Security | The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and has a conversation with James Stewart, formerly Deputy CTO for the UK Government and co-founder of the Government Digital Service. In varying locations they talk about:

YOW! West keynote “Lessons Learned as a Government CTO“
UK government had some large IT failures in the last like the NHS National Program for IT (12 billion pound failure), but now lots of successes like Spine 2
Agile techniques have been successful in the UK government not just because other approaches have failed so badly but the cost of an IT project is only a fraction of the overall cost of a system
The Government Design Principles – start with user needs – successful projects start with clearly articulated principles, did not realise how much they would resonate
Worked around a number of government process early on, support from the Minister and investing time to find allies was essential
Design Principle posters – essential to invest in presentation, help people feel involved
Were never dogmatic about flavours of Agile, this presented challenges with vendors – can you make changes quickly, can you ship software faster, have you thought about quality?
The problem is not scaling frameworks, it’s that you tried to start big – need to start with a small team and seed the trust
Tackled the financials with the spending control process and an Agile business case (based around progressive funding) and align spending around Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live stages and approval for later stages comes from what you have learnt from the previous stage
Genuine leadership requires openness – be self reflective, clearly articulate values and principles, the biggest risks you are concerned about and the outcomes you wish to achieve – then build trust with the team to achieve this
The strategy is delivery
Don’t start until somebody can express an outcome – once they do, turn something around quickly
Digital By Default Service Manual – good place to start, how to do delivery
UK Government Technology Code of Practice – underpinning of spending controls

TheAgileRevolution-157 (43 minutes)

Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and wander around the hallways talking to different speakers and some attendees and volunteers:

Woody Zuill and Paul Rayner – Beer Driven Development (the other BDD), Woody’s talk “Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach” talk and Paul’s “EventStorming – Collaborative Learning for Complex Domains” talk, the reaction from the Australian audience and how Woody gets the audience to tell him why mob programming might be a good idea to change people’s thinking
Tony enjoyed “Uncle” Bob Martins “The Scribe’s Oath” keynote and “Effective Estimation (or: How not to Lie)” talk as well as Woody’s talk
Laura Bell – her “Simplicity, Complexity and Security” talk, and Agile Application Security at SafeStack
John Lamping – his “The One Weird Trick for Analyzing Big Data … Eyeball it Early and Often!” talk, we need to look at our data to see if it is broken or learn something new
Andrea Burbank – her “Data Science as Software at Pinterest” talk, implementing AB testing is really easy, we can use data to look at things in a different way such as spam filtering
Rob, Declan, Daya, Braiden and Homad all enjoyed Dr. Brian Little’s “Personalities at Work” keynote, Andrea Burbank’s fast paced talk and the benefits of volunteering at a big tech conference