Dr Dave Cornelius joined Agile Amped in Atlanta, GA, to talk about a program called 5aturdays, which engages with teenagers on--you guessed it--five Saturdays to introduce them to agility and technology, such as using WordPress to create websites. Job readiness and effective communications are the focus of this program. Topics for the first class include Kanban and user stories. Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance both sponsor 5aturdays, which is free to the public. Started in 2013, 5aturdays operates out of Costa Mesa, CA, but they hope to expand to LA and San Diego. Industry professionals, coaches and trainers donate their time to the program. This year, women constitute the majority of the attendees coming to learn about Agile at 5aturdays. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Many people think that getting teams to self-motivated high-performance is simple: just add coaching. But Esther Derby's research shows otherwise. In her session at Agile2016, Esther looks at "Coaching Teams: Environment + People". Without the right conditions, good coaching may not help much and, worse, inept coaching could make things worse. "It's really going to damage the team's ability to self-manage and work effectively." Esther emphasizes the importance of the team's environment both physical and social. Does the environment contribute to learning and creativity--or does it detract from it? Managers are tempted to blame teams for lack of engagement or motivation, without looking at the environment to see if it motivates teams to excel. If your team is buried in the basement working on boring projects without access to the right resources to do their job effectively, then no amount of coaching will motivate them. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

What makes great teams great? According to Peter Green from Agile For All, "They trust each other, they hold each other accountable, they communicate all the time, they have social bonds." But at what point does scaling Agile counteract organizational Agility? Peter evokes Dunbar's number, whereby individuals can only maintain stable relationships with 150 other individuals. Most Agile scaling approaches focus on practices, but Peter wants us to take a closer look at the principles and, for instance, how Dunbar's number can help or hinder it. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

What makes great teams great? According to Peter Green from Agile For All, "They trust each other, they hold each other accountable, they communicate all the time, they have social bonds." But at what point does scaling Agile counteract organizational Agility? Peter evokes Dunbar's number, whereby individuals can only maintain stable relationships with 150 other individuals. Most Agile scaling approaches focus on practices, but Peter wants us to take a closer look at the principles and, for instance, how Dunbar's number can help or hinder it.

SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA.

About Agile Amped

The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com.

Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/

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What is Agile documentation? For lots of Agilists the term seems counterintuitive since Agile doesn't do documentation. Instead Agile tends to find other ways of ensuring users are constantly delighted. In this episode of Agile Amped, Mary Connor argues that Agile documentation can be beneficial. She introduces the concept of a one-touch doc: a piece of writing that is true to the best of the creator's knowledge at that point in time and that may be helpful to other people but isn't maintained ad infinitum. Sometimes you may need to create a document that will be maintained forever and ever, Amen. In this case you have to ask yourself the hard question: what is actually needed? This means leaving out unnecessary stuff and nice-to-haves and abandoning gold-plating of the content. You have to do the just barely good enough, which can break the technical writer's heart, but this bare-bones approach is much more Agile. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Keep Austin Agile 2016 (http://conference.agileaustin.org/). About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Agile is everywhere now. Regardless of the flavor (Scrum, Kanban, XP), everybody's using Agile to greater or lesser extent. After more than a decade of being Agile, why are so few organizations actually reaping the benefits of implementing it in the first place? Mike Cottmeyer of Leading Agile offers three simple and obvious things that an organization of any size needs to be able to do to be truly Agile:  1. Form teams. 2. Create backlogs. 3. Produce working tested software. Here are some tidbits from his engaging interview: - "A team is an encapsulated value stream... that has no dependencies on the rest of the organization, they can operate with autonomy, they can inspect and adapt..." - "Every failure mode in Scrum ... starts with a team that is not complete and well formed." - "Cargo-cult Scrum: going through the motions but not getting the benefits." SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Keep Austin Agile 2016 (http://conference.agileaustin.org/). About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame famously said, "Move fast and break things." In his Keep Austin Agile 2016 session, Thoughtworks Change Agent Chris Murman laments that "Things are Broken: a Case Study in Moving Too Fast," partly to nod at Zuckerberg. The case study centers on teams at Bottle Rocket who, after implementing Scrum, had so much pressure put on them to deliver fast that "they were writing themselves into technical debt and were releasing apps that weren't very good quality." The goal is not necessarily to work faster but to work better with more intentionality at a sustainable pace. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Keep Austin Agile 2016 (http://conference.agileaustin.org/). About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Some people think that visual models are only applicable to waterfall projects, but Candase Hokanson uses them to make information more accessible to stakeholders early on in the delivery process to avoid expensive redos in the future. A common model she uses in her work is a process flow model, which visualizes the steps that a user will go through to use a product or piece of software. Visual models like the process flow and feature tree help Product Owners see if any use cases are missing. Visual models are also useful when it comes time for documentation (user manuals, FAQs, etc.). SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Keep Austin Agile 2016 (http://conference.agileaustin.org/). About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

People often take it for granted that developers are paying attention to their craft. "Everyone assumes quality is in there," says Mike Rieser, Director of Software Development at Fenway Group. But, as he put it off camera, "technical excellence isn't something you just sprinkle on." Instead, technical excellence is foundational, not something you just add on in the end like some kind of condiment. Allison Pollard, Principal Consultant at Improving, adds that often people think they'll make "improvements" and clean up the code later. "The data becomes apparent... How many defects are escaping with every release? How many defects are getting resolved with every release?" Mike accentuates that, with Agile software development, zero-defect code is a possibility and, often, the general case. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Keep Austin Agile 2016 (http://conference.agileaustin.org/). About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

People often take it for granted that developers are paying attention to their craft. "Everyone assumes quality is in there," says Mike Rieser, Director of Software Development at Fenway Group. But, as he put it off camera, "technical excellence isn't something you just sprinkle on." Instead, technical excellence is foundational, not something you just add on in the end like some kind of condiment. Allison Pollard, Principal Consultant at Improving, adds that often people think they'll make "improvements" and clean up the code later. "The data becomes apparent... How many defects are escaping with every release? How many defects are getting resolved with every release?" Mike accentuates that, with Agile software development, zero-defect code is a possibility and, often, the general case.

SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Keep Austin Agile 2016 (http://conference.agileaustin.org/).

About Agile Amped

The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com.

Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/

Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter

Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook