040 agile intro raw
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the butter map skills podcast. I might pass since I'm the CEO
of quality science. And I'm a little excited today because we're starting a whole new series.
We're going to dive into the world of agile software development. So we've got like a 10 part
series coming up for you. Where we're going to explore the entire universe of agile and break it
down into some super handy, practical tips that you can use in your job.
And, uh, I hope you enjoyed the design thinking series that we've just completed. Um, along
with design thinking, agile software development is. So, so damn him. I, I really, I cannot
overstate the dramatic change it's made for me in helping [00:01:00] build brand new products.
And you know, the reason why agile matters, the reason why we should be thinking about it,
talking about it is agile is the perfect response to that.
Old approach to building software and products, which is called a waterfall. It was slow,
bureaucratic, and completely non adaptive. I, it was just do the plan, whatever we agreed. In
fact, agile would hold software projects. Ha but you would literally make sense the requirements
at the beginning of a project and you wouldn't.
Change those. And what was crazy about waterfall is you would only really embrace a user
testing just before you launched or just after you launched. And the great news about agile. It
turns a lot of things up on its head. Um, but [00:02:00] what it does is it brings testing with users
into the heart of every few weeks.
So this means that you can get more, uh, focus on, um, I product that actually works by being
customer focus, the products going to be higher quality. And by being in there more of a
continuous delivery, uh, mode, if you will, you're going to be able to get way more engagement
from the team. Engagement from users.
And I think it's far more than that. Just a way of building software. I think it's a way of organizing
companies, but I'm going to tell y'all a lot more about that over the course, the coming weeks.
So make sure that you, if you're going to enjoy this series, make sure that you stay tuned for the
entire 10 plus episodes of our agile software development series.
So I K I've [00:03:00] been talking up a pretty big game on agile, and you'll be wondering to
yourself, but what exactly is it? Well, let's set the context for agile software development and
moreover agile ways of working. And I want to you to think of agile as a set of principles. That
help teams build products at speed and it's super nimble and iterative.
Okay. So it's a set of principles. Now, this is really simple because what we'll discover later is
sometimes people get mixed up and think agile is a myth technology. It's actually a set of
principles. There are some great agile methodologies, and we definitely going to talk about
those as well, but at the heart.
I want you to imagine this is about small teams going super fast and probably speaking, you just
get out of their way. You give them empowerment, you give them a clear vision to hit [00:04:00]
and let them go for it. So let's talk a little bit about where. Agile hails from like all good things. It
didn't come out of a void.
Um, in fact, it builds a lot upon if you want to go really back into management theory, it goes
back to some of Peter Drucker's very famous thinking about the art of maximizing, the amount
of work that is actually not done. So this minimalist idea of only building things that work only
focus on core value for your user and for the business.
This goes. Back decades. Um, and at the real Genesis of management theory and management
strategy in the postwar era now moving on from that, I think one of the most, um, Important
examples of the early, early, early part of not only agile, but I would also say, uh, lean [00:05:00]
methodology is the Toyota production system house.
Now this Toyota production system was really at the heart of house. You know, Japanese auto
manufacturing leptons of the scene in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and really challenged
the incumbent traditional manufacturers out of Detroit USA. And they had a couple of crazy
ideas. They focused on really shortening the time to market, really focusing on continuous
nature of manufacturing and, uh, it really standardized a whole, all new way of working.
You may have heard of just in time. Manufacturing that went on to inspire, uh, companies such
as Dell as well. And so it really was something that Toyota embraced in the early fifties. And not
only did that really establish the value of working in an agile way. And it also inspired a lot of
lean thinking, which we will [00:06:00] do a separate master class on cause that's jam packed

with goodies as well.
Um, so just kind of wrapping up some of the background. We've got Drucker and Toyota, some
real cornerstones of agile, but actually a whole bunch of guys got together. Uh, and this was
where we saw, um, the transition from being a manufacturing or management theory and
applying agile into software. So February, 2001, there is a ski resort in Utah called the snowbird
ski resort.
And basically, um, A bunch of dudes got together and came up with this idea of an agile
manifesto. And this is really inspired the principles and values of agile. And these are the kind of
three pillars of, of the history and the context of agile Drucker Toyota. And this manifesto, we
can plot everything that we do today back.
To, uh, these [00:07:00] three inspiring these three driving factors to create modern, agile
software development. And I just, for a moment, we'd love to get. Specific in talking about what
agile is and I'm going to is a form of agile, agile method called scrum to describe it. And we're
going to keep coming back to it time and time again.
And we're going to break down the different roles and practices and tools. So don't worry.
Everything's ahead of you here on the bottom up skills podcast now. We're thinking about agile
and I want to use this scrum analogy. And the best way I can describe it is every couple of
weeks, a small team do a sprint.
This is a sprint of work. They're largely autonomous. They work from a thing called a backlog.
It's a list of tasks and items to a list of, to do's if you will. And they're driven by. A scrum
[00:08:00] master who runs the rhythm and the team work with this idea of having daily scrums.
And at the end of the sprint, they have a retrospective and a review.
And the person that's really at the highest, the process of the product is the product owner.
There was lots of other roles as well, but. We'll get into those, but this is a, uh, a rhythm, a
cadence that you get into and you might on a project have six, 12, 24 sprints, depending on the
size of the product that you're going to build.
And, um, what you do is instead of with waterfall, having these enormous timelines, That lead to
products that are way late and way wrong. What you do is you try and make every sprint self
contained. So there's a body of work that gets reviewed and checked. So you can, it really
makes it easier to stay on track.
And unlike with waterfall, it's, it's much harder to get off track. If you use this. Agile software
development [00:09:00] approach. Now what's really interesting is agile is becoming something
much desired, not only in sort of high tech, uh, startups or, um, software companies, but it's
actually going way beyond the sector into business, more largely speaking, but here's the crazy
thing in a benchmark study that Deloitte and McKinsey did together in 2019, they found.
But when they talked to senior executives across a whole range of companies, they found that
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