Tag Archives: Agile 2016

Episode 145: Working Effectively with (Legacy) Code with Michael Feathers

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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…

TheAgileRevolution-145 (33 minutes)

Episode 144: Mob Programming & #noestimates with Woody Zuill

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Craig is at Agile 2016 in Atlanta and catches up with his old friend Woody Zuill to talk about Mob Programming and #noestimates

TheAgileRevolution-144 (41 minutes)

Episode 142: Agile and SSLM at cPrime with Zubin Irani

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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

TheAgileRevolution-142 (20 minutes)

 

Episode 141: Agile Coaching with a Latin Touch with Martin Alaimo

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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)

TheAgileRevolution-141 (16 minutes)

 

Episode 140: Spinning the AgilityHealth Radar with Sally Elatta

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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

TheAgileRevolution-140 (19 minutes)

Episode 137: The State of JIRA with Jake Brereton

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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

TheAgileRevolution-137 (23 minutes)

Episode 136: Water-Scrum.org-Falling with Dave West

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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

TheAgileRevolution-136 (37 minutes)

Episode 135: DevOps & Electric Cloud with Anders Wallgren

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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

TheAgileRevolution-135 (27 minutes)

Episode 134: Unicorns, Distributed Teams and Agile User Groups with Mark Kilby

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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:

TheAgileRevolution-134 (30 minutes)