Episode 190: Talking Agile Live From The Man Cave with Serge Beaumont

Renee, Craig and Tony are together to chat with Serge Beaumont, Principal Agile Coach at Xebia, live from his man cave and despite showing their lack of mathematical skills in relation to dice they chat about:

TheAgileRevolution-190 (51 minutes)

Episode 163: Agile Australia 2017 Vox Pop #1

Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia 2017 in Sydney and wander the very busy hallways catching up with attendees and with old friends:

TheAgileRevolution-163 (27 minutes)

 

Episode 153: The Great Lean Debate – Live from LAST Brisbane 2018

Stephanie BySouth is the MC of the Great Lean Debate, a fun session recorded live at LAST Brisbane 2018. Ryan McKergow, Shane Hastie, Renae Craven are the “Legendary Agile Sh*t-talkers” team and Craig Smith, Mel Khim and Karyl Crick are the “Getting Agile Sh*t Done” team.

The topics are:

  • Scaling frameworks
  • Estimates vs No-Estimates
  • You can be a Product Owner and a Scrum Master

TheAgileRevolution-153 (37 minutes)

Episode 139: Talking Agile Craft with Steve Elliott

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 113: GreenHopper Handyman Folio with JC Huet

JCHuetCraig and Renee, sitting on the banks of the Potomac River on a sunny but slightly windy day at Agile 2015, they catchup with JC Huet, creator of GreenHopper (renamed to JIRA Agile and post-podcast now JIRA Software) and Tempo Folio:

  • Craig was apparently the first client of GreenHopper that was built in a basement, now JIRA Agile is the most popular JIRA add-on with over 500,000 users, used by more than 80% of JIRA users
  • the idea was to have a tool that brought bugs into software management
  • the name GreenHopper represented the Green company branding at the time, and Hopper was for cards hopping between columns
  • a shout out to our friend Nick Muldoon (who is now writing Atlassian plugins at Arijea)
  • Tempo Folio plugin is about supporting cost management, including time sheeting, estimation, forecasting and allocation
  • time and dedication and about three months is all it takes to create an Atlassian plugin (and JC challenges Renee to write her own WSJF plugin)
  • hippies, not EP’s!
  • versions on frameworks are good, means feedback changes are coming

TheAgileRevolution-113 (34 minutes)

Episode 112: Inside Spotify with Anders Ivarsson

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 99: 99, Not Out!

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 94: Agile 2015 Wrap Up

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 88: Scrum Australia Anticast

weisbartsaAdam Weisbart turns the tables hosting an anti-podcast where he interviews Craig, Renee & Tony at Scrum Australia 2014 in Sydney on their highlights from the conference. The conversation included:

* Adam Weisbart’s “Agile Antipatterns” talk and his awesome Agile Antipatterns cards
* Craig Smith’s “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes” talk (and the methods on the cutting room floor)
* Agile movements are just as important as methods
* Tony mentions the original Winston W. Royce “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems” waterfall paper – why??
* Henrik Kniberg’s “Scaling Agile @ Spotify” keynote
* Matthew Hodgson’s “Backlogs, Story Mapping and Star Wars” talk
* Knowing one of the organisers like Star Wars helps!
* Renee Troughton’s “Darth Vaderless Daily Scrums” talk
* Important to know the expectations that everyone else should be having on each other to have a good Daily Scrum
* Emparting to a new team how to do an effective daily scrum
* Renee and her obsession with origami cranes
* Own the silence…
* David Bale’s “Build Your Own Scaled Scrum” talk (built on Adam’s Build Your Own Scrum)
* Drop Bears 
* Australia has lots of blending, more common to break stories smaller as opposed to tasks, we make proper tea
* Adam’s new project: Agile Adlibs
* Making retrospectives fun…

TheAgileRevolution-88 (27 minutes)

Episode 64: Interstate 40 East with Nick Muldoon

Nick-CraigOn a road trip to Agile 2013 from Dallas to Nashville, Craig chats to Nick Muldoon while cruising in a Chevy Equinox eastbound on Interstate 40 between Memphis and Nashville. Nick is an Agile Coach at Twitter and formerly the Product manager for GreenHopper at Atlassian and whilst doing 65 miles an hour they chat about:

TheAgileRevolution-64 (64 minutes)