Hello, and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I might pass things. I'm the C E
O of quality wins and we are rocking along. We are in the next episode of our agile software
development series. And this time we're going to get into the different types and flavors of agile.
Now in the previous step episode, we really dug into some of the high level.
You know, a primary thinking behind agile, which is around values and principles and how it's all
about being small, focusing on writing the code, doing the design and going fast. And. Whilst
these values and these principles. So this really well in understanding not only how to design
teams, but I would say you can design companies [00:01:00] around this whole idea.

Once you get into the practice of agile, what's quite remarkable is there's millions and millions of
permutations and variations of agile. And this is where sometimes people get confused. And this
is where unlike design thinking, which has a clear kind of universal path math pioneered by the
Stanford D school.
In this case, this is a much bigger practice, much more commonly used. Um, it has, um, You
know, a history of being related to not only lean, but manufacturing processes in the fifties, in
the sixties. And as a result of this, that we actually see this huge variance, these massive
portfolios of different types of way to do agile.

So I want to take you through a journey through some of those explaining. Uh, just the, the
general difference between these [00:02:00] so that you can start to orientate yourself around it.
What I'm also going to do is really call out probably the two primary flavors of agile software
development that you'll either have heard of.
You might know, or you will run into if you're working in the world of technology. So now we're
going to go. Into the practice, the practice of agile and the crazy thing is that you could easily
count beyond 40 different methodologies. These are ways to practice agile and they all have
different sorts of names.
Now we're going to look at these and I obviously, you know, I wish I could take you through
them all. Um, In fact, I wish I even understood them all because there's so many, but I'm going
to give you a general sense of how they work. [00:03:00] And then what we're going to do is
focus on two particular flavors, which is scrum and Kanban.

And so we'll go into those. But first, before we get to those, I want to kind of paint you a picture
of, uh, the, um, These different areas in the world, world of agile. Now the first one is one that
you might have heard, um, that was employed at Zappos. Um, a really famous pioneering
company. They do a lot of stuff in a radically different way, and they've actually, uh, taken a
flavor of agile.
You know, which has its hallmarks and origin in this idea of, you know, self organizing small
teams. And they took that. To an extreme, and that's what we call Holacracy. And Holacracy is a
form of decentralized management and [00:04:00] organizational governments. So this means.
It's quite, uh, it's, it's very similar to what we call radical management.
Um, it's related to theory of constraints, um, management 3.0, but what you have to imagine it,
the key key of hello Chrissy and this whole body of agile methods is where you make the entire
organization. Self-organizing. And it doesn't have a traditional commanding troll approach. It
doesn't have anything like command and control.
There's no waterfall. There's no top down. It's very radical. It's okay. Icing in small distributed
self-organizing decentralized groups. It's called. Holocracy have a look. Um, there's lots has
been written around what, um, Zappos has done in the U S they're probably one of [00:05:00]
the pioneering Holacracy companies, but what's really fascinating about this.

This is really inspired and born out of agile methodology and agile thinking, agile values and
principles. So there you go. So this is one big bucket. Of the agile world, that sort of model
decentralized, um, way of organizing Holacracy. Yeah. Being the, sort of the showcase there.
So now I want to move on to sort of enterprise, um, Kind of a thing I want to move towards how
you might see agile in a more continuous, ongoing manner.
This would be, um, uh, an approach best used in enterprise. Um, you know, when you want to
create that enterprise rhythm and you want to do deploy it an approach that's around the idea of
improvement. So [00:06:00] you've probably, you may have heard of enterprise scrum. Uh, you
may have heard of Spotify is what we call squatter.
Effication. Uh, again, this has sort of an organizational flavor to it. The difference between this

and say the Holacracy approach is this still has the central governance still has the enterprise at
the center, so it's less decentralized. Um, and, um, you know, another great example of this
more enterprise flavor, um, is the Macado method, which is all about.
Continuous improvements on existing software systems. So incremental, make it 1% of each
sprint. And over time you have a better organization. And what's quite interesting is that there
are a lot of European origins have adopted this using Spotify. As this sort of poster child, if you
will, of this approach and this Macado method, or, um, X [00:07:00] scale is another kind of
flavor of this enterprise version.

Um, this has been, um, really quite successful. And so if you have a look at Spotify
quantification, and you're really interested in implying this continuous improvement approach,
then just Google around and you'll find some, some really interesting stuff around this. All right
now, the next one I want to go to is a, what we call more of a lean startup, um, more of an
extreme manufacturing, agile unified process flavor.
This is where at the hot we're starting to use some of the principles of. Just in time
manufacturing, uh, only writing code once it's been tested and validated, or as in lean startup is
experimenting continuously to validate your hypothesis before you build [00:08:00] stuff. Now,
why this is so interesting is obviously the risks with manufacturing.

If you start building the wrong thing and you've got your build of materials and you've got the
wrong components that haven't been tested, what this agile methodology, um, uh, grouping
does is try to de risk some of those bigger investments. And particularly if you look at the origin
of lean startup, lean startup was born because.
When Eric Reese wrote the book, he talked about spending a lot of money on his startup on a
bad idea. They built a bad idea in a great way. Because they didn't have that testing validation.
They didn't have that continuous experimentation to make sure that they are going in the right
way. So this is like the third big bucket okay.
Of agile methods. Um, so you can look into that. And I think the starting [00:09:00] point here, it
has to be go read the book by Eric Reese, lean startup. Okay. So now I've left the biggest and
the most popular, uh, version of agile methodologies. And that is scrum. Scrum is easily, uh, the
most popular, you know, Informal studies say that it can be anywhere up to 70% of the practice
of agile ends up being a, a version of scrum.
Uh, and there was some sort of related, um, kind of, um, Versions of the methodology. You've
got obviously Kanban, which I've mentioned. You've got crystal, um, and, um, some forms of
extreme programming. Um, they all largely coalesce around a more scrum, like, uh, approach.
And I think scrum for me has the focus.

Mostly on the team [00:10:00] and, uh, having a small autonomous team and it also has a
certain rhythm to it. And there's a really big focus on ...