community – a lot of interesting work happening in the FinTech space and startup in spaces such as health and messaging, a move towards innovation centres from cost centres

YOW! West talk “Setting up Continuous Delivery Pipeline for a Large-Scale Mobile App“

Code is a liability, need to focus on the problem we are trying to solve rather than perfect code or an over-complicated safety net, allows you to throw away code more easily, frequently and willingly

Testing through dogfooding – want to be able to fix things faster rather than safeguard and guess what might break

As thought leaders it is our responsibility to challenge our own beliefs, otherwise we stagnate

Agility is how you think about the situation around you and be opportunistic about it

What is the least I can do to make some progress today – Indian word Jugaad (get away with it)

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/theagilerevolution-158.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-158 (53 minutes)

Episode 157: Transforming the UK Government Digital Service with James Stewart Feb 02, 2019
Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and has a conversation with James Stewart, formerly Deputy CTO for the UK Government and co-founder of the Government Digital Service. In varying locations they talk about:

YOW! West keynote “Lessons Learned as a Government CTO“

UK government had some large IT failures in the last like the NHS National Program for IT (12 billion pound failure), but now lots of successes like Spine 2

Agile techniques have been successful in the UK government not just because other approaches have failed so badly but the cost of an IT project is only a fraction of the overall cost of a system

The Government Design Principles – start with user needs – successful projects start with clearly articulated principles, did not realise how much they would resonate

Worked around a number of government process early on, support from the Minister and investing time to find allies was essential

Design Principle posters – essential to invest in presentation, help people feel involved

Were never dogmatic about flavours of Agile, this presented challenges with vendors – can you make changes quickly, can you ship software faster, have you thought about quality?

The problem is not scaling frameworks, it’s that you tried to start big – need to start with a small team and seed the trust

Tackled the financials with the spending control process and an Agile business case (based around progressive funding) and align spending around Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live stages and approval for later stages comes from what you have learnt from the previous stage

Genuine leadership requires openness – be self reflective, clearly articulate values and principles, the biggest risks you are concerned about and the outcomes you wish to achieve – then build trust with the team to achieve this

The strategy is delivery

Don’t start until somebody can express an outcome – once they do, turn something around quickly

Digital By Default Service Manual – good place to start, how to do delivery

UK Government Technology Code of Practice – underpinning of spending controls

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TheAgileRevolution-157 (43 minutes)

Episode 156: LAST 2018 Brisbane Vox Pop Jan 16, 2019
Craig and Tony are at LAST Brisbane 2018 in their home town of Brisbane and wander the lunch hall speaking with members from the local Agile community:

Craig and Tony’s keynote

Frank Valks, Paul Thornton and Felix Kiefer from AginicDS – the state of Agile in Brisbane versus the UK, James Hayes and Shannon Russell talk “Agile in Education: How agile is empowering teachers and principles in the Northern Territory“, there is no one recipe for Agility (start with a framework and adjust) and Agile BI

Ed Wong, co-founder of LAST Conference – the inspiration behind LAST Conference and the 10th anniversary of the Melbourne Agile and Scrum User Group and the challenge of getting more people to talk about Agility

Shannon Russell from the Department of Education Northern Territory – the state of the Northern Territory Agile community is small and growing, mainly around government initiatives, conference talk with James Hayes, Craig’s talk in Darwin “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes“

Sarah Pollard from Tabcorp – Rytan Gribble’s talk “Levelling up from 1P to Co-op mode!“, Agile HR and Gantt charts!

Mervin Chiang from Procensol and Sharon Loder from Crime and Corruption Commission Queensland – Craig’s In Conversations interview with Mervin, the challenges of educating Agile upwards, their LAST talk “Business Agility – How do we bridge the gap when business wants to “go agile”“

Hayley Pepper and the crew from Sunsuper – trying new ideas and being open to failure, fixing the faux agile and agile in superannuation

Renae Craven from Innodev – the challenges of getting executives to understand Agile and change their behaviour, Renae’s LAST talk “10 ways to end up in the Agile Transformation Doghouse“

Being thrown into the deep end of Product Ownership and Agile, Nhia Chang’s talk “Practice what you preach“

Bernadette Greenock from Integral Technology Solutions and Priya Chander from Suncorp – good to know that people in the community experience similar issues

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TheAgileRevolution-156 (36 minutes)

Episode 155: Continuous Delivery Culture at Pushpay with Ian Randall Jan 09, 2019
Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and sits down with Ian Randall, Engineering Lead at Pushpay and co-organiser of the Codemania conference in New Zealand and they chat about:

The size of the New Zealand banking system and small number of banks makes it very easy to innovate in the payments space

YOW! West talk “From Inception to Production – A Continuous Delivery Story“

The more times you the do the things that are hard and hurt, opens up the opportunities for automation

Blameless Retrospective (John Allspaw, Etsy, 2012) – promise that there will be no retribution or consequence for decisions that anybody made during an incident, they made the best decisions that they knew at the time, they were operating in a system that allowed you to make that system in the moment – therefore means that people are not afraid to make decisions because they know they are not held to blame for making a mistake

Sidney Dekker “Just Culture“

5 Whys – don’t ask why until you reach the root cause analysis, because there are often moire contributing factors and also when you ask why you end up with who (which is blame)

WOMing – ensure it works on my machine before it leaves your laptop

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TheAgileRevolution-155 (19 minutes)

Episode 154: Agile Rocket Science with Dr. Anita Sengupta Jan 07, 2019
Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and sits down with Dr. Anita Sengupta, a rocket scientist and aerospace engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and since this interview was recorded now a Senior Vice President at Hyperloop One). They geek out talking about space exploration as well as the important topic of diversity:

YOW! West keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration” and AATC 2017 keynote “Engineering the Red Planet“

7 Minutes of Terror: The Challenges of Getting to Mars

When you are doing something for the first time, you have to come up with out of the box solutions – first you need to make it work, and then you need to make it last

The biggest issue is to get enough people into the pipeline from under-represented groups, one thing we can do is more public outreach at the school level

You come up with more interesting solutions when you work with diverse teams, and, when you intersect with other universes you learn so much

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/theagilerevolution-154-1.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-154 (20 minutes)

Episode 153: The Great Lean Debate – Live from LAST Brisbane 2018 Jan 01, 2019
Stephanie BySouth is the MC of the Great Lean Debate, a fun session recorded live at LAST Brisbane 2018. Ryan McKergow, Shane Hastie, Renae Craven are the “Legendary Agile Sh*t-talkers” team and Craig Smith, Mel Khim and Karyl Crick are the “Getting Agile Sh*t Done” team.

The topics are:

Scaling frameworks

Estimates vs No-Estimates

You can be a Product Owner and a Scrum Master

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TheAgileRevolution-153.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-153 (37 minutes)

Episode 152: Communities of Practice, Onions, Bus Stops and Shopfronts with Emily Webber Dec 30, 2018
Craig is at YOW! Conference and spends some time with Emily Webber, Agile Coach and author of “Building Successful Communities of Practice” and “The Agile Team Onion” and they chat about:

The UK Government Digital Service and gov.uk (and the United States Digital Service and Australian Digital Transformation Agency)

Government needs to be fast and stable (but dealing with change every four years)

YOW! 2016 talk “Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of your Agile Organisation“

Communities of practice are about building knowledge, giving people support networks they need to give them the confidence to do their jobs well and making that practice better and as good as it can be

Most communities of practice are organic but they tend to be closed and often lack direction

Community of Practice Maturity Model

Having an idea of who the community is for and why it is exists, get people together and regular diary times are essential

Distributed communities work but face to face is always best because it builds trust faster

Agile Team Onion is all about communication and thinking about the Agile team and about how you pragmatically communicate with the rest of the organisation – a modern day RACI

The word agile means a lot of things to a lot of people that frightens them – how do we take a step to making things better without shoving it down their throat

“Messy” by Tim Harford

Woody Zuill’s talk “Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach“

London Shop Fronts

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TheAgileRevolution-152 (33 minutes)

Episode 151: Software Craftsmanship with “Uncle Bob” Martin Dec 27, 2018
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are honoured to sit down with Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob), signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and author of numerous books including “Clean Code“, “The Clean Coder” and “Clean Architecture” and they discuss:

YOW! 2016 keynote “The Scribe’s Oath” as well as “Effective Estimation (or: How not to Lie)“

Software craftsmanship has always been the work of individuals – not sure we have really achieved collaboration in programming

Pair programming – some surgeons like to wash their hands and some surgeons don’t!

Woody Zuill’s talk “Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach“

CODE – Uncle Bob’s “terrible” software development process before he stumbled across Extreme Programming and the wiki

Kent Beck’s “Extreme Programming” article for the C++ Report

The story behind the forming of “The Lightweight Process Summit”

The 1995 OOPSLA Scrum Paper

Jim Coplien “Borland Software Craftsmanship” paper and later “Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development” – the foreshadowing of Agile as we know it today

Test Driven Development is something you learn over very many difficult weeks or months, it is a hard concept to teach, it is becoming more accepted but still slowly

“Clean Code” – had to abandon a tradition in software development when writing this book and laid out rules telling people what to do

“The Clean Coder” – was a backlog from “Clean Code” about how to be a professional programmer

The ranks of programmers are doubling every 5 years, so half the people doing the work have less than five years experience, the industry is in a state of perpetual inexperience

“Programming 101” on cleancoders.com – we need to understand the basics

Craftsmanship movement began as a response to the technical community feeling like they were kicked out of the “agile” house that they built as it became more about people and process – the desire is to bring the two camps back together

Kent Beck said “The goal of agile was to heal the divide between technology and business” – the focus has been mostly on the business side

We need a set of ethics and standards that define a profession for software development – the agile and software craftsmanship communities are the right ones to do this as it needs to be done by practitioner

The Programmer’s Oath – a starting point for the ethics conversation

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TheAgileRevolution-151 (45 minutes)

Episode 150: FailAgility – Live from LAST Brisbane 2018 Dec 21, 2018
Craig and Tony were privileged to be asked to be the keynote speakers at LAST Brisbane 2018. This is the audio from the keynote with introductions from long time listener Dave Pryce. You can follow along with the slides below:

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TheAgileRevolution-150.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-150 (49 minutes)

Episode 149: Continuous Delivery with Dave Farley Dec 16, 2018
Craig, Tony and honorary Revolutionist Pete Sellars are at YOW! Conference and sit down with Dave Farley, co-author of “Continuous Delivery” and they chat about the following

There are anti-patterns with doing XP at scale, continuous delivery was born from the learnings from that

Continuous delivery is just extending continuous integration to more of the software development practice (and continuous integration requires test driven development)

Continuous delivery works because it is the application of the scientific method to software development

If you work in an iterative, imperative, experimental way and you take continuous learning seriously and take cycle time as a serious measurement you will naturally drive out agile, lean, systems theory and DevOps

YOW! 2016 presentation “The Rationale for Continuous Delivery“

Most common two ways to introduce continuous delivery to your organisation – need to get cover from senior management to make change or you do it secretly at the grass roots – the fast feedback cycle is important (build feedback in about 5 minutes and ready and deployable in about an hour)

DevOps is a terrible name – we are talking about collaborative cross functional teams and it is more than just developers and operations

Continuous delivery is focused on shortening the feedback cycle from having an idea to getting the idea into the hands of users and figuring out what our users make of the idea – that’s software development, to do whatever it takes

Continuous delivery is working in a way so that my software is always in a releasable state, continuous deployment is if all my automation says my software is in a working state I can just automatically push it to production

We have data to show that continuous delivery makes high quality software faster, creates more money for the organisations that use it, reduces defect rates significantly and makes people working in that environment happier

It changes the way you design, approach databases and the way you test

Scott Ambler’s “Refactoring Databases” book

Continuous Delivery tools still aren’t mature enough

The deployment pipeline is a seriously strategic resource because it is your only route to Production – need to be able to version and test it like any other Production code

It’s as much about the culture of the team than it is about the technology, it frees teams up to do experimentation

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TheAgileRevolution-149 (40 minutes)

Episode 148: The Science of Human Personality with Dr. Brian Little Dec 12, 2018
Craig is at YOW! Conference in Sydney and talks science and psychology with Dr. Brian Little, author of “Me, Myself and Us” and professor at Cambridge University and Carleton University and they analyse:

Keynote talk at YOW! 2016 “Personalities at Work“

There are 5 dimensions of personality – OCEAN – openness, conscientiousness. extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism

Biogenic features of personality – neurophysiology, sociogenic and idiogenic

We can often act out of character, we are not bound by our biochemistry

What are the core projects in your life that drive your behaviour

Skeptical of personality tests at work such as Myers-Briggs because the results are not fixed, they are good for starting a conversation but deadly if they conclude a conversation

Don’t just ask “How are you doing?” but ask “Really, how are you doing?” to show that you are taking an interest and care in your people and their projects and aspirations

We need to look at the research in this space to find exercises that we can use in the workspace to better help and understand our people

“Me, Myself and Us” is written for the person who is waiting in Starbucks for that friend that is late again

TED talk “Who Are You, Really? The Puzzle of Personality” (it has 6 milliion views – about 5.99 million more than this podcast!)

Research is currently looking at the neuro-slant of personality traits

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/theagilerevolution-148.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-148 (24 minutes)

Episode 147: YOW! Speaker Vox Pop with Woody Zuill, Paul Rayner, Laura Bell, John Lamping and Andrea Burbank Nov 26, 2018
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and wander around the hallways talking to different speakers and some attendees and volunteers:

Woody Zuill and Paul Rayner – Beer Driven Development (the other BDD), Woody’s talk “Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach” talk and Paul’s “EventStorming – Collaborative Learning for Complex Domains” talk, the reaction from the Australian audience and how Woody gets the audience to tell him why mob programming might be a good idea to change people’s thinking

Tony enjoyed “Uncle” Bob Martins “The Scribe’s Oath” keynote and “Effective Estimation (or: How not to Lie)” talk as well as Woody’s talk

Laura Bell – her “Simplicity, Complexity and Security” talk, and Agile Application Security at SafeStack

John Lamping – his “The One Weird Trick for Analyzing Big Data … Eyeball it Early and Often!” talk, we need to look at our data to see if it is broken or learn something new

Andrea Burbank – her “Data Science as Software at Pinterest” talk, implementing AB testing is really easy, we can use data to look at things in a different way such as spam filtering

Rob, Declan, Daya, Braiden and Homad all enjoyed Dr. Brian Little’s “Personalities at Work” keynote, Andrea Burbank’s fast paced talk and the benefits of volunteering at a big tech conference

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TheAgileRevolution-147 (20 minutes)

Episode 146: Agile, Architecture and Technology with Rebecca Parsons Nov 24, 2018
Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and catch up with Rebecca Parsons, the Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks and the co-author of “Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change” and chat about the following:

Rebecca’s keynote talk at YOW! “The Past and Future of Evolutionary Architecture“

Evolutionary Architecture is the next stage on applying Agile practices to software development at the systems level and be able to respond to changes in the environment that affect the architecture

Need to determine for your system what constitutes good, fitness functions are the documentation and tests to ensure your system meets those characteristics

Need to move the needle on architecture, need to develop tools and techniques to decompose the role

Agile Alliance is looking at what it means to truly be an international organisation (there are now affiliates in Brazil and New Zealand), expanding conferences from the large North American conference to OnAgile and Deliver:Agile and member initiatives to support local events such as Agile Open Space, Agile Conference Sponsorship, Community Group Support Initiative and Speaker Reimbursement

YOW! CTO Summit talk “The CTO is Dead: Long Live the CTO“

CTO role is more now to set technical direction by setting up communication channels to mine insights that can be rolled out and presented to the market

ThoughtWorks Tech Radar started as a hot technology list of what ThoughtWorkers would love to work on, became a visual radar that is now released twice a year, starts with 250-300 items and they try to get it down to 100 items, something will fade after being in the adopt ring more than twice, the radar is also available as an open source tool or radar as a service

Women leave technology at double the rate as men leave technology, mostly because they are not treated well in the environment

Anita Borg Institute Top Company for Women Technologists award

What does it mean to be Agile in new technologies like machine learning and data science?

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TheAgileRevolution-146 (34 minutes)

Episode 145: Working Effectively with (Legacy) Code with Michael Feathers Oct 27, 2018
Craig is in Atlanta at Agile 2016 and catches up with Michael Feathers, author of “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” and they talk about the following:

Working Effectively with Legacy Code originally started as a book about Test First Programming but morphed into a book about the techniques for refactoring code in legacy systems

The Pinned Progress Curve – for many people there is no incentive to change so the mean gets larger between the status quo and good practices

Agile Alliance Deliver:Agile conference

Organisations that have technical founders have a very different character to their work internally, need to make knowledge of the quality of software more pervasive – the business need to understand more about the technical side, and the developers need to understand more about the business

Code that has excessive error handling typically has other design problems – benefit in thinking about whether certain things should be treated as errors or not

Entropy happens in all systems, including code, so technical debt is not a surprise, need to make the case for hygiene, putting a dollar amount on technical debt does not add much value

Use low impact probing to determine whether code is dead

Potsel’s Law – an implementation should be conservative in its sending behaviour, and liberal in its receiving behaviour

State of quality is improving and there is more recognition to build quality in

Property based testing is becoming more prevalent as we move from object oriented to functional languages

Holacracy was designed by a software person, Sociocracy talks about applying democratic principles to governance, these are all interesting experiments

It can be hard to recognise if something is intrinsically difficult or not something you are familiar with

We weren’t really battling waterfall, it was the lack of any process at all…

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TheAgileRevolution-145 (33 minutes)

Episode 144: Mob Programming & #noestimates with Woody Zuill Sep 22, 2018
Craig is at Agile 2016 in Atlanta and catches up with his old friend Woody Zuill to talk about Mob Programming and #noestimates

Craig’s InfoQ interview with Woody Zuill

We need to work well together to get our work done

Mob Programming originated at Hunter Industries, identified we can get a lot done if we don’t have to wait for answers to questions from other people and if we are all in the same context all the time

Mob Programming – all the people on the team working at the same time, working in the same space on the same thing and using a single computer and working interactively the entire day

Work well together and turn up the good, need to pay attention on how to work well together

“Extreme Programming Explained” by Kent Beck – “a great book”

The person with the idea expresses it out loud, somebody else enters it via the keyboard

Original Mob Programming at Hunter Industries video and the Updated Mob Programming at Hunter Industries video showing 6 teams working in 6 minutes

When you are getting results quicker with good quality, nobody can really question your way of working

How can people be productive when we separate the people who should be working together?

Mob Programming website

“Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach” book with Kevin Meadows

#noestimates – we do estimates with little validation that they are useful to us, we should question the practices we do automatically, by default or not questioning, what is the purpose for the estimates and how well are they serving us

Need to look for work that is broken down enough to something of value that we can deliver to a customer

We need to experiment more rather than trudging through mud that is getting deeper, improve small things to get a big gain

Vasco Duarte article “Story Points Considered Harmful – Or why the future of estimation is really in our past…“

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TheAgileRevolution-144 (41 minutes)

Episode 143: One Last Jam with The “Dude” David Hussman Sep 16, 2018
The Agile community recently lost its friend and one of its most inspirational members in David Hussman. Craig and Tony were privileged to speak to him in one of his last interviews at YOW! Conference in Brisbane.

David Hussman’s YOW! 2017 talk “Learning in Product: How Wrong are You Ready to Be?”

“Extreme Programming Explained” is Agile’s White Album, just don’t read it backwards!

We make stuff up in software too much, rather than learning from the past and patterns

You can’t look at code and tell it is going to be a good experience and we don’t know our ideas are going to be great until we interact with them

The tenth principle – simplicity is essential

A good developer needs confidence and war wounds, same for Product Managers – they have shipped something crappy and don’t want to do that again

Cardboard User Story Mapping app

The Shallot (The Onion’s little brother)

Craig’s InfoQ interview with David Hussman

Dude’s Law – Value = Why / How, when how equals zero you get infinite value

Nonban – the least amount of process with the most real and measurable value

First follow the product, then follow the process

Product Discovery – you need a discovery cadence and a delivery cadence, we need product engineers as much as software engineers

Alan Cooper “You listen to what people say, but you don’t necessarily do it”

There is not enough written about how products are delivered well across multiple teams

We need more clever visualisations in our tools

We don’t need more UX designers, we need more people with UX skills

Interactions cut across stories – interaction driven design

Chaos engineering – moving beyond resilience to intuition, feels like the early days of Agile, no judgement just people trying cool things

ProductAgility.org website

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TheAgileRevolution-143 (48 minutes)

Episode 142: Agile and SSLM at cPrime with Zubin Irani Sep 01, 2018
Craig sits down with Zubin Irani, the CEO of cPrime, at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta and chats about:

CPrime is the largest Atlassian implementer and platinum partner

Need to make sure that ALM products work with your process and support and enable it

One of the big gaps in the Coaching world is coaches are staying away from technology – we have to leverage technology

SSLM (Software Service Lifeycle Management) – Agile, DevOps and ALM initiatives are fragmented, they need to interact and have dependencies on each other

5 big trends – Agile beyond development, DevOps is taking centre stage, every company is a software company, digital transformation and the talent crunch

Agile Hardware – how do you build hardware in a more iterative way, how do we think about hardware and software being built together, how do we think about different about hardware design to support the software process (white paper)

The emergence of mobile is driving Agile adoption

Tools and process working together will solve problems

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TheAgileRevolution-142 (20 minutes)

Episode 141: Agile Coaching with a Latin Touch with Martin Alaimo Jun 23, 2018
Craig is sitting by the pool at the Agile 2016 conference and chats to Martin Alaimo who is an Agile Coach from Kleer in Buenos Aires and they discuss:

South America has a number of language, cultural, economic and business differences between Brazil and the Spanish speaking countries, Agile is starting to go mainstream across many of the countries, collaboration is difficult in countries that have a generation of social and dictatorial government

Craig’s talk “Coaching Nightmares: Lessons We Can Learn From Gordon Ramsay“

Coaching Canvas template – based off the Business Model Canvas to aid coaching conversations using sticky notes to help refocus and keep conversations on track

Martin’s workshop with Olaf Lewitz “Powerful Questions Workshop for Agile Coaches” (and how Craig is garbage at using them on the podcast)

His third book “Agile Team Facilitator” which is about the skill of facilitation for Scrum Masters and other leadership roles

Martin’s other two books “Agile Projects with Scrum” (Spanish only) and “#HighPerformance Teams” which is about a formula R = R (quality of result is proportional with the quality of relationships)

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/theagilerevolution-141.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-141 (16 minutes)

Episode 140: Spinning the AgilityHealth Radar with Sally Elatta Dec 27, 2017
Craig sits down with Sally Elatta, Founder and President of Agile Transformation and AgilityHealth at the Agile 2016 Conference in Atlanta and they talk about:

First things first, the AgilityHealth discs are not a frisbee!

The AgilityHealth vision is to help Agile teams have a consistent way to measure their health and performance and see the results in a visual way and secondly for leadership to understand the cause and effect – the radar opens up a conversation

AgilityHealth radars

The team radar has five dimensions – leadership, performance, clarify, foundation and culture – a healthy team should have these

It is not a survey tool, it is a facilitated retrospective to promote healthy conversation and create an action plan

We should be doing tactical retrospectives every sprint, but the missing component is strategic retrospectives once every quarter

Business agility relies on having healthy teams

Many other radars including Lean Product Health, Technical Health, Scaled Agile Release Train Health and Portfolio Health and Business Agility as well as individual radars for Agile Coach Health, Scrum Master Health and Product Owner Health

Larry Maccherone and the SDPI

“If you ever use data to punish a team, you will never see the truth again”

Craig’s Quality video on the AgilityHealth growth portal

AgilityHealth certifications

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/theagilerevolution-140.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-140 (19 minutes)

Episode 139: Talking Agile Craft with Steve Elliott Dec 16, 2017
Craig chats with Steve Elliott, the founder and CEO of Agile Craft and they discuss:

Dependencies are the number one thing that kills agility

Scaling agility across a large organisation is a 5 – 10 year journey

Scrum is often disconnected from the portfolio planning layer, the scaling methods are making the program level agile and predictable

If you want business agility you have to hinge the technology into the business

Sometimes it takes a few attempts for agile transformations, like tipping over a Coke machine (and unlike tipping a cow), you need to lead with results and then work on cultural change to be successful

If the leader of an Agile transformation left the organisation, would they go back to the old way or is Agile part of their DNA – if they would go back they have not been transformed

The scaling Agile frameworks are relatively new and evolving with major changes, without these though there is a lot of chaos and you need them to do Agile at Scale in a large company

The companies that win are the ones where the technology and the business are in sync, you need some process to do that

If we do more experimentation with the scaling methods and some of the lesser frameworks get traction, the community will be better for it

SAFe is the leader in the scaling space, but LeSS is very popular in Europe

Startups are all about business agility, because long feedback cycles are deadly, we need to be able to make decisions and react quickly

Amazon is a good technology company that through business agility threatens everyone

The technology curve is only going to accelerate; physical, digital and biological is going to come together and the application is going to disrupt many businesses very quickly

We still need more data to improve the software process using machine learning to do simulations to get better quality, predictability and value

Agile Craft brings together the product strategy, the team ALM tooling and the business strategy together from the top down, and is multi-modal (it works with all levels of Agile maturity) to nudge teams across to Agile practices faste. The tool has automated coaching built in (no, they have not built a robot coach, yet…!)

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/theagilerevolution-139.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-139 (45 minutes)

Christopher Avery — Episode 138: A Responsibility Deep Dive with Christopher Avery Oct 13, 2017
In this episode of the Agile Revolution, Renee Troughton and Peter Lightbody join Christopher Avery again as entertains and educates Australia on The Responsibility Process and The Leadership Gift.

Whilst we looked at The Responsibility Process in Episode 114 of The Agile Revolution, this episode does a deeper dive and looks at:

Christopher’s talk at Scrum Australia on how Agile Leader’s improve results with The Responsibility Process. You can check out the LinkedIn article Christopher refers to here

Self leadership and self management

WL Gore and Associates core values and how it relates to The Responsibility Process.

The four minute overview of The Responsibility Process including denial, lay blame, justify, shame, obligation and responsibility.

How The Responsibility Process is a self-use tool

How to work with others (individuals or groups) using The Responsibility Process

The subtlety in the word of “responsibility” over others like “accountability”

Overcoming catastrophic events using the responsibility process

How The Responsibility Process aligns with other similar fields of thought such as Byron Katie’s “The Work” and Samuel Arthur’s vocal coaching

How responsibility is different from “being good”

Taking responsibility is about being at choice

What organisations can do to make an active practice of responsibility through “wins” using Intention and positive psychology

Walking through an example of the responsibility process in action

The difference between Quit and choosing not to act

Don’t try these with the Responsibility Process…

The Leadership Gift Program

The Responsibility Process Book

You can ask Christopher Avery for more information through his main website at ChristopherAvery.com.

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TheAgileRevolution-138 (50 minutes)

Episode 137: The State of JIRA with Jake Brereton Oct 03, 2017
Craig sits down with Jake Brereton from Atlassian who is the Senior Product Marketing Manager of JIRA while roaming the product halls at Agile 2016 in Atlanta.

JIRA is no longer just JIRA, now people outside of software are using it – now JIRA Software (that includes JIRA Agile), JIRA Core (lightweight version of JIRA) and JIRA Service Desk

Over 70% of users were using JIRA Agile

JIRA has over 1,000 addons in the Atlassian Marketplace, some exciting work being done around analytics and data

Many organisations are starting to question whether they need to adhere to all of the practices and overheads – find the way that is most efficient and productive that works for you

The double-edged sword of how configurable and customisable JIRA is – improved onoboarding experience, test instance with demo data and an active online presence

Acquisition of Status Page

Launched JIRA Software Mobile and BitBucket integration

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TheAgileRevolution-137 (23 minutes)

Episode 136: Water-Scrum.org-Falling with Dave West Sep 08, 2017
Craig catches up with Dave West, product owner and CEO at Scrum.org, at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta. They talk all things Agile and Scrum including:

Water-Scrum-Fall came about because Scrum is often delivered in the context of a organisational waterfall lifecycle

Scrum implies a magical Product Owner that is empowered and understands the market to effectively create a backlog and manage it and the Scrum Guide provides very litte guidance around this

Nexus is a way of getting multiple teams working from the same backlog and provides an exoskeleton to Scrum

“Scrum 21 Years and The Future” talk at Agile 2016

People don’t get Scrum, it is always surprising how few people have read the Scrum Guide

The Scrum Guide is in audiobook form (but not yet in Klingon)

The Sprint Review is not a phase gate, it is the opportunity to inspect and adapt at the boundary of the sprint, try running it with continuous delivery and production results

The way mono goes through a high school is the way in which Scrum should go through an organisation (according to Dave!)

Some of the initial ideas and avenues for Scrum include The New New Product Game, Agile Manifesto, Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance

Scrum.org was created to push the focus of Scrum back to the delivery of software (rather than the world of work and LEGO) and to decouple the assessment from the classes

Scrum.org assessments include PSM I (I understand Scrum), PSM II (I practice Scrum) and PSM III (I am a coach / mentor around Scrum) to validate your learning as you grow into the role of a Scrum Master

Over a million people a day are doing a Daily Scrum!

State of Scrum – after 21 years the world is full of Scrum and software is being developed better, but the profession has not improved in the way we had wanted it to (we are not driving to value fast enough and we are not engaging the business correctly)

Software is the business now, Scrum cares about product delivery

Looking into Evidence Based Measurement in Scrum, how to help people do done (Scrum Delivery Kit)

Organisational change is almost impossible – it is hard to change the existing organisation to do Scrum

“Software in 30 Days” book and section on Scrum Studio (how do you build a persistent studio that delivers innovation on a business level)

Pragmatic Marketing

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TheAgileRevolution-136 (37 minutes)

Episode 135: DevOps & Electric Cloud with Anders Wallgren Aug 31, 2017
Craig speaks to Anders Wallgren from Electric Cloud about Continuous Delivery and DevOps at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta. The topic of conversation included:

“Release It!” by Michael Nygard

We can’t declare victory on Agile, but it is the winning methodology

We are now plumbing the last mile of deployment and we also need to move it left

Joshua Kerievsky Agile 2016 keynote on “Modern Agile“

Software process is like human DNA, we are different but essentially the same

Gene Gotimer Agile 2016 talk “Experiences Bringing Continuous Delivery to a DoD Project“

You will fail if you don’t pay attention to the cultural aspects of Agile and DevOps

State of DevOps Report

Critical to automate everything to eliminate manual process errors and loss of valuable data

DevOps is starting to push into complex and regulated environments like finance, health and aerospace with an emphasis on issues like performance and audibility

Automation is a great audit trail because it forces you to document what you do and it shows the process

James DeLuccia “DevOps Audit Defense Toolkit” – DevOps and auditing are not enemies (they are actually friends)

#c9d9 Continuous Discussions community video podcast

Release Management wiki

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TheAgileRevolution-135 (27 minutes)

Episode 134: Unicorns, Distributed Teams and Agile User Groups with Mark Kilby Jul 26, 2017
Craig is at Agile 2016 in Atlanta and catches up with Mark Kilby, an Agile Coach at Sonatype and co-founder of Agile Orlando and Agile Florida. Along the way they discuss:

“Extreme Programming Explained” by Kent Beck (the white book)

Memories of Jean Tabaka and her book “Collaboration Explained”

We should be collaborating with leaders rather than working for them

InfoQ interview “Mark Kilby, Stephanie Davis and Rick Regueira on Effective User Groups & Remote Agile“

“Can you be remotely Agile” Agile 2015 experience report

“Audacious Salon – Distributed Agile” session output from Agile 2016 conference

Virtual Team Talk group (started in Berlin, ironically at a conference)

“Communicating and Collaborating: How Distributed Agile Teams Can Thrive” Agile 2016 workshop with David Horowitz

Distribution tips: don’t force distributed teams, it needs to be a choice; it’s a culture shift so it is not for all organisations, take small steps; set a template for the team and expectations

Value connection over face to face communication

Spotify Engineering Culture videos and paper

You can survive without video on distributed teams, you need to learn the signs

Agile Open Florida

Experience Report on Agile Florida “User group dying? Time to build a state-wide learning network!” with Stephanie Davis and Alex Kanaan

Agile Alliance Community Group Support initiative, user group leaders are welcome to join the Slack group

OnAgile 2016 conference

Agile Alliance Initiatives are there to support the community

See remotelyagile.info for distributed agile resources

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TheAgileRevolution-134 (30 minutes)

Episode 133: Rules Are For Pussies! Jul 07, 2017
Craig and Renee are both in Sydney and catch up around the kitchen table to discuss a bunch of things happening in the Agile universe:

Renee is watching “The Leftovers” while Craig has been binge watching “Mad Men” and they talk about TV show podcasts such as “The West Wing Weekly“

ANZ (one of Australia’s big four banks) is diving into Agile (everywhere but bank branches)

Silicon Valley Agile (Scrum) reference (NSFW!)

UK is wasting 37 million pounds per year on failed Agile projects (but the devil is in the detail not the headline)

IBM calling remote workers back to the office – is it about trust, staff reductions or something else?

The Thomas Allen Curve

17 Essential Hacks Every Scrum Master Should Know

"SAFe doesn't require your management to change in any meaningful way" says @jboogie at #CraftConf

— Daniel Terhorst-North is mostly @tastapod@mas.to (@tastapod) April 27, 2017

Boomerang retrospectives (when your action goes up and comes back and whacks you in the head)

Dave Snowden blog post on “SAFe: the infantilism of management” – “is PRINCE2 camouflaged in Agile language”

Renee is reading “The Originals” by Adam Grant and her conclusion is that “we continue to be a community of agilists who attack each other”

Agile Alliance and its belief in the “big tent” view of Agile

As agilists we need to adopt the improve approach of “yes and” more often

The Oath of Non-Allegiance

“Culture May Eat Agile For Breakfast” – can an organisation double in size and become Agile at the same time?

Renee’s “Scaling Agile Tricks Series: Mitosis”

Craig is reading “lego4scrum 3.0” and Renee is reading “Immunity To Change“

Renee is now a Certified Holacracy Practitioner and she sat the Holacracy Practitioner Training course in Philadelphia

Brian Robertson “Holacracy” Talks At Google video and the “Holacracy” book

Frederic Laloux “Reinventing Organizations“

Craig is now a Certified AgilityHealth Facilitator and sat the AgilityHealth Facilitation course in Atlanta

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TheAgileRevolution-133 (76 minutes)

Episode 132: Usability Made Easy with Steve Krug Jun 27, 2017
Tony, Craig and Renee are at Agile Australia and catch up with Steve Krug and talk usability and along the way try to figure out whether Tony is lean, agile or just old…

“Don’t Make Me Think” book, now in 3rd edition

Agile Australia keynote “You’re not doing usability testing? Are you…nuts?“

need to start doing usability early, to find issues early and have time to fix it

Laura Klein’s book “UX For Lean Startups” is a good book on lean

issues with lean from a usability perspective is failure and disruption

usability is a user advocate role

cubicle test – draw a paper prototype and ask the person in the next cubicle to fill it out and observe the issues

CX is basically UX owned by marketing!

UX is design where usability is more about testing

start by taking to customers then do regularly scheduled usability testing

you only need about 3 people to get a good idea of usability

Janice Redish “Letting Go Of The Words“

Jakob Nielsen articles on ROI

“Rocket Surgery Made Easy” companion book, scripts and other resources are on the website for the book

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TheAgileRevolution-132 (27 minutes)

Episode 131: Program Management Envato Style with Adrian Fittolani Jun 20, 2017
Renee, Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia and sit down with Adrian Fittolani from Envato and discuss program management and monte carlo simulations. Renee also makes an estimate that is super accurate!

Envato – a marketplace for creative assets

Lisa Frazier talk at Agile Australia “Leadership in the Digital World“

utilise bottom up program management at Envato, they have 4 main themes as a company and use self organising themes to meet those themes

had to evolve from co-located teams as could not find local resources, they now have any person working in any team wherever they are and make that work, they try to keep teams in close timezones and use asynchronous communication tools, have a policy to work anywhere and additionally a policy to travel and work from anywhere in the world for 3 months

the teams responsibility is to radiate program status, currently using a short document with a timeline view

launch wall for important items kicking off in the next 2 weeks – helps eliminate surprises

project is where more than one team is involved, form a circle around the project (like holacracy)

Renee and Craig’s talk at Agile Australia “Coaching Nightmares: Insights We Can Learn from Gordon Ramsay“

Adrian’s talk at Agile Australia “Better Project Forecasts without Estimates – The Monte Carlo“

monte carlo simulation- replace subjective estimation techniques that most projects use and rather use a lean approach of takt time to model a project teams delivery

takt time – the drumbeat, the time it takes for a process to deliver to another process (e.g. how often a car comes off the production line or how often a story is delivered)

value of monte carlo is that it is non-subjective as well as allowing you to decide on the spread of risk you are prepared to take

Adrian’s article “Agile Project Forecasting – The Monte Carlo Method” and the associated link to the Takt Time Project Simulation spreadsheet

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TheAgileRevolution-131 (28 minutes)

Episode 130: Agile Australia 2016 Vox Pop #2 May 30, 2017
Craig and Tony are roaming the conference floor again at Agile Australia in Melbourne talking to more interesting people in the Australian Agile community:

Sarah Pollard (Super Retail Group) on the talk by Margarette Purvis on “Creating a kaizen culture proves transformative for Food Bank For New York City” and Richard Weissel talk on “The Heart of Agile is in your Local Primary School” and in our organisations understanding what we need to change

Joanne Robertson (Tatts Group) on her first Agile conference, Luke Hohmann’s “Awesome Superproblems” keynote and Innovation Games book

Cathy Tang (Westpac) and the journey from event management to Agile and the Jennfier Frahm talk on “Enterprise agility through OCM and Agile”

Keynotes from Steve Krug and Luke Hohmann

Stewart Gleadow (Bilue) and the balance of design thinking, feasibility and business value in mobile development, Kate Darling robotics keynote and how mobile development has grown up in an Agile environment and his talk on “Apps and APIs: best friends forever“

Craig Brown (Aconex) and Katrina Kolt (AGL) on LAST Conference and learning from Agile leaders

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/theagilerevolution-130.mp3

The Agile Revolution-130 (15 minutes)

Episode 129 – Agile Australia 2016 Vox Pop #1 May 30, 2017
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and do a lap of the convention centre floor:

Keynotes from Peter Halacsy from Prezi, Jeff Smith from IBM and Kate Darling on robots and human interaction

Daniel Fajerman and Anubhav Berry from Australia Post and how they have dealt with business disruption, Cameron Gough talk “Scaling as the Tide Turns”

Daniel Ginn (Tatts Group), Daniel Pike and Brett Barber (LGIAsuper) on the digital transformation in their respective industries

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The Agile Revolution-129 (13 minutes)

Episode 128 – Elabor8-ing the Agile BA with Ryan McKergow May 04, 2017
Craig chats with Ryan McKergow, a Business Analyst and Agile Consultant at Elabor8, at the YOW! West conference in Perth about being an Agile BA:

Business Analysts work with business people to understand the problem they want to solve and then work with developers to take those expectations and help them build the system

Writing stories and requirements is the boring part of the job – the exciting part is getting different people problem solving together

Paul Rayner’s YOW! West “EventStorming” keynote and Craig’s brainwave around Value Stream Mapping

Ryan’s talk “Don’t Be A Zombie Reading Your Stories…” at YOW! West

Story Kickoff – having a conversation at the start of a story (one of the three C’s), get the whole team in front of a whiteboard and drawing it out

Reduce the amount of time between analysis and development as much as possible, try not to have a lead time of more than one sprint ahead where possible

The further ahead you complete analysis, the more likelihood you will introduce waste and rework

Showcases and review sessions are a good engagement piece to replace traditional signoffs and to build trust

Document conversations as acceptance criteria within stories, but the tool or document does not replace conversations

Best way to learn new approaches is to give it a go

Eventstorming, customer journey mapping and design thinking are good tools

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TheAgileRevolution-128 (25 minutes)

Episode 127 – Storming DD’s with Paul Rayner Apr 27, 2017
Craig chats with Paul Rayner, a BDD and DDD expert who helps people bridge the gap of collaborative design between developers and business representatives, at YOW! West in Perth, and two old friends talk about the following:

* Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tool workshop (2011 in Salt Lake City)
* “Domain Driven Design” (Eric Evans) and “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” (Michael Feathers)
* The heart of DDD is about developing a rich model to allow you to deal with complex business domains
* Domain Driven Design Europe conference
* Design done well should pay off immediately, as well as in the medium to long term as well
* There are lot of overlaps between DDD and BDD, particularly the use of an ubiquitous language, BDD is a test first way to drive out your domain model
* YOW! West Keynote “EventStorming”
* Given When Then has a close relationship to modelling your domain events – a good model is one you can make assertions against
* “User Story Mapping” (Jeff Patton) is an example of how the community has started to build useful collaborative tools
* Example Mapping (Matt Wynne) visualises the perspectives of the Three Amigos and puts the focus on our understandings and our ignorances and provides a technique for the conversation
* Deliberate Discovery (Dan North and Liz Keogh) – where is our ignorance
* “Introducing EventStorming” (Alberto Brandolini) is a way of mapping out the domain or the business process using coloured sticky notes – what are the important events to support the behaviour required in our system
* You get a lot better result when you start at the end and work backwards to find insights
* Can use EventStorming to support lean processes such as value stream mapping (Craig’s lightbulb moment)
* “Coaching Agile Teams” (Lyssa Adkins) and how to make yourself a better coach
* Resistance as a Resource (Dale Emery) – helps to have a champion that you can support
* DDD continues to grow and evolve – the popularity of EventSourcing and CQRS have helped this

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TheAgile Revolution-127 (48 minutes)

Episode 126 – Agile Snotfest Apr 19, 2017
Renee has been busy being sick (and Tony and Craig are sick of being busy) and thus it has been a long time between cough syrup for our Revolutionists…

The Scrum Guide was updated in July 2016 to add some value(s)

Renee has a copy of the Scrum Body of Knowledge (for $#!^$ and giggles)

The need for an Agile Manifesto 2.0, will it go away?

Ghostbusters, Splash and Top Gun

Modern Agile – “Agile is old, we need to make it modern” or Craig’s article “Agile 2016 Keynote: Modern Agile” on InfoQ as well as the original article “Modern Agile“

Tony and Craig already spoke about Modern Agile in “Episode 116: The Heart of Modern Agile“

Mike Cohn blog on “The Dangers of a Definition of Ready“, is it essential to teams and the crossover with the definition of done?

The importance of the pipeline in the enterprise

Renee’s protip: Change hypothesis to assumption

XP is as relevant now as as before

Agile Alliance technical debt initiative

Craig has been reading Disciplined Agile Delivery

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TheAgileRevolution=126 (64 minutes)

dannorth — Episode 125: 10 Minutes with Dan North Jan 27, 2017
After many failed attempts to get him on the podcast, Craig finally catches up with Dan North at YOW! Conference on his way out the door to the airport and in a quick chat they cover:

BDD – developing an application by looking at its behaviour from the perspective of its stakeholders (people who’s live you touch)

Given When Then – “given” is setting up the world in a well known way, “when” is me interacting with the application as a stakeholder and “then” is what I expect to happen

BDD is not the same as writing automated tests, they are orthogonal – “Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing“

Software, Faster – collection of patterns for people who have been around Agile and are asking “now what” – “Software, Faster” book in progress

YOW! 2015 talk “Delivery Mapping: Turning the Lights On“

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TheAgileRevolution-125 (12 minutes)

16069825102_aa54010a22_z — Episode 124: Talking Testing with Anne-Marie Charrett Jan 18, 2017
Craig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Anne-Marie Charrett who is well known in the testing community as a trainer, coach and consultant but also for her support of the community:

Don Reinertsen talk “Thriving in a Stochastic World“

Context-Driven Testing

Testing is a verb – it’s a doing thing and not an output, but the challenge is you cannot see doing

Anne-Marie’s class in Exploratory Testing

Where there is risk and failure, there is a job for testing

Exploratory testing – the key is feedback and using the learning to feedback into the next test

Agile testing – don’t try and test everything and don’t try and automate everything either, rather adopt a risk based approach

Unit testing – the usefulness depends on the programmer and the context and figuring out what you are trying to achieve

Sydney Testers Meetup

Speak Easy – Speak Easy is a voluntary program designed to increase diversity in tech conferences through dedicated conference spots, mentoring and events

YOW! WIT Program

WorkVentures – training marginalised youth

Testing challenges include microservices (the risk of bounded context and breaking things down and missing the whole) and working together as developers and testers

James Lewis podcast “Episode 120: Microservices & The Lean Enterprise with James Lewis“

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TheAgileRevolution-124 (39 minutes)

8265695783_995186c1ce_h — Episode 123: Some Principles of Lean and Product Development Flow with Don Reinertsen Jan 11, 2017
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are privileged to spend some time with Don Reinertsen, who is considered one of the leading thinkers in the field of lean product development and author of numerous books including “Principles of Product Development Flow”

“Principles of Product Development Flow” book and why there is a waterfall on the front

Japanese Manufacturing Techniques was the name before it was rebranded as Lean Manufacturing

Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, hated math and thus preferred to sit on the factory floor and tweak processes, hence it was not a theory driven approach but rather empirically driven

Need to understand why things work so you can transfer it to other domains, a big shortcoming in lean manufacturing is that they don’t have much of a mathematical view on what they are doing

You can use magic in manufacturing because it is highly repetitive

People understand iterations are good to do but do not understand why

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

Agile software people are doing a better job at lean product development because software people have already crossed the chasm of inspect and adapt

There are many sources of variability other than just people, such as the Internet and the fact we are constantly doing things people have not done before

To get management to listen about cost of delay you need to benchmark what you are doing today

Agile eliminated the economic gene, hence it works well bottom-up

Easiest way to introduce quantitive based decision making is to find a project manager who wants an economic model (as they will be fighting for resources and the guy with the numbers will end up winning because they can communicate their needs)

Lifecycle pretax profit is far more useful than ROI

Start with Chapter 1 in the book – describes what is wrong with what we are doing today, then look for the tree that is ready to be pushed over in your organisation as there is no one way of approaching this

The low hanging fruit is: visual control boards, economic model, batch size reduction and WIP constraints

The first knob to turn is batch size reduction

It is 175 principles in small little batches that add value, it is not the ten commandments!

YOW! 2015 talk “Thriving in a Stochastic World“

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TheAgileRevolution-123 (38 minutes)

aino — Episode 122: Learning to Learn with Aino Vonge Corry Jan 07, 2017
Craig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Aino Vonge Corry who is one of our very few repeat guests on the Agile Revolution. She describes herself as someone who puts speakers on stage, makes developers communicate and messes with the heads of students!

Part of the YOW! conference organising committee

Important to find examples that relate to all of the students in the class (not just a subset)

Microservice lectures – no more than 15 minutes lecture and then a learning activity

If there is interactivity then there is a reason to turn up to a live lecture

YOW! 2015 talk “A Comment on How We Learn“

Need to respect and acknowledge that other people take in knowledge at different paces, this is important in activities that we give people time to think

People need to relate ideas to the things they are doing now to take new ideas in

Working memory takes in new information and as well as decoding for long term memory

Research says that we can think about 7 +/- 2 things at a time, but newest research says we can only think about 4 things at a time!

Chunk new content or information and then allow people time to process and think

Multitasking is a huge misunderstanding, if you are doing two things at once you are only doing them at 40% rather than one thing at 100%, this is a huge problem for people working in computer science

Try to figure out your learning preferences, realise you can’t chunk a whole lot of new information at once and ensure you sleep because without sleep you cannot learn effectively

Interesting things happening in the culture space right now, Dan North’s YOW! 2015 presentation “Delivery Mapping: Turning the Lights On“

Polyglot agile highlighted in Craig’s YOW! 2015 talk “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes“

Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility) (Dave Thomas)

Seen at #yow15. What is it? pic.twitter.com/oyaRMT7nST

— Aino Vonge Corry, PhD @apaipi@agilealliance.social (@apaipi) December 10, 2015

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TheAgileRevolution-122 (31 minutes)

enyo — Episode 121: Diversity & Frugal Innovation in Africa with Betty Enyonam Kumahor Jan 03, 2017
Craig and Tony sit down for a conversation at YOW! Conference with Betty Enyonam Kumahor (stands for good for me, on the way there) who is a technology leader in Africa:

Tony and Enyo are mutual members of the Alistair Cockburn fan club

YOW! Conference talk “Frugal Innovation and Scaffolding Software“

Software engineering uptake in Africa is very low, need more technologists because it is is not an industry it is an enabler

Lots of diversity challenges in Africa – lees than 1% of the South African IT industry is women, but also diversity in languages, education and belief systems

Diversity is a multi-pronged issue, need to be patient but not complacent to move the needle forward, give girls the confidence to be competent and to push the boundaries

Frugal innovation in Africa – building technology in a space of constraints such as inadequate power, everything happens by mobile feature phones, needs to be built fast and cheap

Agile in Africa – need to make communities more aware of Agile practices, share what developed world has learnt but also what needs to adjust for the context of the continent

Growth of techpreneurs, expensive to do business in Africa, focus on local market rather than off-shoring to Europe

Andela program – train to be a software engineer, become a fellow and work for offshore clients

Successful conversions from tech hubs to startups is below 5%

Biggest issue is lack of access to expertise in Agile / Lean practices as well as lack of people to adapt it for the continent

South Africa is a great landing point into Africa

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TheAgileRevolution-121 (27 minutes)

jlewis — Episode 120: Microservices & The Lean Enterprise with James Lewis Dec 28, 2016
Craig is at YOW! Conference and has a conversation with James Lewis, best known for his work around microservices at ThoughtWorks. They discuss:

“Microservices: a definition of this new architectural term” article with Martin Fowler

Huge cycle of hype around the term “microservices”

You have to run so fast to keep up with the great people at ThoughtWorks you end up accidentally doing interesting things

Cruise Control became Cruise that became GoCD which was open source then went commercial and then went back open source

Extreme Programming (XP) is complementarianism – the sum is greater than the parts

YOW! 2015 talk “Microservices – Building Software that is #neverdone“

Microservices – systems that are composed of parts that you can independently throw away – the analogy of “My Family’s Axe” (Terry Pratchett)

Business and architecture isomorphism – if you look at your architecture you should be able to see your business represented in it and vice-versa

Disruption is causing organisations to think about organisational design as well as architectural design

Microservices is a style that is applicable for certain circumstances, it is not one size fits all – follow the 16th rule of Unix programming “distrust all claims for one true way”

For microservices, Amazon and AWS was the game-changer

If you are not building software using the Agile practices these days, you have probably gone down “the wrong trouser leg of history”

Lean Enterprise is an evolution and description of current thinking

Geek crushes on Don Reinertsen and Dan North

Agile methods need to focus on flow rather than scaling and structure

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar – point in time snapshot on what is going on in current projects, throw systematic darts at the wall, vote on over 300 items to whittle down to 100 items,

Stationery driven decision making – sticky notes!

Sam Newman book “Building Microservices”

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TheAgileRevolution-120 (31 minutes)

davethomas — Episode 119: Agile (Raccoon) is Dead with “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas Nov 24, 2016
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and get the opportunity to sit down with Dave Thomas, signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and have a great discussion about:

Dave’s talk “Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)“

Agile as a word has become meaningless, don’t follow the off-the-shelf processes, apply small corrections to move forward

Story of Stone Soup is like Agile consultancies, the hard work is done by the companies

Scrum is a good starting point due to its simplicity

Raccoon is a noun, so not a good replacement name for Agile, because you can buy a pound of it

1,000 working on one thing can never be Agile, you have to make enterprises agile before you can run an agile project

The values in the Agile Manifesto hold up well, would have been nice to have had more diversity, had no expectation they were going to create something so significant

The Agile Manifesto was a reaction to the problems in development at the time, maybe something new is required, it would be a tragic mistake to create Agile Manifesto 2.0, we need to ask what is more relevant today to express our frustrations

Agile is a fundamental way of thinking about doing stuff, that’s why it’s important to understand why we are doing it

“The Pragmatic Programmer” started as a set of field notes and somehow became a book that still sells well today despite some of the dated examples and it invented terms like DRY (don’t repeat yourself)

The Pragmatic Bookshelf was accidental by saying the dreaded words “how hard could this be”, the strength is knowing nothing about publishing, everything was automated unlike traditional publishers and still runs with 2 main employees, now storyboard books like a movie as the reader is on a learning journey

Ruby has a future, but it needs to distinguish itself as a fantastic general purpose programming language, the community is still very friendly and innovative

The emphasis and dogma around testing is off-putting, the amount of effort around many tests are not moving people forward

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TheAgileRevolution-119 (40 minutes)

yow_2015_conference_-stacked-png — Episode 118: YOW! 2015 Brisbane Vox Pop Nov 20, 2016
Craig and Tony are once again roaming the lunch hall at YOW! 2015 in Brisbane, where they catch up with a number of people including:

Dave Thomas – founder of YOW! Conference discusses the success of YOW! Conference in Australia and how he didn’t go to Snowbird for the signing of the Agile Manifesto

Peter Sellars – quality and DevOps dude shares what he learnt at DockerCon and his highlights at YOW! including “Building Microservice Architectures in Go” and “Designing for Failure: Scaling Uber’s Backend by Breaking Everything“

Nardene Smith – from Interpro recruitment, talks about the Mars lander keynote “Engineering and Exploring the Red Planet” and she gives Tony some “stuck”

Matt Callanan, Ben Spillane and Alex Spillane – Matt and Alex’s talk at YOW! “DevOps @ Wotif: Making Easy = Right” as well as discussing “Agile is Dead”

Nigel Rausch – organiser of the Brisbane Ruby meetup tells us what’s new in the Ruby community and comments on the number of talks related to microservices

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/theagilerevolution-118.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-118 (30 minutes)

Episode 117: The Changing Role of a Tester with Mark Pedersen Nov 12, 2016
Craig is at the YOW! Connected conference and talks to Mark Pedersen, the CTO at KJR, and they talk all things quality and testing:

the changing role of a tester in an Agile environment, it clarifies the role rather than making it blurrier

in an Agile environment it does not make sense to have a Test Manager role anymore

the number of dedicated testing roles are decreasing, but becoming more important and valuable

most organisations say that they use both waterfall and agile frequently

build your skills in either a quasi analysis / product owner / acceptance criteria role or get up to speed with sensible technical automation tools for your tech stack

TDD – good idea but not many organsations practicing it in a dedicated way, unit testing in most industries is a luxury

BDD – does not make TDD obsolete, defining acceptance criteria upfront helps understand what we need to code

pair programming – does not deliver much benefit from a test perspective, unless the tester has technical expertise, adoption is still very low

YOW! Connected talk “Building Mobile App Test Automation“

mobile testing is challenging and IoT will take it to another level – customer expectations are higher for these devices, they are thought of more like traditional mechanical devices

mobile and IoT is driving the demand for testers to become more technical – more API and distributed technology tests

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/theagilerevolution-117.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-117 (37 minutes)

heartmodernagile — Episode 116: The Heart of Modern Agile Oct 07, 2016
Craig and Tony are sipping a sarsaparilla or two on a balcony in Brisbane and start trying to dissect the state and heart of modern agility:

You can trust the team if you listen to them

Keys to transformation is LLL – leadership, leadership, leadership

If you have Agile leaders maybe you don’t need Agile coaches

Craig and Renee’s talk “Coaching Nightmares: Lessons We Can Learn From Gordon Ramsay“

Heart of Agile by Alistair Cockburn – collaborate, deliver, reflect and improve

Agile is Dead (Long Love Agility) by Dave Thomas and the related YOW! Conference talk

Modern Agile by Joshua Kerievsky – also the original article and the keynote talk at Agile 2016 – make people awesome, deliver value continuously, make safety a prerequisite and experiment and learn rapidly

Survey to rewrite the Agile Manifesto (again)

Tony is a tenner – he believes in “simplicity is the art of maximising the amount of work not done”

Do we do enough as coaches to make our teams safe?

Agile Coaching Institute Competency Cohort program and Craig’s reflections on his year long journey

Constellations technique

Adaptive planning – responding to change over following a plan – we often still have “waterfall on a wall”

Tony is re-reading “Coaching Agile Teams” and Craig is re-reading “Disciplined Agile Delivery”

Craig has been elected to the Board of the Agile Alliance, and they have lots of useful initiatives

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/theagilerevolution-116.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-116 (46 minutes)

115 — Episode 115: Connecting Developers & Designers with Chris van Raay & Tom Brodhurst-Hill Sep 26, 2016
At the YOW! Connected conference, Craig sits down with Chris van Raay and Tom Brodhurst-Hill and talks about bridging the gaps between developers and designers:

Chris van Raay talk “Bridging the Designer – Developer Divide“

Tom Brodhurst-Hill talk “Design Driven Mobile Development“

Typically most organisations have separated development and design teams which results in a very linear process

Need simple design documentation as a “single source of truth” because you shouldn’t need to specify styles more than once and it helps reduce effort and obtain a consistent design

Use tools such as PaintCode to create a colour palette which serves as documentation as well as a static analysis test

Need leadership to ensure there is an agreed approach, set the standards and create discipline

When building features need to decide when to leave work that is consistent across features, in relation to design, this should be a special amendment to the definition of done

Process can get in the way of achieving good things sometimes

Small thin slices do not work well for design, UX flow is the bare minimum you need, then you can have separate threads of development for front end and back end and evolve the app over time

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/theagilerevolution-115.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-115 (24 minutes)

cavery — Episode 114: The Responsibility Process with Christopher Avery Jul 31, 2016
Craig and a late-arriving and quietly spoken Renee talk to Christopher Avery, author of “Teamwork is an Individual Skill” and the visionary behind The Leadership Gift and The Responsibility Process, at Agile 2015 in Washington, DC:

Management science says that the problem of business performing highly and being profitable and people having a life at work are highly at odds with each other, Agile has challenged that

Organisational Agility and self organising teams have been around since the late 80’s / early 90’s

Keynoted the first combined XP / Agile Universe Conference in Calgary 2004

The Responsibility Process is now in 26 languages, including Klingon

The Responsibility Process is a naturally occurring pattern that occurs in our mind that shows how we respond to upset or frustration in ways that we either cope with it or take responsibility to learn and grow

Correlation between The Responsibility Process and the 7 stages of grief

You go through each stage, even if it is for a microsecond

The mental state of responsibility is available to you all the time

Listen for yourself saying “I have to…” then catch it and change it to a statement you are willing to own like “I am…” or “I choose…”

The Responsibility Process Game – each day score yourself for when you heard it, said it or caught it

Research started in 1984 and collected through participant observation and interaction

“The first job of a leader is to define reality” Max De Pree

First principle of leadership of The Responsibility Process – “No group in an organisation will consistently operate at higher levels of responsibility than the people to whom they report”

The Leadership Gift program for individuals via christopheravery.com and corporate solutions as well via Partnerwerks

The Responsibility Process book (coming soon)

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/theagilerevolution-114.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-114 (28 minutes)

JCHuet — Episode 113: GreenHopper Handyman Folio with JC Huet Jul 29, 2016
Craig and Renee, sitting on the banks of the Potomac River on a sunny but slightly windy day at Agile 2015, they catchup with JC Huet, creator of GreenHopper (renamed to JIRA Agile and post-podcast now JIRA Software) and Tempo Folio:

Craig was apparently the first client of GreenHopper that was built in a basement, now JIRA Agile is the most popular JIRA add-on with over 500,000 users, used by more than 80% of JIRA users

the idea was to have a tool that brought bugs into software management

the name GreenHopper represented the Green company branding at the time, and Hopper was for cards hopping between columns

a shout out to our friend Nick Muldoon (who is now writing Atlassian plugins at Arijea)

Tempo Folio plugin is about supporting cost management, including time sheeting, estimation, forecasting and allocation

time and dedication and about three months is all it takes to create an Atlassian plugin (and JC challenges Renee to write her own WSJF plugin)

hippies, not EP’s!

versions on frameworks are good, means feedback changes are coming

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/theagilerevolution-113.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-113 (34 minutes)

Anders — Episode 112: Inside Spotify with Anders Ivarsson Jul 05, 2016
Renee and Craig are at the Agile Australia conference and talk to Anders Ivarsson, an organisational coach at Spotify, and learn some of approaches that make Spotify tick:

Agile Australia talk “Autonomy and Leadership at Spotify” and workshop “Organisational Improvement: Design-inspired Problem Solving”

Agile Coaches spend time with squads versus a new role of organisational coach that looks at the culture, ways of working, vision and systemic wastes

Spotify is not a model

Original Spotify scaling paper, never imagined the spread or the impact

Spotify have shared a lot of the things that have worked well, but they do also have challenges as well – one is alignment across teams as the organisation gets bigger so they have been working on visualisation and prioritisation

Spotify Culture videos (Part 1 and Part 2)

use microservices to ensure that the organisation can work in the way they want to work – great autonomy but a challenge in keeping a consistent design language and customer journey

Agile culture is spread throughout Spotify, use what works rather than one particular approach

The Oath of Non Allegiance

POTLAC – Product Owner / Team Leader / Agile Coach – leadership cell at Spotify

use internal blogging to share Agile approaches and patterns, started to recognise the value of story telling

Agile Product Management in a Nutshell video – Henrik Kniberg is a genius at making things simple and understandable

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/theagilerevolution-112.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-112 (24 minutes)

peanutmm — Episode 111: M&Mailbag Jun 30, 2016
Craig and Renee, sitting in a shoe-box sized hotel room in Sydney eating peanut M&Ms, decided to rustle through the mailbag and answer a bunch of outstanding questions.

Note: this episode is not sponsored or endorsed by M&Ms but we certainly enjoy their product!

Crossing The Chasm

more and more organisations seem to be crossing the chasm to Agile, but too many are still just doing and not being Agile

inimal viable product (MVP) is still the trend word, the next stage is Minimal Viable Experience and then Minimal Viable Robustness to Minimal Marketable Product and finally Continuously Evolving Product

Enterprise Transformation Meta Model

Agile is a true north concept, not sure that you will ever get there

Suggested reading list on where to start with Agile:

General Books: Scrum Guide, Extreme Programming Explained

Developers: The Pragmatic Programmer

Scrum Master: The Human Side of Agile

Kanban: Personal Kanban, Kanban In Action

Portfolio: Essential Scrum

Product Owner: Agile Product Management with Scrum, User Story Mapping

Business Analysis: User Stories Applied, Writing Effective Use Cases, Specification By Example, UML Distilled, Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide

Testing: Agile Testing, More Agile Testing

see the Top 100 Agile Books list, unfortunately the world is still too complex

What certification should a new Scrum Master get:

passing through the corporate filter, you probably need some key certification to get a look in

CSM / PSM is valuable if you have a good quality trainer

Kanban resources include the Kanban Yahoo! Group, Kanban and Kanban and Scrum: Making The Most of Both

Craig’s 2010 talk “Kaizen with GreenHopper: Visualising Agile & Kanban Storywalls“

one of the various scaled certifications (versus building your own)

ICAgile pathway is good as it is allows you to be skillset specific

Agile Coaching Institute (starts at ICAgile skill set)

learning is 70:20:10

just get your hands dirty!

leadership needs to support as Agile well: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, Creating Great Teams, Management 3.0

community events like meetups and conferences

get a mentor!

Building your own scaled framework

Holacracy and Reinventing Organizations

need to answer questions around ensuring quality, growing capability, benefits realisation, etc…

at what level do the questions need to be answered

Minimal Viable Organisations

scale on the operational cadence of the problems of the organisation, not following a framework

how often do we check that our approach is meeting our needs

Visualising business analysis in a Scrum team

3 Amigos approach

call it what it is if you’re sprint length is longer than it is

focus more on Kanban flow

Reading List

Renee is reading about climate change (and how that applies to Agile) including “This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein

Craig is reading “CTRL-SHIFT” by Jessie Shternshus and Mike Bonifer

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TheAgileRevolution-111 (71 minutes)

lukeh — Episode 110: Every Voice Engaged via Games with Luke Hohmann Jun 15, 2016
Craig joins guest co-host Shane Hastie to talk with Luke Hohmann, author of “Innovation Games”, founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc. and co-founder of Every Voice Engaged at the Agile 2015 conference after his inspirational opening keynote and they chat about:

Luke’s opening keynote “Awesome Superproblems“

Innovation Games – the book, the training, the games

also author of the “Beyond Software Architecture” book

how to sell games to your boss, the goal is not the game but the outcome

great resource for learning games is Tasty Cupcakes

with serious games, we don’t use the word “fun”, we use the word “engagement”

epic scale games with the City of San Jose to solve prioritisation problems, this resulted in the formation of Every Voice Engaged

our roots are “agilists” not “methodologists”, as a result we have capacity to solve larger problems

“you can’t read a bike”, so we need simulations to help understand Agile

engagement trumps the communication mechanism, especially video

play two games to change the world, because the world needs us!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/theagilerevolution-110.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-110 (24 minutes)

JamesShore — Episode 109 – The Art of Agile Fluency with James Shore Jun 01, 2016
Craig and Tony at the Agile Australia conference sit down with James Shore, best known as for his work as author of “The Art of Agile Development” and co-creator of the Agile Fluency Model and talk about a wide range of Agile topics including:

“Java Modeling in Color with UML” book mentioned Feature Driven Development (an Australian Agile method!), learnt a valuable lesson to pay attention to the financials and, no matter how much you talk to your customer, seeing is not enough (they need to use it)

“Extreme Programming Explained“, both editions are the same problem but coming from different experiences with the benefit of seven years of experience

the bulk of the “Art of Agile Development” book, particularly section 2, is mostly online, the major thing that probably needs to be updated is the section on customer testing

Agile Australia keynote “The Reward”

language hunting – there are multiple levels of language proficiency and you can be fluent at any one of them – proficiency is good, but to be really good you need fluency

Agile Fluency whitepaper

the agile fluency model is not a maturity model, it is about finding the right bus stop

Marick’s Missing Manifesto (the things missing from the manifesto) – skill, discipline, ease and joy

fluency comes more from the organisational investment than the team, so if you are not seeing fluency look at the organisation first

one star is doing Scrum well – with dedicated effort in 2-6 weeks, two stars with mentorship in 3-9 months, three stars takes a lot longer

the model is aspirational, so the barriers are high

Gamasutra Games Outcomes Project

next steps for the model is to share the diagnostics with organisations to help teams compare, contrast and grow

“Bloody Stupid Johnson Teaches Agile” with Arlo Belshee

the model will work regardless of the method used, its a way of looking at where you are at and not how you do it

we should take anybody who fits into the values of the Agile Manifesto

“Let’s Code JavaScript” started as a Kickstarter, now 300+ episodes

Quixote project allows you to test drive CSS and refactor it

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TheAgileRevolution-109 (43 minutes)

DeanLeffingwell — Episode 108 – SAFe from the Source with Dean Leffingwell May 17, 2016
Renee, Craig and Tony (with a lurking Em Campbell-Pretty) in a very busy corridor with random bells ringing, catch up with Dean Leffingwell, author of numerous books including “Agile Software Requirements” and “Scaling Software Agility” and the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in a very candid discussion:

the journey to SAFe included as a developer building the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ride and infusion pumps and generally a mission to make quality better

epiphony around Agile was the step change around how teams perform and how they like their work when they perform better

not everything that is old is stupid, “we are discovering new ways of developing software” and we need to ask ourselves are we still discovering

Scrum is the only method that defines what a software team is (roles and size)

SAFe is not a war it is a mission to improve outcomes

need to provide leadership to agile learning, SAFe is a body of knowledge and a set of patterns that helps simplify learning

the differing viewpoints on SAFe are because the stakes have gotten higher, Agile is a big business and hence other approaches need to defend their turf because we are in a competitive market

they don’t defend SAFe – we publish case studies, talk about it and implement it, we have to take the pragmatic approach to help people succeed

SAFe is versioned because we record the best knowledge we have at the time and Dean is an author, but it has also allowed change management

SAFe will always support two versions in the market, including courseware and the big picture, the blog is kept fully up-to-date

SAFe LSE was a fork for SAFe for Lean, Software and Systems Engineering and allows for innovation, most of it has been collapsed back to the main framework

the framework is free (and will remain so)

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/theagilerevolution-108.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-108 (30 minutes)

MarcusHammarberg — Episode 107 – Kanban in Action with Marcus Hammarberg May 09, 2016
Marcus Hammarberg, co-author of “Kanban in Action” talks with Craig at YOW! West in Perth in a sometimes noisy coffee shop at the Parmelia Hilton Perth:

Craig’s quote on the book! “No mucking around … gets to the heart of kanban from the first page. A must-read!”

originally from Sweden, now working for The Salvation Army in Indonesia helping them become more effective

bitten by the Agile bug by demonstrating something embarrassingly small at the end of a sprint and yet he found the stakeholders were overjoyed at just seeing movement

Agile has changed many things that used to manual to be automated, such as testing and deployment, to fit in short cycles

Fred George’s talk “Agile Roots: Use JIT to Go Faster” at YOW! West (slides / video)

Marcus’ talks at YOW! West “Kanban in Action – A Practical Whirlwind Tour of Kanban” (slides / video) and “Impact Mapping: Drawing is Not the Point” (slides)

other books on Kanban include Henrik Kniberg’s “Kanban and Scrum – Making the Most of Both“, and David J. Anderson’s “Kanban” and “Lessons in Agile Management“

Kanban slides on SlideShare led to writing the book with Manning

recommend “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt, the content is boring but the intriguing story keeps you reading

Kanban is trustworthy due to its principles: start where you are, limit the work in process, manage flow from idea to production

sprint is a crazy word, when running a physical marathon you should keep a pace that allows you to continue a conversation

slack will always occur, so plan for it, idle people is OK, we sell ideas not keystrokes per minute

“you can’t be more productive than not delivering a feature” – John Smart

recommended books include “Turn The Ship Around” by David Marquet (also see the TED talk) and “Reinventing Organizations” by Frederic Laloux

lessons we can learn from IT – simple visualisations, data that makes sense (you can’t improve what you can’t measure), be transparent on what is being worked on and meeting every day

not an Agile Coach but a Social Worker

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TheAgileRevolution-107 (42 minutes)

DavidMarquet — Episode 106: Turning the Agile Ship Around with David Marquet Apr 29, 2016
Tony, Renee, Craig and special guest host Tyson Nutt catchup with David Marquet, author of “Turn The Ship Around!” and the “Turn Your Ship Around” companion workbook at the Agile Australia conference and talk about how similar a nuclear submarine and an Agile team really are:

leadership is not about telling people what to do and how to do it

all investments in human beings are long term

the approach spread from the bottom up, now the book is on the official reading list of two Navy’s (including New Zealand)

“I intend to” does not mean they get to do it – gives psychological ownership and to spark the conversation

thinking out loud is about saying what is going on in our head, this even works when teaching your children how to drive!

feed the beast – don’t respond by hiding, feed them with as much information as you can as data puts you in control

you can’t empower people, you can only unempower them

you give control while ensuring competence and clarity

whilst not telling people what to do can be good for their learning, sometimes you just need to tell people what to do (in the absence of competence and clarity)

good to have you team hold you accountable when you fall back to old habits

deal with the “frozen middle” by giving them decision making authority they previously didn’t have

when learning about a new team ask “what do you hope I will change” and “what do you hope I won’t change”, this is easy when you have not created the culture

“I imagine a world where we all find satisfaction in our work” – you need embrace your fears, on a submarine that can be fear of death

need to seek permission to proceed and embrace feedback rather than pursuing signoff

instead of saying “are you sure?”, ask “how sure are you?”

David is working on a couple of new books – a book of success stories and a colouring book

when talking to yourself, use the third person for motivation

signup for a weekly leaderhip nudge on David’s website

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TheAgileRevolution-106 (40 minutes)

max — Episode 105: The Flux Interview Apr 25, 2016
Renee flies solo on this one and takes the opportunity to delve into the intersection of Agile and politics and interview the founders of voteflux.org, Max Kaye and Nathan Spataro and finds out:

Whar exactly Flux is – Technology , Political Party , Crowd source solution?

The outstanding vision and purpose for Flux as well as the how, what and who’s of perhaps the future of politics and voting

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/theagilerevolution-105.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-105 (38 minutes)

nathan — Episode 105: The Flux Interview Apr 25, 2016
Renee flies solo on this one and takes the opportunity to delve into the intersection of Agile and politics and interview the founders of voteflux.org, Max Kaye and Nathan Spataro and finds out:

Whar exactly Flux is – Technology , Political Party , Crowd source solution?

The outstanding vision and purpose for Flux as well as the how, what and who’s of perhaps the future of politics and voting

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/theagilerevolution-105.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-105 (38 minutes)

Episode 104: Agile Australia 2015 Vox Pop #2 Apr 19, 2016

Craig and Tony wander the lunchtime floor on day 2 of Agile Australia conference in Sydney, looking for more interesting people in the Australian Agile community. They chatted to the ones who couldn’t quite run fast enough away from the microphone including:

NZ Ben Gracewood (Vend) and Anders Ivarsson (Spotify) – overview of Ben’s talk “What if there were no rules?“, Tony learning a new word (connaissance) and the motto of not being a “duck” is his talk and Anders about his talk “Autonomy and Leadership at Spotify” and that we shouldn’t call Spotify a model!
Chris Chan and Dylan Verheijden – the (Agile) Australian tradition of the Tim Tam Slam, Linda Rising’s keynote and her myth on smart people not being rational, James Shore’s keynote and inspirations around the Agile Fluency Model
Bernd Schiffer and Poppy Schiffer (#agilebaby) – Bernd’s talk “Concrete experimentation in Agile environments” and the example of getting pregnant as a complex environment, David Marquet’s keynote which is also an example of a complex environment
Erwin Van der Koogh (Elabor8) – talk on “7 Habits of Highly Effective Organisations” and how Agile hasn’t really helped us and how we need to think beyond our current thinking
Robert Loomans and Shane Sendall (Suncorp) – David Marquet’s keynoyte on making change in a regulated space, James Shore’s keynote on mapping Agile to fluency and not maturity and being aware of the cargo cult plus the issues with DevOps
Mirco Hering (Accenture) – Mirco’s talk “Adopting DevOps practices for systems of record – An experience report” and how to take packaged products and apply DevOps techniques

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/theagilerevolution-104.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-104 (22 minutes)

Episode 103: Agile Australia 2015 Vox Pop Apr 07, 2016

Craig and Tony are once again roaming the floor, this time at the Agile Australia conference in Sydney, looking for interesting people in the Australian Agile community. While walking around the floor they run into:

Rachel Slattery (SlatteryIT) – organiser of Agile Australia talks about the record crowd, selection of speakers and the number of first timers new to Agile
Kim Ballestrin – organiser of Cynefin Melbourne Meetup Group discusses what’s new in the Cynefin world and enjoyed the talk learning about the model used by Flow Perth
Ben Melbourne and Jean D’Amore (ThoughtWorks) – discussed applying Agile techniques to reality television (and podcasts), Ben’s workshop on “Using Design Thinking to Drive Agile Planning” and Jean’s talk on “Delivering with microservices or how to iterate towards sophistication”
Daniel Luschwitz (SoftEd) – talked about the strengths of ICAgile over other approaches and the Agile community in Singapore
Ben Escudero and Julian Parry – enjoyed the DevOps and leadership talks
Ryan McKergow (Elabor8) – enjoyed David Mole’s talk on putting Drive into practice, Agile for beginners and the 1st Conference in Melbourne
Jody Podbury – on the transformation of Agile at Vodafone in the Digital team and now across the wider business and Lean UX

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/theagilerevolution-103.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-103 (31 minutes)

scottshaw — Episode 102: The Essence of Microservices (and Agile) with Scott Shaw Jan 25, 2016
Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference and in the hallway ambush Scott Shaw, the Director of Technology (Australia) at ThoughtWorks and talk about the state of microservices and Agile:

Scott’s YOW! talk “Avoiding Speedbumps on the Road to Microservices“

Microservices are just a different way to build applications that get away from monoliths

Beth Skurrie, Evan Bottcher, Jon Eaves case study at YOW! – “The Odyssey – From Monoliths to Microservices at realestate.com.au“

Essentials for microservices include Domain Driven Design, security and identity and change management

Simon Brown talk at YOW! – “Agility and the Essence of Software Architecture“

Cloud and infrastructure as code has changed the way we look at applications and have allowed microservices

The essence of Agile is the team taking ownership of the business success of whatever it is they are building and keeping that ownership over the longer term

Microservices take advantage of Conway’s Law – the teams closest to the systems should own them or change your structure to mimic the systems you want to look after

There should be no difference between maintenance and evolution – it is all one of the thing that goes towards the success of the business

Adrian Cockcroft defines microservices as “a service-oriented architecture composed of loosely coupled elements that have bounded contexts”

Microservices should be no bigger than a concept that fits in your head

Sam Newman book “Building Microservices“

Agile approaches that are evolving include Docker and functional programming languages (especially Scala, Clojure and Go), the importance of craftsmanship and skills

Defending the Free Internet

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

Microservices in a Nutshell by Martin Fowler and James Lewis

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/theagilerevolution-102.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-102 (28 minutes)

craig-poppendieck — Episode 101: The Lean Mindset with Mary and Tom Poppendieck Jan 15, 2016
Craig catches up with two luminaries in the Agile and Lean space, Mary and Tom Poppendieck at YOW! Conference to talk about agile, lean, rapid feedback, culture and leadership. The discussion points include:

Making the link between lean and software development and discovering that waterfall makes no sense

The origins of the first book: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

Agile is not lean in software development, Agile is lean in a delivery organisation

How long does it take you to put a single line of code into Production?

The manifestation of lean really kicked off in 2010 with both the rise of DevOps and the Lean Startup

Delivery organisations versus engineering organisations and the journey of Agile

Agile has not well addressed delivering the right stuff, solving the right problem and the architecture of rapid deployment

Only two goals at ING: Deliver every two weeks and don’t crash production, resulted in rapid feedback loops

“The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest” by Yochai Benkler

Latest book: The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions

Create centres of good culture and let people find it, to survive in a competitive environment you need to do something different

Goal is to create an environment where people enjoy the challenge of developing software

The critical resource to be managed is not capital but the passion and energy of bright and creative people

People don’t resist change, they resist being changed

Build a change platform, not a change program

YOW! 2014 talk – The Scaling Dilemma

The military model – leaders have strategic awareness two levels down and situational awareness one level up and the concept of working leaders

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TheAgileRevolution-101 (43 minutes)

100dpp — Episode 100: 100th Episode Spectacular Jan 06, 2016
Craig, Renee and Tony come together to celebrate 100 episodes of The Agile Revolution, and review the journey of both the podcast and Agile in general over the last 4 and a half years and surprise themselves on how many things have changed but how many things have remained the same.

Thank you to all of our guests and to our loyal listener(s) for helping us reach 100 episodes!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/theagilerevolution-100.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-100 (82 minutes)

Malcolm-Christmas-Card-front-3-620x400 — Episode 99: 99, Not Out! Dec 22, 2015
Despite not feeling well, a sick Renee, a very sick Tony and a trying not to get sick Craig, get the band back together to discuss all the latest in the Agile world, including:

New Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his drive to be Agile, our thoughts on the National Broadband Network (NBN), Australia’s Data Retention laws and the importance of Emotional Intelligence

The Project

Five years, building a culture, and handing it off – the thoughts of outgoing Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea

The Nexus Guide (and no, it’s not a new Google phone or a car but yet another scaling framework) and its associated Scaled Professional Scrum Assessment

The Oath of Non-Allegiance

Sanjiv Augustine new book Scaling Agile: A Lean Jumpstart

The Story Behind How Pocket Hit 20 Million Users with 20 People

New CIOs: How to succeed in the first 120 days (and Renee’s quiz to Tony and Craig)

Fire all your managers: ‘Supportive Leadership’ is management’s new role

Fast IT – (it’s a thing)

We are reading: Reinventing Organizations, The OpenSpace Agility Handbook, Start With Why, Talk Like TED, Turn The Ship Around and The Phoenix Project

100 episodes is our Don Bradman

This Agile Life beat us to 100 epsiodes (we are not bitter!)

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TheAgileRevolution-99 (65 minutes)

YOW_2015_Conference_-stacked-PNG — Episode 98: The Heckle Revolution YOW! 2015 Edition Dec 08, 2015
Craig joins Darren Rogan, Ben Morgan and Leigh Appel in another special cross over episode with the Hack && Heckle Podcast to talk software development, Agile and preview the upcoming YOW! conference that will be covered by both podcasts.

This episode has been released simulatenously as H&&H 131 – Hack and Heckle / Agile Revolution Discuss the YOW! Conference.

Discussion points included:

A discussion about our upcoming 100th episode

a discussion about behind the scenes of organising and schedulinf the YOW! 2015 conference

YOW! 2015 speakers and topics including: Adrian Cockroft, Troy Hunt, Aaron Bedra, microservices, Pragmatic Dave Thomas, Anita Sengupta, Dan North, Dean Wapler and Docker

Manifesto for Half-Arsed Agile Software Development

YOW! 2014 videos

YOW! Bubs – childcare at a technical conference

The YOW! tour and Brisbane

Windows 10 upgrades

The pros and cons of Scala and FORTRAN versus Java

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/theagilerevolution-98.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-98 (50 minutes)

PeterBell — Episode 97: 3 Things, 3 Letters (Git, CTO, MBA) with Peter Bell Nov 05, 2015
At YOW! Conference, Craig has a chat with Peter Bell, a contract member of the GitHub training team, co-founder of CTO School and the founder of the Startup CTO Summit series and they talk about approaches to learning Git, building better CTO’s and digital literacy for MBA’s.

YOW! 2014 talk “How To Undo Almost Anything with Git“

Balance the appropriate batch size for communicating with your team the work you have completed versus the appropriate batch size for if you mess up you can easily go back – this is typically 2-10 lines of code to the local repository

Most teams just need a master branch that is always releasable and all work done on feature branches that are merged into master

training.github.com – training options and a number of great resources

Learning Git – not easy to learn on the job, balance of basic how to use Git versus a deeper understanding of how and why it works to avoid messing things up

CTO Summits run across the world – help people who lead engineering teams to build better software and build software better

CTO School started in New York but now runs around the world as a not-for-profit and has built a CTO network

CTO’s deal with the same high level decisions around technology that most of us do, but overlapping with how to build better product and how to build a better engineering team brand that the best technologists would want to to work for

Don Reinertsen wrote the best book on how Agile works “The Principles of Product Development Flow” – but it is not very accessible

Colombia University Graduate School of Business – teaching MBA and EMBA students how to learn about digital literacy and big data which is really how to hire and manage developers when you are not one which is the best nuggets from Agile and Lean that are accessible for a business audience

GitHub – create the repository and make your team collaborators – if you cannot understand the gist of the commit messages you have a problem

For the business, business leaders can learn a lot from basic Kanban, user stories, doing the riskiest thing first, using tools like SBE to create meaningful specifications

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TheAgileRevolution-97 (31 minutes)

YOW_2014_logo-png — Episode 96: YOW! 2014 Brisbane Vox Pop Sep 30, 2015
Clearing out the backlog, Craig and Tony roam the corridors at YOW! 2014 in Brisbane and talk to attendees and old friends and colleagues. Despite Tony’s fetish with pineapples and the fact it took 96 episodes to get a mention of ISO-9126 they talk to:

Craig Aspinall on hosting the highly rated talk by Troy Hunt on “Hack Yourself First” and Peter Bell on “How to Undo Almost Anything with Git” and that listening to security talks is like watching horror movies, completely terrifying and entertaining at the same time!

Jason Royals and Carlo Simbag on cheesecake and great talks by Troy Hunt, Jez Humble, Gojko Adzic and Gabrielle Benefield

Andrew Newman on using Scala in the enterprise, keynotes from Martin Thompson and Todd Montgomery as well as Ed Kmett

Sharon Robson on using Agile at Tatts Group, her favourite standard ISO-9126, Boehm’s Quality Tree, getting rid of “THWADI”

Darren Cotterill on Optiver being the second best place to work in Australia, enjoyed Jon Eaves on Microservices

Aran Elkington on Agile at Youi, Jeff Patton and his cake wrecks and the underlying theme of microservices at the conference

Matt Callanan on DevOps Brisbane, DevOps Days Brisbane, “it’s all about Docker”

Michael Villis on Agile and Lean really being about doing the right things rather than just looking busy

Peter Oxenham on looking for outcomes and different ways to look at problems

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TheAgileRevolution-96 (28 minutes)

JeffPatton — Episode 95: User Story Mapping (Something Something) with Jeff Patton Sep 15, 2015
After chasing him across the east coast of Australia, Craig sits down with Jeff Patton at YOW! Conference in Sydney. Along the way they fail to remember the subtitle of Jeff’s “User Story Mapping” book and talk about:

Art school dropout to software developer to early Extreme Programming

“Extreme Programming Explained” by Kent Beck (and we agree the first edition was the better version!)

One of the secrets to success is having a great relationship with customers

Early Agile colleagues included Eric Evans (“Domain-Driven Design“), Joshua Kerievsky (“Refactoring to Patterns” and Industrial Logic), Rob Mee (Pivotal Labs)

The product decisions on what to build matter most

YOW! Talk “User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story“

Story Mapping addressed the problem of losing sight of the big picture when building very small things

Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood “Software For Use” – task modelling was the inspiration for Story Mapping

Impact Mapping was inspired by Effect Mapping

There is no way to build a story map and not stand in the shoes of someone using your product

They were initially called “stories” not “user stories”, because of the way we use them – it’s not a change in the way we write documents, its a change in the way we work

As a… I want… So that… is just a conversation starter, and they need titles!

Dependencies in story mapping – the map helps you see in slices, using stories helps you build the thing you need now

Passionate Product Owner course

The hope of the User Story Mapping book is that people think differently about stories

Your job in software development is not to build more crap faster, your job is to change the world

Jez Humble “Lean Enterprise” – output and impact

What we do now builds on an Agile foundation – but it is more than Agile – we are missing an umbrella term for product centricity

Raccoon! – Jeff likes it, but it doesn’t work in mountain states as they knock over garbage cans!https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/theagilerevolution-95.mp3
TheAgileRevolution-95 (43 minutes)

Agile2015 — Episode 94: Agile 2015 Wrap Up Sep 08, 2015
Craig and Renee catch up after the last session at Agile 2015 in Washington, DC and talk about the highlights of the conference. Sitting in the atrium near a waterfall, they discuss:

Renee’s talk “Agile Passionfruits: Growing Agile Champion capability through a Learning Culture” received rave reviews

Stalwart sessions at Agile 2015

Day 3 keynote by Jessie Shternshus “Individuals, Interactions and Improvization”

Esther Derby and Mike Lowery talk “Coaching Flow: Moving Past Resistance”

Craig Larman and Bas Vodde talk “Introduction to Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)”

Dan Greening and Jeff Sutherland talk “Agile Leadership Patterns: The Agile Way of Doing”

Joint podcast with “This Agile Life” – our second favourite Agile podcast!

Skip Angel and Richard Watt talk “Outcome Driven Organizations (ODO): A new operating system for organizational change”

Day 5 keynote by James Tamm “Want Better Collaboration? Don’t be so Defensive!” and some shocking numbers around effectiveness

The conference hotel (biodome) – Gaylord National Harbor

Trends at the conference: lots of newcomers, scaling, leadership, improvisation, games, coaching and technical debt

Interesting discussions in the Open Jam, daily Lean Coffee and Agile Alliance Lounge and lots of vendors selling tools

The new planningpoker.com

"I have a question about story point velocity." to @ourfounder at #agile2015 #WaitForIt

— Adam Yuret Stands with the strikers. F U Pay Them (@AdamYuret) August 5, 2015

Reject superhero, doctor diamond #Agile2015 @TheImprovEffect pic.twitter.com/KD71BhWFfb

— Renee Troughton (@AgileRenee) August 5, 2015

Radical Collaboration with James Tamm #Agile2015 pic.twitter.com/4nNDLYNDZx

— Renee Troughton (@AgileRenee) August 7, 2015

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TheAgileRevolution-94 (39 minutes)

OpenJam — Episode 93: I Like Big Boards Aug 29, 2015
Craig and Renee are at Agile 2015 in Washington, DC and in the open jam area team up with Jason Tice and Natalie Simonsen from the “This Agile Life” podcast for a crossover episode. Joining in the roundtable conversation are Stephen Vance, Troy Tuttle, Jenny Tarwater, Abby Bangser and Serge Beaumont.

Stephen Vance shares highlights from the multi-team agile framework he has put in place at his organization with Natalie and Renee.

Abby Bangser and Jason Tice continue a discussion from Lean Coffee at Agile 2015 regarding the benefits of having a full lifecycle Kanban board (product envisioning thru development thru formal testing and acceptance by the customer).

While discussing the benefits of “Big Boards” the excellent session that Lisa Crispin and Emma Armstrong presented on User Interface testing came up

Next Jenny Tarwater gave props to John Krewson who did an awesome Improv workshop where attendees (including Jenny and Jason) acted out 3-4 minute Improv sketches of how waterfall could complicate simple activities in life like going to Starbucks, planning a trip to Disneyworld or dating and marriage (there are YouTube videos of these Improv sketches somewhere) but the session was AWESOME – thanks to John Krewson for allowing us to get our Improv on at Agile 2015

If you’ve ever played cards against humanity, Jenny Tarwater recommends “Cards for Agility” presented by Bob Payne and and Beth Miller at Agile2015

Several present on ThisAgileLife comment on Jeff Sutherland’s “Agile Leadership Patterns” presentation and how he made several comments regarding other members of the agile community during his presentation

Jason Tice proposes an experiment (to the organizers of Agile 2016 – Bob Sarni) whereby there would be a video interview with presentation submitters prior to acceptance to confirm that their presentation is focused around learning vs. a sales pitch for a product and/or training. BTW, the conference chair of Agile2016 is Bob Sarni – Jason mis-spoke in the recording regarding Bob Payne – there just happen to be quite a few Bob’s involved in the planning of agile conferences.

Serge Beaumont mentions a few of the activities that provide value in addition to the conference sessions, such as the Scrum Alliance Coaches clinic and Open Jam. He suggests that the conference conclude with some type of “Open Space” in future years.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/theagilerevolution-93.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-93 (40 minutes)

Agile2015 — Episode 92: Agile 2015 Day 1 Aug 26, 2015
Craig and Renee visit Washington, DC for the Agile 2015 conference and debrief in the Agile Alliance Lounge after day 1:

Luke Hohmann keynote “Awesome Superproblems” – Innovation Games and book, Every Voice Engaged – challenge to play 2 games in the next year that will change the world

Lundy’s Law – “any team of programmers if given enough time will justify a total rewrite of the system”

Paul Goddard talk “Improvisssssing With Agile” – some good examples for team starters, new book “Improv-ing Agile Teams“

Will Evans talk “Learn Like A Scientist” – start with a problem, lots of good models and templates

Lots of different scaling solutions and related certifications being discussed at the conference

Larry Maccherone talk “Probalistic Forecasting for Math Mortals” – monte carlo forecasting is a useful tool for project planning (and superannuation!)

Ellen Grove talk “Games for Talking about Conflict Resolution” – lots of games you can play with a team to talk about conflict

Lots of ability at this conference to network and meet new people in sessions and at breaks

Lots of good discussions happening in the Open Space area

Sponsors (vendors) are mostly tools (and tools for tools) and the Agile bookstore

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/theagilerevolution-92.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-92 (23 minutes)

SimonBrown — Episode 91: Coding The Architecture with Simon Brown Jul 19, 2015
Craig and Tony talk to Simon Brown at the YOW! 2014 conference in Brisbane. SImon is the author of “Software Architecture for Developers”, creator of the C4 software architecture model and Structurizr. We tracked him down after his talk to talk about:

YOW! 2014 talk “Agility and the Essence of Software Architecture“

Create a software guidebook as opposed to big upfront documentation

Tony is an old BA apparently… Explains a lot

If you can’t sketch out your architecture, you don’t understand it

C4 model was created after observations many archtecture drawings don’t make sense

Tony shows his age again by referencing Mr. Squiggle (video)

A tiny percentage of architects understand UML – do you teach them UML or teach them something simple?

Structurizr replaces drawing boxes in Visio or OmniGraffle, creates the C4 model from Java code and keeps it up to date, other implementations for C# have also been created

Suggest updating the diagrams at the end of every storycard

C4 starts at system context level, opens up to containers, zooms down to components inside containers and then down to the class level

Use the model to understand your microservices strategy versus monoliths (article by Rob Annett)

C4 is a drill down per system, does not have much to offer enterprise architects – can add an extra enterprise architecture layer if you wish

ArchiMate allows Enterprise Architects to model processes

We need Enterprise Architects but architects need to be involved in the day to day architecture including code (REA have a delivery engineering team that they spoke about at YOW!)

Roy Osherove’s Elastic Leadership – starting point is one architect but then get more people involved

Ask your team what an Architect does and you will probably get conflicting answers, it is a not well defined role

System Architect and Tech Lead are essentially the same thing

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/theagilerevolution-91.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-91 (28 minutes)

Episode 91: Coding The Architecture with Simon Brown Jul 19, 2015
Craig and Tony talk to Simon Brown at the YOW! 2014 conference in Brisbane. SImon is the author of “Software Architecture for Developers”, creator of the C4 software architecture model and Structurizr. We tracked him down after his talk to talk about:

YOW! 2014 talk “Agility and the Essence of Software Architecture“

Create a software guidebook as opposed to big upfront documentation

Tony is an old BA apparently… Explains a lot

If you can’t sketch out your architecture, you don’t understand it

C4 model was created after observations many archtecture drawings don’t make sense

Tony shows his age again by referencing Mr. Squiggle (video)

A tiny percentage of architects understand UML – do you teach them UML or teach them something simple?

Structurizr replaces drawing boxes in Visio or OmniGraffle, creates the C4 model from Java code and keeps it up to date, other implementations for C# have also been created

Suggest updating the diagrams at the end of every storycard

C4 starts at system context level, opens up to containers, zooms down to components inside containers and then down to the class level

Use the model to understand your microservices strategy versus monoliths (article by Rob Annett)

C4 is a drill down per system, does not have much to offer enterprise architects – can add an extra enterprise architecture layer if you wish

ArchiMate allows Enterprise Architects to model processes

We need Enterprise Architects but architects need to be involved in the day to day architecture including code (REA have a delivery engineering team that they spoke about at YOW!)

Roy Osherove’s Elastic Leadership – starting point is one architect but then get more people involved

Ask your team what an Architect does and you will probably get conflicting answers, it is a not well defined role

System Architect and Tech Lead are essentially the same thing

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/theagilerevolution-91.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-91 (28 minutes)

aep — Episode 90: Step Away From The Book Jul 03, 2015
Craig and Renee catch up late in the evening to chat about recent Agile articles and events including:

Havard Business Review article “Time Management Training Doesn’t Work“

turn off Microsoft Outlook notifications (do as we say not as we do)

“Disruption and Recovery of Computing Tasks: Field Study, Analysis & Directions” – if you have read this, tell us about it!

Harvard Business Review article – “How to Help Someone Develop Emotional Intelligence” – find the dream!

Ron Jeffries want his XP back!

“Modern Extreme Programming” by Benji Weber – it’s not dead, just evolved

The 9th Annual State of Agile Survey – summary and thoughts

“Let’s Acknowledge SAFe for What It Is and Move On” by Mike Cottmeyer

Reactive Manifesto and how it applies to programming as well as human reactions

Our reading list includes,”No Estimates” beta book by Vasco Duarte, “BDD In Action” by John Smart and “Turn The Ship Around” by David Marquet

Be willing to #learn is the key of #success #SGPHX #Icouldbewrong with @mikewcohn pic.twitter.com/36APDrZX9j

— Gustavo Bonalde (@gbonalde) May 4, 2015

Estimates in classic comedy…#NoEstimates pic.twitter.com/TnoP2fFkww

— Nezumi Ronin (@NezumiRonin) April 26, 2015

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/theagilerevolution-90.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-90 (50 minutes)

Episode 90: Step Away From The Book Jul 03, 2015
Craig and Renee catch up late in the evening to chat about recent Agile articles and events including:

Havard Business Review article “Time Management Training Doesn’t Work“

turn off Microsoft Outlook notifications (do as we say not as we do)

“Disruption and Recovery of Computing Tasks: Field Study, Analysis & Directions” – if you have read this, tell us about it!

Harvard Business Review article – “How to Help Someone Develop Emotional Intelligence” – find the dream!

Ron Jeffries want his XP back!

“Modern Extreme Programming” by Benji Weber – it’s not dead, just evolved

The 9th Annual State of Agile Survey – summary and thoughts

“Let’s Acknowledge SAFe for What It Is and Move On” by Mike Cottmeyer

Reactive Manifesto and how it applies to programming as well as human reactions

Our reading list includes,”No Estimates” beta book by Vasco Duarte, “BDD In Action” by John Smart and “Turn The Ship Around” by David Marquet

Be willing to #learn is the key of #success #SGPHX #Icouldbewrong with @mikewcohn pic.twitter.com/36APDrZX9j

— Gustavo Bonalde (@gbonalde) May 4, 2015

Estimates in classic comedy…#NoEstimates pic.twitter.com/TnoP2fFkww

— Nezumi Ronin (@NezumiRonin) April 26, 2015

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/theagilerevolution-90.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-90 (50 minutes)

IanKorrineJones — Episode 89: Intersecting Service Management, People Development & Agile May 15, 2015
Craig gatecrashed the Australian ITSMF / ITIL conference, LEADit in Melbourne and in the hallway chats to Korrine Jones (an Organisational Development Consultant and running late for a plane) and Ian Jones (an IT Service Management expert) about how People Development and Service Management are intersecting with Agile and each other:

LEADit is the biggest service management conference in Australia – focus on disruptive service management, Agile, Lean, DevOps, Continuous Delivery

Challenges with virtual teams – not everybody is suited to working this way, need to take time up front on shared values and getting to know each other (and this can be done virtually if need be)

Measuring good teams – satisfaction surveys, team results, engagement levels

Agile Virtual ITSM Teams workshop

Opportunity for convergence between Agile and people development areas

Issue is how to translate Agile to Service Management – learn by continuous improvement and experimentation

Leading ITSM from Scrum to Kanban talk

Olanned work (continuous service improvement and BAU) and unplanned work (major incidents) and how to write story cards for service management teams

Moving from Scrum to Kanban moved the team from being reactive to proactive but they missed the cadence and planning and did not respect WIP limits, so went back to Scrum

Tracked number of points which represents delivered service improvement

Showcases are a challenge outside of an IT management team – who should come?

Problem Management Analysts use a Kanban wall to track incidents and impacts

Buy in increasing in IT Service Management community, but slow uptake

ITIL – when implemented well, it provides real benefits to the customer

DevOps Days Brisbane – Why You’re Destroying DevOps – many correlations to what DevOps is experiencing now to what ITIL experienced 10 years ago

ITIL has nothing about culture, rather it is just focussed on process unlike Agile and Lean, it is also often pushed from above and has a compliance way of thinking due to certifications

Nigel Dalton keynote – The Cloud: It’s Not About The Money

Need to continue to support and coach the ITSM community and collaborate

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TheAgileRevolution-89 (33 minutes)

weisbartsa — Episode 88: Scrum Australia Anticast Apr 14, 2015
Adam Weisbart turns the tables hosting an anti-podcast where he interviews Craig, Renee & Tony at Scrum Australia 2014 in Sydney on their highlights from the conference. The conversation included:

* Adam Weisbart’s “Agile Antipatterns” talk and his awesome Agile Antipatterns cards
* Craig Smith’s “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes” talk (and the methods on the cutting room floor)
* Agile movements are just as important as methods
* Tony mentions the original Winston W. Royce “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems” waterfall paper – why??
* Henrik Kniberg’s “Scaling Agile @ Spotify” keynote
* Matthew Hodgson’s “Backlogs, Story Mapping and Star Wars” talk
* Knowing one of the organisers like Star Wars helps!
* Renee Troughton’s “Darth Vaderless Daily Scrums” talk
* Important to know the expectations that everyone else should be having on each other to have a good Daily Scrum
* Emparting to a new team how to do an effective daily scrum
* Renee and her obsession with origami cranes
* Own the silence…
* David Bale’s “Build Your Own Scaled Scrum” talk (built on Adam’s Build Your Own Scrum)
* Drop Bears
* Australia has lots of blending, more common to break stories smaller as opposed to tasks, we make proper tea
* Adam’s new project: Agile Adlibs
* Making retrospectives fun…

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/theagilerevolution-88.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-88 (27 minutes)

Henrik Kniberg — Episode 87: Coffee From The Trenches with Henrik Kniberg Mar 15, 2015
Renee and Craig catch up with Henrik Kniberg at Scrum Australia 2014 where he tries coffee for the first time in ten years at the Paramount Coffee Project (the best coffee in Sydney according to Renee). Apart from getting his verdict on the brew, they also talk about:

First time back in Australia in a long time to keynote at Scrum Australia 2014

Craig’s interview “Henrik Kniberg on Lean From The Trenches, Translating the Agile Manifesto and Living Agile” from Agile 2012 in Dallas on InfoQ

“Scrum and XP From The Trenches” and how the book was written in 3 days

Ivory Tower Syndrome – you can get good at describing crap in a believable way if you don’t have connections to reality

“Kanban and Scrum: Making The Most of Both“

Spotify – 25 coaches with 25 pet approaches, the culture and the fundamentals in each cross functional team is the same, the purpose of organisations is not make life easy for the manager, it is to make it possible to deliver and learn fast

Tradeoffs – consistency vs flexibility in tools such as version control at Spotify

Spotify culture – started with Scrum, was fundamentally healthy, created by the mindset of the founders and the first few people

Spotify succeeded because the people who work there are passionate about making a great product – making a product where they also the customer – the new problem is keeping empathy for new users

Renee still buys CDs apparently!

Spotify is focussed on growth not profit – optimise for users loving the product – there will ultimately be one big player

“Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds” paper and “Spotify Engineering Culture Part 1” and Spotify Engineering Culture Part 2” videos

Scaling Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches – gradual ramp up since 2010, each coach has 2-3 squads, coaches are culure workers (a good example of investing in coaches)

On coaches, Spotify has shown it is probably harder to multitask roles than teams

Crisp – balance of independence versus freedom, runtime environment for consultants

Oath of Non Allegience – come to companies with toolboxes – how they work and which one is appropriate for the environment

Need some relation to the craft of the team as a coach – need to be open to blindspots

Henrik’s verdict on the the coffee… no spoilers, you will need to listen!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/theagilerevolution-87.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-87 (40 minutes)

The Agile Revolution Rocks — Episode 86: Sticky Notes and Agile Stuff Feb 23, 2015
Renee sets the tone for the Podcast, talking sticky notes and a great new app Post it plus by 3m and tests them live on the podcast .

This week the team talk about :

Are performance reviews a waste of time ? Review from the Business insider

@agilescout Remove your constraints article piques Tony’s interest and then ends up with a debate around star treks relevance

Renee interrupts to provide the results of her tests with the sticky notes app

We discuss the new update to the LeSS (large scale scrum) framework by @less_works

Craig asks questions of Renee and Tony from an Agile Coaching course

Tony proves it’s live as he runs off to sooth his daughter, Craig and Renee take the opportunity to have some fun in his absence

Books The Revolutionists are Reading: Impact Mapping (Gojko Adzic), Lean Startup (Eric Ries), Bridging the Communication Gap (Gojko Adzic)

https://twitter.com/neil_killick/status/537150511107940353 https://twitter.com/drunkcod/status/519030634162167809

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/the-agile-revolution-86.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-86 (56 minutes)

stickytest1 — Episode 86: Sticky Notes and Agile Stuff Feb 23, 2015
Renee sets the tone for the Podcast, talking sticky notes and a great new app Post it plus by 3m and tests them live on the podcast .

This week the team talk about :

Are performance reviews a waste of time ? Review from the Business insider

@agilescout Remove your constraints article piques Tony’s interest and then ends up with a debate around star treks relevance

Renee interrupts to provide the results of her tests with the sticky notes app

We discuss the new update to the LeSS (large scale scrum) framework by @less_works

Craig asks questions of Renee and Tony from an Agile Coaching course

Tony proves it’s live as he runs off to sooth his daughter, Craig and Renee take the opportunity to have some fun in his absence

Books The Revolutionists are Reading: Impact Mapping (Gojko Adzic), Lean Startup (Eric Ries), Bridging the Communication Gap (Gojko Adzic)

https://twitter.com/neil_killick/status/537150511107940353 https://twitter.com/drunkcod/status/519030634162167809

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/the-agile-revolution-86.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-86 (56 minutes)

ScrumAus — Episode 85: Scrum Australia 2014 Vox Pop Jan 31, 2015
Tony and a sometimes over-modulated Craig (with Renee popping up from time to time) roam the floor at lunchtime at Scrum Australia in Sydney and talk to some interesting Scrum folks along the way about their thoughts on the conference and the Scrum community in general:

Shane Sendall (Suncorp) – end to end delivery and design patterns for teams, minimum loveable products, looking at flow efficiency

Justin Urbanski (Rally) – Scrum Alliance Coaching Clinic, minimum viable bureacracy, scaling

Ben Hogan (Tabar) and Martyn Frank (CBA) – teams overcommitting, Scrum in 60 seconds, visual facilitation inspired by Lynne Cazaly, kanban in curriculum development in universities

Neil Killick (MYOB) – spoke with Craig Brown running the #noestimates Puzzle Game, 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes, Tony suggests #lotsofestimates, Neil’s posts on #noestimates

Jason Yip (ThoughtWorks) and Sunish Chabba – learning to design problems, Spotify model is a good example because it considers scaling and distribution

Craig Brown (Tabar) – Dare Festival in Melbourne

Venky Krishnamurthy (Suncorp) – talk at conference “Building products that customers love by strengthening Scrum with Design Thinking and Lean Startup methods”, article “Building Products That Customers Love: Strengthen Scrum with Design Thinking and Lean Startup“, Who Is Agile Australia & New Zealand, dispelling some of the myths around Agile

Pete Tansey – RBA talk, agile in government organisations, starting Agile projects

Michael Rembach (Transport for NSW) and John Ferguson Smart (Wakaleo) – collaborative work practices, BDD In Action, Thucydides, “The Three Amigos – going to the heart of BDD” workshop

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TheAgileRevolution-85 (40 minutes)

P1020445 — Episode 84: Retrospectives in Middle Earth with Rachael Tempest Wood Dec 18, 2014
Rachael Tempest Wood from Nomad8 in Wellington joins Tony and Craig in the Brisbane Queen Street Mall over lunch with a bonus busker on saxophone and they discuss:

PMI and Agile are completely different mindsets, PMI Project Managers are “the CIOs of their projects”

AgileWelly – strength through the struggle of doing Agile in government

Wellington Agile community led by TradeMe, Snapper, BNZ

Gojko Adzic – Specification by Example and Impact Mapping

Agile NZ conference

Retrospective design – creativity in facilitation is a gap

Esther Derby’s model for restrospectives

Paper Airplane game – using an abstract process to apply learnings to the real process

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/theagilerevolution-84.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-84 (25 minutes)

GojkoAdzic — Episode 83: Making Impacts with Gojko Adzic Nov 30, 2014
Gojko Adzic “does computers” which means he helps people deliver software and he caught up with Craig on a recent YOW! DepthFirst tour of Australia. Gojko is the author of numerous books including “Bridging The Communication Gap“, “Specification by Example“, “Impact Mapping” and “50 Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories“.

XP – started with “Extreme Programming Explained” which was really about developers ruling the world – XP is not dead, it won!

TDD has crossed the chasm to mainstream

Sturgeons Law – 90% of anything is going to be crap

Continuous integration and automation has opened up a world of possibilities

“Bridging the Communication Gap” – about finding ways to break dysfunctional processes in organisations

“Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

The most valuable companies in the world are software companies

It’s more about the right people being involved rather than narrowly defined roles

“Specification by Example” – a collaborative way of coming up with good requirements and tests involving a cross functional team

Pschologically people perceive that tests come after development – in that case you have already failed

BDD – no canonical definition, would love BDD and SBE to be the same thing

“Impact Mapping” – based on a Swedish interaction design process – about setting goals and strageies

Impact Mapping uptake outside of IT – Marcus Hammarberg on Doctors in Indonesia and Ahmad Fahmy on helping orphanges in Egypt

“50 Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories” – a lot more to good user stories than just a template

Hamburger Slicing – last resort technique for technical story breakdown to think about options for value

Product Management is the big missing piece – teams could benefit from doing this better

As an industry we produce too much software – need to change the percentage of software that can achieve something big

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TheAgileRevolution-83 (45 minutes)

name_col_sq_200 — Episode 82: The Heckle Revolution Nov 25, 2014
Craig joins Darren Rogan, Ben Morgan and Leigh Appel in a special cross over episode with the Hack && Heckle Podcast to talk Agile and preview the upcoming YOW! conference that will be covered by both podcasts.

This episode has been released simulatenously as 088 The Heckle Revolution by Hack && Heckle.

Discussion points included:

Hack && Heckle interview with Scott Hanselman from YOW! 2013

Hack && Heckle intervoew with Ed Kmett from YOW! Lambda Jam 2014

Hack && Heckle Tech Project Tools Overview including Sprintly, Trello, JIRA and Pivotal Tracker

Half Arsed Agile Manifesto

40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes – The Lean Startup, Scaling Agile, Holacracy, Spotify Tribes and Agile Marketing

Not marketers, growth hackers!

50 in 50 keynote from YOW! 2010

YOW! 2014 preview, discount code is HECKLEREVOLUTION

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/theagilerevolution-82.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-82 (39 minutes)

JustinHennessy — Episode 81: Resetting Agile & Devops with Justin Hennessy Nov 05, 2014
Sitting in a sometimes noisy coffee shop on a unusually cold Brisbane day, Craig sits down for a chat with Justin Hennessy, a Scrum Master, Devops and System Administrator all rolled into one!

“An Agile Team Reset” article on the Scrum Alliance

The High Performance Tree by Lyssa Adkins

resetting awesome

early Agile experience shaped by “User Stories Applied” by Mike Cohn

“Coaching Agile Teams” by Lyssa Adkins reshapes the way of thinking about about teams

Agile in Adelaide versus Agile in Brisbane

Coaching Circles with Lyssa Adkins

Devops is more of a culture than a title

being a Scrum Master on a single team is hard and the full-time role debate

infrastructure has become a form of coding in itself

infrastructure resource as part of a core Agile team

better management and testing of configuration artefacts, unit testing and CI frameworks

infrastructure deployment tools are often just another thing to maintain

our job as Agile people is to help organisations evolve and change

resetting the expectations of good enough

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/theagilerevolution-81.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-81 (42 minutes)

Em Campbell-Pretty — Episode 80: Context Matters in SAFe with Em Campbell-Pretty Nov 01, 2014
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne; Craig, Renee and Tony catch up with Em Campbell-Pretty to talk about the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as well as Impact Mapping and a variety of other topics:

Em’s Agile journey and how she came to Agile from the business side and discovered SAFe before it was SAFe

Australia’s first Agile release train and the SAFe Telstra Enterprise Data Warehouse Case Study

Pretty Agile blog – Adventures in Scaling Agile

Scaling Software Agility and Agile Software Requirements books by Dean Leffingwell

did SAFe without PSI Planning – doing textbook SAFe you will most likely fail – apply it to your context

SAFe is designed for big enterprise and is just where you start

Leading SAFe training – focus on lean principles and leadership

Epic – Feature – Story – why?

if your wall isn’t changing then your process is probably not changing (inspect and adapt)

key metrics – cycle time, employee net promotor score and customer net promotor score – recommended book “The Ultimate Question 2.0“

Context Matters – consulting, training and coaching with Mark Richards

people take comfort from the fact there is a process (and a certification)

SAFe 3.0 – cleaned up some of issues and imagery, lean leadership, etc…

the book is still a reasonable resource but the website is the most up-to-date source

Impact Mapping – good way to get alignment around business objectives on a project – “Impact Mapping: Making an Impact over Shipping Software” presentation at Agile Australia 2014

Impact Mapping is good for mapping opportunities and assumption testing – why, who is impacted, how do we want behaviours to change and what can we do to support the impacts, Story Mapping is further down the line

Impact Mapping book and website are both good resources, Em’s blog post “How I Fell in Love with Impact Mapping“

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TheAgileRevolution-80 (35 minutes)

14491375311_22bf182a39_z — Episode 79: Vomit Value with Jim Benson Oct 08, 2014
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne, Jim Benson of Personal Kanban fame takes some time to talk with Craig, Renee, Tony and (a very silent) Kim Ballestrin and along the way they talk about:

early work implementing David J. Anderson’s Agile Management which resulted in Jim focussing on the person (Personal Kanban) and David focussing on the organisation (Kanban method) – two different viewpoints on the same solution set

XP, Scrum, Kanban method and Personal Kanban exemplify the people who created them

The Oath of Non Allegiance

Scrum vs Kanban

Why Limit WIP and Why Plans Fail books out now and working on an upcoming book about meetings

Individuals and interactions is redundant – relevant in 2001 to shake people out of complacency

Agile is anti-manager

Agile in knowledge work

WIP limits and avoiding “death flow”

Vomit Value – user stories with spurious and arbitrary value in a 2 week sprint

standardisation of humans and collaboration

Toyota change of culture – “what’s good for your life is good for Toyota”

Product Owners (#nopo) – should be the stewards of the value stream

https://twitter.com/Playin_w_nomes/status/479031669517582337

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TheAgileRevolution-79 (45 minutes)

Renee — Episode 78: Renee-Renee-Renee Sep 20, 2014
Yes they’re at it again ! The revolutionists bring forth their innermost thoughts on the life the universe and most importantly Agile . Oh yeah and Craig and Tony ask the question repeatedly ….Renee,Renee……Renee

Wall street hands the whip back to their staff …Less deaths and sustainable pace

Via @jboogie : The Lean Product Management Manifesto

Lean Startup Website and the Principles of Lean Startup

Slicing Heuristic Concept Explained : Via @neil_killick :

Task based collaboration with Asana

JIRA Service Desk application

The new names for Distributed Agile and CoLocated Agile : Via Alistair Cockburn: @TotherAlistair

State of Agile Survey – Version One

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TheAgileRevolution-78 (61 minutes)

AgileAus2014 — Episode 77: Agile Australia 2014 Vox Pop #2 Sep 02, 2014
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne, Craig and Renee grab the microphone again and wander the conference foyer in one of the breaks looking for interesting people in the Australian Agile community to ask them about what they are working on and their views of the conference.

The people they harassed include:

Tyson Nutt – believes giving teams empowerment is part of the core of strong Agile teams, Rachel Botsman on disruption was a highlight

Stephanie BySouth – enjoyed seeing new speakers and attendees and that we are taking agile outside of IT, looking to bring collaborative innovation into the space, co-organiser of Agile Coaching Circles Melbourne

Dipesh Pala – IBM is realising we don’t do Agile to our clients, we do Agile with our clients, spoke on how leaders can recognise the humans in our teams

Chris Chan – holocracy and the concept of no managers is pushing the boundaries, co-organiser of Agile Coaching Circles Melbourne, stream chair of Agile Australia 2014

Neil Killick, Simon Bristow and Alexandre Barreto – Red Bubble is building their Agile development shop in Melbourne, MYOB are a large Agile shop in Melbourne, good lean startup feel running through the conference, #noestimates the book may come sometime soon (or not)

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TheAgileRevolution-77 (19 minutes)

AgileAus2014 — Episode 76: Agile Australia 2014 Vox Pop #1 Aug 22, 2014
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne, Craig and Tony grabbed the microphone and scoured the conference foyer in one of the breaks looking for interesting people in the Australian Agile community to ask them about what they are working on and their views of the conference.

The people they harassed include:

Maxime Groenewoud – Project Manager, enjoyed hearing about new practices including microservices architecture

Nigel Dalton – CXO at REA Group, Agile Australia advisor, highlight of the conference was an Ellen DeGeneres moment getting a selfie with Brant Cooper, excited to hear about holocracy at Zappos, at REA have been disrupting through bringing virtual reality to real estate, “there is one innovative startup in real estate in Australia each week!”

Steve Lawrence – Agile Coach and Agile Australia stream chair – has been watching the scaled agile debate and the learnings allowing us to take the message into the business

Paul Detheridge – Executive Coach at Shibusa – need to set the ecosystem up well at the executive level, huge opportunity outside of software

Tom Sulston – Thoughtworker and Agile Australia stream chair – enjoyed Adel Smee talk on Nice Pairing and Martin Fowler keynote on ethics of software development

Nish Mahanty – Program Manager at RMIT University – interested in gaining new insights and reconnecting with the community

Michael Stange – Agile Coach at IOOF – always enjoys the discussions in the hallway

David Brough-Smyth – Agile Coach – enojoyed Jim Benson keynote on lean thinking and visualisation and adapting the good parts of the toolkit

Renee Troughton – Agile Revolutioner and needs no introduction!

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TheAgileRevolution-76 (25 minutes)

alanbustamante — Episode 75: Agile Expedition with Alan Bustamante Jul 12, 2014
At Agile 2013 in Nashville on a park bench, in a garden, near a waterfall that is ever present, Craig catches up with Alan Bustamante to talk about his Agile expedition. Along the way they chat about:

the enormity of the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville and the average weather outside

the use case approach in the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and how it set the scene for Scrum and Agile

bringing architects along for the Agile journey

an initial lure for Agile – “the pressure of letting the team down is greater than staying resistant”

Agile Cincinnati and the take up in Cincinatti and Colombus

the need to “get back to making work fun and building relationships”

Alan’s work at Seapine Software and “The Agile Expedition” book

Alan’s conference tip: make it a goal to meet at least one person and get to know them

Advice: “there are bigger things in life than project work, keep grounded and realise what’s important”

Starting a company: Xcelerate Partners

Agile 2013 nighlights were Michael Sahota and Olaf Lewitz on “Temenos—the Healing Container” and Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd on “Conflict Facilitation as a Leadership Skill“

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TheAgileRevolution-75 (36 minutes)

lynnecazaly — Episode 74: Visual Mojo with Lynne Cazaly Jun 29, 2014
Live at Agile Australia 2014, Craig and Renee talk all things visual with one of Australia’s top visual facilitators, Lynne Cazaly:

What is Visual Facilitation and Graphic Recording

You can use visuals even if you can’t draw

Lynne’s story into Visual Facilitation

How to anchor emphasized words

The benefit of a chisel tip

The girl who played with paper presentation at Agile Australia 2014

Tools that are useful – the good ol’ finger, brushes, procreate, sketches, inkflow, sketchclub

The benefit of bringing people up to speed with visual stories

To split or not to split – facilitation and the visual scribe

Turning your back on the room – a no go or a load of tripe?

Preparation – to spend time upfront or not, using templates

Facilitation through lean coffee wall (gather, sort, do)

Using visuals to engage and distill information for future visibility

Lynne’s next course in Melbourne on the 14th of July on Visual Facilitation

Visual Mojo the book

Create Change coming out in the middle of July!

You can find out more about Lynne on her website or through @lynnecazaly on twitter.

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The Agile Revolution-74 (31 minutes)

AgileCoach — Episode 73: What Made You An Agile Coach? May 26, 2014
Tony asks a philisophical question , whilst Renee harnesses her nineties pop star – Ice Ice Baby and Craig marvels at Tony’s cool intro – probably the coolest intro he’s done since the eighties.

Craig entices us to save the environment by using Octopads instead of sticky notes – with Luke Stephenson

Renee get us game playing with the Lean Startup game”Snowflake” from TastyCupcakes.com

Carrying on the game theme ,Devops-against humanity

Tony asks ….What Made You An Agile Coach?

I didn’t sign up for all this people Sh**t from @flowchainsensei

TDD is dead .Long live Testing from @dhh

Ship It Day! with Renee

The “Safe Segment” – discussing Safe Training blog from Steve Barrett

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The Agile Revolution – 73 (54.21)

JoelPobar — Episode 72: Shipping at Facebook with Joel Pobar May 22, 2014
From YOW! 2013, Craig and Renee talk to Joel Pobar, currently working at Facebook as an Engineering Lead and talk about:

Joel’s journey to Facebook

Common Language Runtime (CLR)

Building and shipping fast

The value of a developers time and their critical paths

A day in the life of a Facebook manager

Who is the Product Owner in an infrastructural team?

A/B (experimentation) testing in New Zealand

Stabalisation and release process

Recruiting the right people

Pulling out the sharpies when pivoting on PHP

Striving for infrastructural efficiency and how to empower the team to this goal

Owning the stack from the bottom to the top and its impact on agility

Checkout HHVM, the Facebook Engineering Blog & Open Compute

You can contact Joel at facebook or on twitter at @joelpob.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/theagilerevolution-72.mp3

The Agile Revolution- 72 (41 minutes)

KennyRubin — Episode 71: Essential Scrum with Kenny Rubin May 02, 2014
At Agile 2013 in Nashville, TN, Craig catches up with Kenny Rubin, author of “Essential Scrum” and Scrum trainer and coach at Innolution. While sitting in the corridor, they talk about:

Essential Scrum – the success and background of the book

Visual AGILExicon® – free image library to describe Scrum and Agile in a visual way

The lack of Agile (and technical) audio books

Strategies for Agile Portfolio Management and Scaling with Feature vs Component Teams talk at Agile 2013

The size of the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville

Contact Kenny to speak at your user group / meetup if he is passing through your town!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/theagilerevolution-71.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-71 (15 minutes)

IsThisThingOn — Episode 70: Hello Is This Thing On? Apr 09, 2014
Craig, Renee and Tony catch up again and discuss the wonderfully diverse world of Agile :

Tony starts the SAFe conversation again via @RonJeffries blog post SAFe – Good not Good Enough

I want Agile back , you ? via Tim Ottinger

Craig brings the Raccoon back whilst discussing ” Reports of Agile’s death” from @jbrains, “Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility) ” from @pragdave

What is ScrumStudy and the “Scrum Master Certified” ? via @sdunnrocket9

We’ll ask for estimates @jonelf

Renee gets in a shameless plug for the “Who Is Agile in Australia and New Zealand ?” Book

Siemens success story ” Kanban at Scale” via InfoQ

“Kanban in Action” book review via authors @marcusoftnet and @joakimsunden

“The Human Side of Agile ” book review @gilbroza

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The Agile Revolution – 70 (65 minutes)

Michael Nygard — Episode 69: DevOps with Michael Nygard Mar 29, 2014
At YOW 2013 in Sydney, Craig and Renee catch up with Michael Nygard and discuss the world of DevOps including:

Michael’s book “Release it!: Design and Deploy Production Ready Software“

What DevOps really is

The values of DevOps and its relationship to the Agile Manifesto

Could DevOps have occurred without Agile?

How much of Release it is still holding well?

Anti-patterns in DevOps (eg. a separate DevOps group)

Cognitect and Closure

Development is production

Where does ITIL fit in with DevOps?

Why Problem Management may no longer be relevant

How good are we really in DevOps?

You can contact Michael on twitter at @mtnygard or at the Think Relevance Blog.

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The Agile Revolution-69 (28 minutes)

peascarrots — Episode 68: Together Again Like Peas & Carrots Mar 24, 2014
Can you believe it ! Yes it’s a real Forest Gump moment, the revolutionists are finally back together again just like peas and carrots . They are back to their best discussing :

What is Agile 2014 ? Inspired by The Dark Side of Scrum – Thomas Schranz – @__tosh

Renee gets agile academic : Understanding Post-Adoptive Agile Usage – an Exploratory Cross-Case analysis : Mali Senapathi and Ananth Srinivasan

Tony befuddles Craig and Renee with a great question : Two top tips to enable the people to uptake agile and empower them ?

Laminating not slicing : Alistair Cockburn

Tony quotes “Cher” (yes that’s right “Cher”) and turns back time

37 Signals becomes Basecamp

CSIRO builds Sophie a dragon

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/theagilerevolution68-togetheragainlikepeasandcarrots.mp3

The Agile Revolution-68 (53 minutes)

boysnightout — Episode 67: A Boys Night Out Feb 18, 2014
Craig and Tony take the opportunity in Renee’s absence to talk about the year that was , conferences and workshops attended and generally cover all things Agile:

A managers guide to attending agile team events – Illustratedagile.com

Lyssa’s “Coaching Agile Teams” book

Steve Blank – Why Continuous Deployment May Mean Continuous Customer Disappointment

YOW 2013 wrap up

Lyssa Adkins / Michael Spade – Coaching Agile Team workshop

Ilan Goldstein – Scrum Shortcuts Without Cutting Corners

Twitter Quotes: @RonJeffries, @WendyAppell, @drunkcod

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/theagilerevolution_a_boys_night_out.mp3

The Agile Revolution-67 (60 minutes)

Michael-Craig-Lyssa — Episode 66: Agile Coaching with Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd Feb 11, 2014
At YOW 2013 in Sydney, Craig, Renee and Jeremie Benazra catch up with Lyssa Adkins, author of “Coaching Agile Teams” and Michael Spayd, both Agile Coaches at the Agile Coaching Institute and chew the fat on:

What is Agile?

Lyssa’s “Coaching Agile Teams” book

The difficulties in being an Agile Coach

The XP Coach

Coaching as a more mature version of leadership

Where professional coaching fits into Agile Coaching

Why Agile Coaches are sought after whereas general organisational coaching is less prevalent

The training of managers and its impact on mindsets

Michael’s “Coaching the Agile Enterprise” book

Team coaches vs enterprise coaches – what is the difference

Scrum Mastering an enterprise transformation

ICAgile

How to teach a pig to sing

The coaching oath of non-allegiance

Certified Scrum Coach versus ICAgile Coach

The myriad of skill sets needed as an Agile Coach

Agile Management

Agile Coach as term and riding waves

Agile Coaching resources

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The Agile Revolution-66 (47 minutes)

GregSmith — Episode 65: Becoming Agile… with Greg Smith Nov 09, 2013
At Agile 2013 in Nashville, TN, Craig catches up with his old friend Greg Smith (no relation), co-author of “Becoming Agile… In An Imperfect World” and Agile Coach at GS Solutions Group. Greg regularly assists Fortune 500 with their adoption of Agile and the quote of the podcast has to be “discipline or good software practices are proportionally inverse to how much money you make!”. Some of the topics of conversation were:

Fire the client!

The state of Agile in the United States

Switch by Chip and Dan Heath

The traditional practices are still important

“Becoming Agile… In An Imperfect World” and what would be added if it were written in 2013

PMI and Agile – should be used together

Scaling Agile and Essential Scrum by Kenny Rubin

Beyond Budgeting

Collaboration Culture and Teams track at Agile 2013

Story Mapping

Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf

Diversified – Business Analyst Times and Project Times

IIBA Agile Extension

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TheAgileRevolution-65 (23 minutes)

Nick-Craig — Episode 64: Interstate 40 East with Nick Muldoon Oct 04, 2013
On a road trip to Agile 2013 from Dallas to Nashville, Craig chats to Nick Muldoon while cruising in a Chevy Equinox eastbound on Interstate 40 between Memphis and Nashville. Nick is an Agile Coach at Twitter and formerly the Product manager for GreenHopper at Atlassian and whilst doing 65 miles an hour they chat about:

Interstate 40

Memphis – Graceland, Sun Records, Beale Street, BBQ

Atlassian and Greenhopper (renamed JIRA Agile at Agile 2013)

FOLIO for JIRA

Drive (Dan Pink) and ~~Fed-Ex~~ Ship It Days

Peter Senge and the Learning Organisation

Atlassian Blogs

JIRA Issue Collector

Agile approach at Atlassian and on the Greenhopper team

Twitter – 1,200 engineers to work 140 characters!

#Music (We Are Hunted)

The Fail Whale is harpooned and scaling Twitter (Agile, teams and platform)

SprintZero: The Physics of Agile Marketing

The convergence of Lean Startup, Growth Hacking and Agile Marketing

“You Can Still Dunk in the Dark”

Optimizely

San Francisco Agile Marketing Meetup

Share what you learn!

Uncle Julio’s – the best Mexican this side of the border!

Visual Management – Leading With What You Can See

Scaled Agile Framework

The Social Network

Scaling – how much is enough?

Contributing to Open Source and the benefits to a business – email us your thoughts!

AAFTT (Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools)

Agile 2013 highlights – “these are my people!”

Wikispeed

Innovation Games

Fat Tire

Agile 2014 – Orlando

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TheAgileRevolution-64 (64 minutes)

alan_shalloway — Episode 63: The Lean-Agile Project with Al Shalloway Sep 09, 2013
At Agile 2013 in Nashville, TN, Craig talks to Al Shalloway from Net Objectives in the open space area (ironically in front of a waterfall) about his current areas of interest in the Lean Agile community. Al has been a leading voice in the Agile community for many years, is the author of many software development and Agile related books and is a SAFe Program Consultant as well as a co-founder of the Lean Software & Systems Consortium. The topics discussed include:

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and the manifestation of Lean

Third Generation of Lean Agile or more simply The Lean-Agile Project

Kanban clarity

“When your up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you’re there to drain the swamp” – IBM

Aspire by Kevin Hall

Steve Chandler – “When things serve us they’re good, and when they don’t they’re not”

Singles

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/theagilerevolution-63.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-63 (26 minutes)

Agile2013 — Episode 62: Agile 2013 Days 3, 4 & 5 Sep 09, 2013
Craig continues his daily reports from Agile 2013 in Nashville with some observations on the sessions he attended on days 3, 4 and 5.

More in-depth notes will be available on Craig’s blog soon.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/theagilerevolution-62.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-62 (13 minutes)

Agile2013 — Episode 61: Agile 2013 Day 2 Aug 07, 2013
Craig continues his daily reports from Agile 2013 in Nashville with some observations on the sessions he attended on day 2.

More in-depth notes will be available on Craig’s blog soon.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/theagilerevolution-61.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-61 (17 minutes)

Agile2013 — Episode 60: Agile 2013 Day 1 Aug 06, 2013
Craig is in Nashville, Tennessee in the USA for the Agile 2013 conference,, and recaps the opening keynote as well as the day 1 sessions he attended.

More in-depth notes will be available on Craig’s blog soon.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/theagilerevolution-60.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-60 (15 minutes)

@neilkillick — Episode 59: #NOestimates with Neil Killick Jul 14, 2013
Tony and Kim Ballestrin have a chat with Neil Killick whilst at Agile Australia 2013 in Sydney and talk about:

The origins of the #NOestimates hashtag

Agile with a small ‘a’ – going for agility and not a process

Neil’s journey into Agile

The link between health and the values & principles of Agile

The manifesto

Embracing change

Safe to fail

How changing our language can change our culture

Expectations management through range provisioning

Understanding real constraints

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/theagilerevolution-59.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-59 (33 minutes)

Beer Cheers — Episode 58: Don’t Drink and Podcast! Jun 25, 2013
Craig and Renee are in Sydney and dangerously podcast after Renee’s one (1) drink and Craig’s two (2) drinks. Along the way they fumble over the following topics:

Agile Sydney meetup – Agile 101

Build Your Own Manifesto and Adam Weisbart’s Build Your Own Manifesto (and my Interview with Adam Weisbart at Agile 2012 in case you missed it)

Wordle – awesome word cloud generation tool

Agile observations from Dave Thomas (not Dave Thomas)

YOW! Lambda Jam and Lambda Jam and the buzz around functional programming

Emergent Design

Mike Cohn on “Hard to Read Handwriting is Best for User Stories” (and the associated research)

Craig’s notes from Tech Connect 2013 in Brisbane

Startup Metrics for Pirates (AARRR)

When would you pick waterfall over agile (…we think you know the answer!)

DWP drops agile from flagship government software project

New book Commitment from Chris Matts and Olav Maassen has been released – a full review coming soon

Craig has been reading the MEAP of Kanban in Action and Renee is writing her own Agile Forest story

Quotes:

Seeing more that #agile coaching is being commoditised and that the entry criteria is whether you can do a stand-up or facilitate a retro

— Chris Chan (@ChrisChanAU) May 27, 2013

@mikewcohn Regarding handwriting blog you didn't consider what the point of the story wall is – is it to retain and remember cards @mstange

— Renee Troughton (@AgileRenee) May 26, 2013

@mikewcohn or is it to be able to find a card quickly so that you can move it/talk about it @mstange

— Renee Troughton (@AgileRenee) May 26, 2013

@AgileRenee Agreed–I really do prefer neatly written cards. I'm just adding some fun to sharing a bit of research.

— Mike Cohn (@mikewcohn) May 27, 2013

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/theagilerevolution-58.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-58 (55 minutes)

Episode 57: No, No, Noooo! May 24, 2013
Tony, Renee and Craig meet in sunny suburban Sandgate and have an intense debate about the world of Agile while dealing with the 4:01 to Shorncliffe and beeping out Tony’s references to seagulls and respect.

Agile coaching is more about building the capacity of people and high performing teams rather than processes, the Situational Leadership Model, Shu Ha Ri and pragmatic coaching

No estimates – Purpose Of Estimation by Martin Fowler, The NoEstimates Movement by Ron Jeffries, numerous posts and an Agile Business Analysts Meetup by Neil Killick and numerous posts by Woody Zuill

Inspirational speaker Peter Williams from Deloitte

No prioritisation and no product owner movements

The Costs of Ignoring Employee Engagement

2012 Version One State of Agile Survey as well as Renee’s blog and Craig’s InfoQ post on the survey

Al Shalloway – Why I am No Longer With Lean-Kanban University

No videos from LKNA

Australian startup We Are Hunted purchased by Twitter

Renee has been reading The Principles of Product Development Flow, Tony is re-reading Good To Great and Craig is reading Solr In Action and Devops For Developers

Quotes:

Unstructor (n): someone who, by attempting to teach a topic, leaves the student more ill-informed than when they started.

— Daniel Terhorst-North is mostly @tastapod@mas.to (@tastapod) April 20, 2013

Mondays are fine.
It's just your job you hate.

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) April 29, 2013

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/theagilerevolution-57.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-57 (56 minutes)

Scrum Australia 2013 — Episode 56: Scrum Australia plus a Hint of Peas & Apples Apr 14, 2013
Craig and Renee rendezvous in Sydney for Scrum Australia and clear the backlog for a way overdue podcast. Whilst Craig battled a cold and Renee a fit of giggles, they discussed:

Highlights from the inaugural Scrum Australia in Sydney

LAST Conference 2013 in Melbourne is now accepting submissions

Kenny Rubin’s presentations at Scrum Australia, his book Essential Scrum and his Visual AGILExicon

Clark & Wheelwright study (1993) on Multitasking

Complexity Thinking by Anton Rossouw and some of the models

RubyConf Australia 2013

Kim Ballestrin is off to LKNA!

New certifications such as Kanban Coaching Professional and Disciplined Agile Certification

Every Employee Should Work From Home (David Heinemeier Hansson on Forbes) http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/03/29/david-heinemeier-hansson-every-employee-should-work-from-home/

WIP Limits by Conversation (Pawel Brodzinski) – http://brodzinski.com/2013/03/wip-limits-by-conversation.html

Scaled Agile Framework

Dinosaur Train

The Insufficiency of Scrum is a Fallacy – http://agile.dzone.com/articles/insufficiency-scrum-fallacy

Amazon Acquires Goodreads: World’s Biggest Online Retailer Acquires Beloved Book Site – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/28/amazon-acquires-goodreads_n_2974572.html

Renee has been reading Fixing The Game and Real Options whilst Craig has been reading The Agile Pocket Guide and Sonar In Action

The brand new spiffy “The Agile Revolution” website – comment if you like it!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/theagilerevolution-56.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-56 (59 minutes)

Zach Holman — Episode 55: YOW! 2012 with Zach Holman Dec 30, 2012
Our last YOW! 2012 interview, Craig and Renee have a talk to Zach Holman (@holman) from Github and chat about:

The open source model – what is it?

Meeting hate crimes

Scaling organisational size

Culture spreading outside of programming

Being agile without being Agile

Being enabled to make change

Hack houses

Working less makes better code

Internal value adding tools

Innovation and 20% time

The challenge of working in teams

Thankyou to the YOW! 2012 conference for inviting The Agile Revolution to record podcast interviews at the conference!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/theagilerevolution-55.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-55 (30 minutes)

Ben Hogan & Peter Moran — Episode 54: YOW 2012 DevOps with Ben Hogan and Peter Moran Dec 30, 2012
Still getting through some of the fantastic speakers at YOW! 2012, in today’s episode Renee speaks to Ben Hogan (@agileben) and Peter Moran (@petermoran) about all things DevOps including:

REA‘s DevOps journey for the home ideas team

Hooroo’s DevOps journey

Continuous Deployment

Advantages of co-locating the DevOps people into the teams

Distributed teams

Amazon and Engine Yard server farms

Callenges of DevOps – people or technological?

Innovation

Change to testing

Thankyou to the YOW! 2012 conference for inviting The Agile Revolution to record podcast interviews at the conference!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/theagilerevolution-54.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-54 (27 minutes)

Xmas — Episode 53: Merry Xmas Mumbles Dec 19, 2012
In this episode Tony, Craig and Renee once again meet in a dingy (and occasionally slightly noisy) cafe and discuss:

The Agile Alphabet (Koti Reddy Bhavanam)

The Agile Pocket Guide is released by Peter Saddington (@agileScout)

An Alternative to Agile Coaching (Phil Abernathy)

Agile Australia 2013 is now open for speaker submissions!

Agile 2013 in Nashville is now open too for submissions!

Quotes:

https://twitter.com/flowchainsensei/status/208489500735836160

https://twitter.com/CFOAmerica/status/151739448269344768

It's not deliver so fast that marketing doesn't have a chance to change their mind but deliver so fast that they don't have to #yow2012

— Jason Yip (@jchyip@mastodon.online) (@jchyip) December 7, 2012

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/theagilerevolution-53.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-53 (34 minutes)

Aino Vonge Corry — Episode 52: YOW! 2012 Retrospectives with Aino Vonge Corry Dec 16, 2012
In this episode Craig and Renee talk to Aino Vonge Corry (@apaipi) at YOW! 2012 and discuss:

Retrospectives

Design patterns

Trojan retrospectives

Enterprise retrospective patterns

Retrospective facilitators – part of the team?

Distributed retrospectives (and a plug for Linoit)

The importance of acknowledging success and learning

Women in IT

Thankyou to the YOW! 2012 conference for inviting The Agile Revolution to record podcast interviews at the conference!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/theagilerevolution-52.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-52 (36 minutes)

Fred George — Episode 51: YOW! 2012 Programmer Anarchy with Fred George Dec 11, 2012
In this episode Renee and Steve Dalton from the Six Degrees Podcast (formally Coding By Numbers) at YOW! 2012 talk to Fred George (fgeorge52) from Forward on:

What is Programmer Anarchy?

Old school development and cowboys

Risk and appropriateness of anarchy to culture

Lean startups and parrot cages

Thankyou to the YOW! 2012 conference for inviting The Agile Revolution to record podcast interviews at the conference!
https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/theagilerevolution-51.mp3
TheAgileRevolution-51 (38 minutes)

YOW! 2012 — Episode 50: YOW! 2012 Day 1 Wrap Up Dec 11, 2012
Craig, Renee and Peter Sellars (from Auckland, New Zealand) talk about their first day at the YOW! 2012 Software Developer Conference, chatting about the speakers that they listened to and their thoughts on them including:

Don Reinersten‘s “The Practical Science of Batch Size”

Fred George‘s “Programmer Anarchy”

Dan North‘s “Embracing Uncertainty”

Aino Vonge Corry‘s “Retrospectives, Who Needs Them, Anyway?”

Marko Rodriguez‘s “Big Data”

Michael Nygard‘s “Architecture and Design”

John-Henry Harris‘ “Design and Innovation at the LEGO Group”

Jeff Patton‘s “Co-making Great Products”; and

Mike Lee‘s “The Most Important Minute of Your Life”

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/theagilerevolution-50.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-50 (39 minutes)

AlistairCockburn — Episode 49: Merry Manifesto Madness with Alistair Cockburn Nov 13, 2012
Craig and Renee lob around to Tony’ abode to interview his house guest, Alistair Cockburn. Alistair spends time:

denying a K Stew affair

answering what brings him to Australia

plugging his fantastic Advanced Agile Course

presenting his thoughts on where Agile is going

answering how the Agile Manifesto has shifted and whether the last line should be shifted earlier

talking about the simplicity principle

explaining the difficulty of Agile Organisational transformations

answering whether transformation that succeed better can be big-bang or have to evolve

discussing the sticky middle management layer where transformations become hard

ponderings on what is happening in the ICAgile space

generally taking the p*ss out of Renee, Tony and Craig

You can contact Alistair Cockburn for any work opportunities or Advanced Agile Training on totheralistair@gmail.com or totheralistair@aol.com.

You can contact Renee for any work opportunities or Agile 101 Training at renee@theagilerevolution.com.

Special thanks to Tony’s wattle bird in the background!

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/theagilerevolution-49.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-49 (48 minutes)

Declan Whelan — Episode 48: Declan (Not Dexter) Nov 10, 2012
At Agile 2012 in Dallas, Texas, Craig chats with Declan Whelan, a Canadian Agile Coach at LeanIntuit, the CTO and co-founder of a new startup called Printchomp and a newly elected member of the Agile Alliance board. Amongst other things we talk about pair coaching, running a Lean Startup, the direction of the Agile Alliance and the future of Agile.

His talk at Agile 2012 (with Alistair McKinnell) was entitled “Simple Design Applied: Spend More Time Creating Valuable Code“. Look out for a longer video interview with Declan on InfoQ.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/theagilerevolution-48.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-48 (25 minutes)

Adam Wesibart — Episode 47: $#*! Adam Weisbart Says Oct 25, 2012
Craig chats with Adam Weisbart as he tries to enjoy his breakfast at Agile 2012 in Dallas, Texas. When not eating toast, he is creating awesome stuff for the Agile community at his website, teaching Scrum courses or coaching teams at CollabNet. His talk at Agile 2012 was entitled “Agile Antipatterns: The Agilist’s Guide to Traps, Tripwires and Treachery“. Look out for a longer video interview with Adam Weisbart on InfoQ.

Retrospective Cookies

Update The Card Wall

Sh*t Bad Scrum Masters Say

The Agile Antipattern Project

Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby

Jedward – Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby)

Six Pages Of Scrum

Build Your Own Scrum

Scrum Cat Learns to Fetch a Sharpie

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/theagilerevolution-47.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-47 (19 minutes)

Peter Saddington — Episode 46: Raccoon Scout Sep 28, 2012
Craig chats with Peter Saddington (an Agile Coach and Consultant who is probably best known as the face behind Agile Scout) at Agile 2012 in Dallas, Texas about Agile in the US Military, the top lists on Agile Scout, his newly rewritten book “The Scrum Pocket Guide” and the state of Agile (or “Raccoon”!)

Peter is also the Co-Founder of Action & Influence and his upcoming book “The Agile Pocket Guide” will be released via Wiley in late 2012. His talk at Agile 2012 was entitled “Scaling Product Ownership at the US Air Force“. Look out for a longer video interview coming soon on InfoQ.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/theagilerevolution-46.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-46 (13 minutes)

Joe Justice — Episode 45: Team Wikispeed Sep 18, 2012
Craig chats with Joe Justice from Wikispeed at the Agile 2012 conference about extreme manufacturing and using Agile for social good to create a 100 mile per gallon car.

Joe is the founder, CEO and team leader at Wikispeed (by night) and an Agile Consultant for SolutionsIQ (by day).

From Agile 2012

From Agile 2012

You can also view Joe’s Q&A and keynote from the Agile 2012 conference, as well as his interview with InfoQ.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/theagilerevolution-45.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-45 (27 minutes )

Episode 45: Team Wikispeed Sep 18, 2012
Craig chats with Joe Justice from Wikispeed at the Agile 2012 conference about extreme manufacturing and using Agile for social good to create a 100 mile per gallon car.

Joe is the founder, CEO and team leader at Wikispeed (by night) and an Agile Consultant for SolutionsIQ (by day).

From Agile 2012

From Agile 2012

You can also view Joe’s Q&A and keynote from the Agile 2012 conference, as well as his interview with InfoQ.

https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/theagilerevolution-45.mp3

TheAgileRevolution-45 (27 minutes )

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