Tag Archives: Craig Smith

Episode 99: 99, Not Out!

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Malcolm-Christmas-Card-front-3-620x400Despite 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:

TheAgileRevolution-99 (65 minutes)

Episode 98: The Heckle Revolution YOW! 2015 Edition

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YOW_2015_Conference_-stacked-PNGCraig 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:

TheAgileRevolution-98 (50 minutes)

 

Episode 97: 3 Things, 3 Letters (Git, CTO, MBA) with Peter Bell

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PeterBellAt 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

TheAgileRevolution-97 (31 minutes)

Episode 96: YOW! 2014 Brisbane Vox Pop

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YOW_2014_logo-pngClearing 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:

TheAgileRevolution-96 (28 minutes)

Episode 94: Agile 2015 Wrap Up

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Agile2015Craig 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:

TheAgileRevolution-94 (39 minutes)

Episode 93: I Like Big Boards

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OpenJamCraig 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.

TheAgileRevolution-93 (40 minutes)

Episode 92: Agile 2015 Day 1

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Agile2015Craig and Renee visit Washington, DC for the Agile 2015 conference and debrief in the Agile Alliance Lounge after day 1:

TheAgileRevolution-92 (23 minutes)

Episode 91: Coding The Architecture with Simon Brown

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SimonBrownCraig 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

TheAgileRevolution-91 (28 minutes)

Episode 90: Step Away From The Book

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aepCraig and Renee catch up late in the evening to chat about recent Agile articles and events including:

TheAgileRevolution-90 (50 minutes)

Episode 89: Intersecting Service Management, People Development & Agile

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IanKorrineJonesCraig 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

TheAgileRevolution-89 (33 minutes)