Tag Archives: Craig Smith

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)

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Episode 139: Talking Agile Craft with Steve Elliott

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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…!)

TheAgileRevolution-139 (45 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)

Episode 133: Rules Are For Pussies!

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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:

TheAgileRevolution-133 (76 minutes)