Episode 152: Communities of Practice, Onions, Bus Stops and Shopfronts with Emily Webber

December 30, 2018 by The Agile Revolution

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

TheAgileRevolution-152 (33 minutes)

Episode 119: Agile (Raccoon) is Dead with “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas

November 25, 2016 by The Agile Revolution

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

TheAgileRevolution-119 (40 minutes)

Episode 95: User Story Mapping (Something Something) with Jeff Patton

September 15, 2015 by The Agile Revolution

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!
TheAgileRevolution-95 (43 minutes)

Episode 15: The Perfect World of Agile

October 20, 2011 by The Agile Revolution

The usual crew get together again:

Henrik Kniberg’s Scrum from the Trenches
Lyssa Adkin’s Coaching Agile Teams
Retrospective Cookies (found by Lisa Crispin)
Knowledge acquisition curve by Alistair Cockburn
Agile after the chasm by Alistair Cockburn
Rebooting the racoon by Craig Smith
What I learned from Steve Jobs by Guy Kawasaki
What everyone is too polite to say about Steve Jobs by Ryan Tate
Why not velocity as an Agile metric by Esther Derby
Working hard or hardly working by Esther Derby
One Manifesto to Rule them all
Leadership Skills: Tap into team member’s existing motivation by Christopher Avery
What would an organisation that is using Agile to the max look like?
SeeNowDo

Quotes

“Don’t mix dev ops with dev oops!”

“99% of we bapp bugs are caused by 1% of browser types #occupyinternetexplorer”

“Gartner’s analysts are predicting that by 2012 that Agile development methods will be used in 80% of projects.”

It's sad how Wile E. Coyote is remembered for his violence, and not for his brilliantly realistic paintings of tunnels.

— Matt Roller (@rolldiggity) October 15, 2011

Saying an empty room should "pull" a patient from ER misses the point completely. Patient should pull resources when they are needed – #Lean

— Mark Graban (@MarkGraban) October 10, 2011