Tag Archives: Microservices

Episode 124: Talking Testing with Anne-Marie Charrett

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16069825102_aa54010a22_zCraig 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“

TheAgileRevolution-124 (39 minutes)

Episode 122: Learning to Learn with Aino Vonge Corry

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ainoCraig 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)

TheAgileRevolution-122 (31 minutes)

Episode 120: Microservices & The Lean Enterprise with James Lewis

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jlewisCraig 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”

TheAgileRevolution-120 (31 minutes)

Episode 118: YOW! 2015 Brisbane Vox Pop

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yow_2015_conference_-stacked-pngCraig and Tony are once again roaming the lunch hall at YOW! 2015 in Brisbane, where they catch up with a number of people including:

TheAgileRevolution-118 (30 minutes)

Episode 112: Inside Spotify with Anders Ivarsson

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AndersRenee 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

TheAgileRevolution-112 (24 minutes)

Episode 102: The Essence of Microservices (and Agile) with Scott Shaw

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scottshawTony 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

TheAgileRevolution-102 (28 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)