Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat to Jessica Kerr, software developer, consultant and symmathecist (look it up or listen to the podcast) and apart from our first live podcast sneeze they talk about:
Reminiscing about Barry’s resume that includes CitySearch (and its competitor Zip2 owned by Elon Musk), Snake, Wireless Pets on Nokia and Lilo & Stitch using J2ME and eventually onto ThoughtWorks
Lean Enterprise was written after “The Lean Startup” was released but to explain how it works if you are not a startup and increase experimentation in organisations
When people can design good disciplined experiments, you have system to break down problems and grow your system and people
Fortune 15 executives and successful startup leaders don’t sit around and ask “if we are doing the framework correctly”- they have their own system, in the same way as Toyota created their own system
If you choose an off-the-shelf framework it is just a starting point – you need to evolve your system of work to your context to have a competitive advantage
ExecCamp – take execs out of their business for up to 8 weeks with the aim to disrupt themselves in a safe environment
Unlearn – we are in an industry where we need to learn but that is not the limiting behaviour, it is our inability to unlearn our existing behaviours that holds us back from getting breakthroughs of higher performance
Mean time to discovery – how quickly can you see that an assumption is invalid so that you can then make better decisions
How often are you spending time with customers, how are you getting customer feedback and how are you feeding that information back into your system of work to improve it
Think big but start small and learn fast – safe to fail experiments
Retrospectives are great for any sort of change, not just software
There is no way of becoming Agile as a company without the CFO on board and moving from yearly budgeting – beyond budgeting assists from both the money side and the strategic side
Sociocracy looks at the organisation from the structure side – we need to build structures that allow us to make decisions more quickly through double linking and built in feedback loops
Open Space techniques are essential for facilitation and product liftoff and about using the passion of the people for innovation of your products
If you trust people maybe its cheaper than checking procedures
Need some background, come up with a hypothesis, design some experiments and measure
Experiments need to be safe to fail – either if the hypothesis is not true or the outcome is not valuable
Not “safe to fail” but “failing safely” or “safe to learn”
Publish your experiments so people can learn from each other (even if only internally)
Extreme Programming (XP) was born at Chrysler by letting go of conventional wisdom and pushing practices to eleven
Software development is a social process, not a sum of individuals process
Nobody cares about certificates, we care about competence
It’s time for a renaissance and reboot of XP – this time it needs to be inclusive and no barriers to entry
We know how to make a difference – it starts with execution and continues to empathy
Big tent agility can become an excuse not to tackle hard problems
“Not thinking about all the legs on the stool leaves you sitting on the ground” – some of the legs of agility require a fundamental change in belief
As a programmer am I responsible for my code running – once you have that belief, unit testing falls out of that
TDD is a set of feedback loops and an incentive system to encourage confidence and certainty
Test, Commit, Revert takes TDD further – run the tests, if they pass you commit and if they fail you revert the changes – incentive to take small steps
“Silence is the sound of risk” – you need feedback (unless you are perfect)
XP was a better product, but it lost (round one)
Electric or blade?
If XP starts with the premise that we want a process that anyone with talent and skill can contribute and grow at maximum velocity, the rest will take care of itself
Agile as a name is so attractive, nobody doesn’t want to be agile – the brand of Extreme Programming means if you are not extreme you are not going to say that you are
The fundamental question to ask first is “what do we have to lose” – if you have nothing to lose you need to try short and crazy experiments to find things nobody else is doing
3X model (explore, expand, extract) – YOW! keynote “3x Explore, Expand, Extract” – depends which part of the curve you are on as to which tools in your bag you should use, rules of the game change depend on whether you are looking for a new source of value (explore), growing fast and trying to keep up (expand) or continue growing to pay for new explorations (extract)
Brendan Cleary and Pete Manion from Tabcorp – got value from Jessica Kerr’s keynote and talk, Brendan’s Gregg’s keynote and the aspirational bar that has been set
Michele Playfair – 2 step journey in Agile (those playing catchup and those that are faster moving looking into newer things like sociocracy and holocracy), enjoyed Jessica’s keynote and Avdi Grimm’s “#nocode” talk suggesting that you are still a developer if you are gluing things together
Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat to Jessica Kerr, software developer, consultant and symmathecist (look it up or listen to the podcast) and apart from our first live podcast sneeze they talk about:
The Agile Revolution Podcast 