Engineering Culture by InfoQ

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Seb Rose, a dispassionate developer, and one of the principals of Cucumber Limited about his work at Cucumber, the Cyber-dojo charity, designing a robust certification program and involving testers in code reviews

Why listen to this podcast:

• Cucumber is more than a testing tool – it is a collaboration tool

• There is a lot of confusion around what Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) is and isn’t

• BDD is made up of three distinct practices: Discovery, Formulation and Automation – Cucumber is only about the Automation practice

• Provide concrete examples to communicate business needs using BDD to ensure that business rules are defined unambiguously

• Cyber-dojo is a place for people to practice their coding skills on many platforms

• Ideas around designing a robust certification scheme

The value of having testers involved in code reviews goes far beyond reading the code

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Lyssa Adkins and Halim Dunsky about the current state of agile coaching, the competencies and skills that coaches need to develop and the journey that the Agile Coaching Institute has taken since they became part of Accenture

Why listen to this podcast:

• The wide range of approaches which exist in agile coaching, while remaining aligned with common learning objectives

• There is a marked difference between people who have put in the effort to build deep and wide coaching competency and those who have not done so, and organisation are becoming more discerning about who they engage in the coaching role

• Key competencies for effective coaching are about the ability to reach people on a human-to-human level

• There shouldn’t be a distinction between the scrummaster and agile coach roles – scrummasters should be coaches

• Even the most experienced and knowledgeable coaches can and do fall prey to human system dynamics and make mistakes

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In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jeff Patton about moving from project to product thinking; whole team product ownership and satisfying the real customer needs.

Why listen to this podcast:

• There is a lack of focus on product in the agile community – the emphasis has been on projects

• “Project” and “product” are used interchangeably, yet they are two very different things

• If you are building a product that is sold to end consumers, then they are your customer, not “the business”; the focus on “the business” means we build products to satisfy the internal perceived needs, not the real customer needs

• When we start measuring outcomes, we realize that we’re wrong a lot and begin to embrace experimentation

Implementing effective measurement takes engineering – instrumentation needs to be built into the product

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In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Phil Brock and Paul Hammond of the Agile Alliance about the current state of the Alliance and plans for the future.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Agile 2018 had around 2400 attendees, from 54 countries and 900 companies, with over 270 sessions across the five days of the conference

• The Agile Alliance initiatives represent the areas that the Alliance is involved in and supporting their members globally

• The mission of the alliance is to create an inclusive global community, advance the breadth and depth of agile and provide value to the member community

• Affiliates are being established where there is a strong community that wants to come together and have a more local focus with support that is appropriate for the local context

Being a part of the agile community implies that one is participating, not simply consuming

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In this podcast recorded at QCon New York, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sangeeta Narayanan of Netflix about improving the developer experience, and why it matters.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Developer Experience is about making it easy and simple for software to be developed, released and operated

• It’s about identifying and removing whatever creates friction in the process of building software

• Modern approaches increase the cognitive load on engineers in every part of the process, DevEx tries to reduce that load

• The tools and infrastructure you use to build the system is as important as the production environment – treat your tooling in the same way you treat your production environment

• DevEx goes beyond the tools into anything which influences the ability to do effective work, the culture, motivation, team and individual health and productivity

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In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Simon Powers of Adventures with Agile about helping organisations move from siloed groups to large product teams, he gave advice for new managers and discussed the trends he sees happening in large organisations.

Why listen to this podcast:

• The challenges of making businesses more successful through technology

• Today the challenges are less technological and more cultural

• The team is everyone who works on the product or service, working collaboratively to meet customer needs – this could be hundreds of people and they all need to have consistent goals

• We are looking to create a structure that enables truly self-organizing teams at scale

• The role of middle-tier leaders is to truly adopt a servant leadership mindset and help work out what the team can do to solve their own problems, rather than solving the problems for the team

ore on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2U9ddb2

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In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dominic Price from Atlassian about his opening keynote at the Agile 2018 conference.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Agile is an answer to teams working together effectively, but it is not the only answer

• A lot of large-scale “transformations” are about AGILE being thrust around as a compliance regime where the measures of success are the following of rituals

• The example of an organisation who moved from “agile transformation” to “new ways of working”. The difference is that “agile” is not the only answer and in a “transformation” there is an expectation of an end-state whereas new ways of working are continually evolving

• Many of the things we call “soft skills” are in fact very hard and they are the key to success in making change in organisations

• The need to focus on the mental health and wellbeing of people in the organisation – we believe we are custodians of our people

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In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Diana Larsen about the evolution of the Agile Fluency model, the rate of adoption of new ideas in organisations, organisation design and being an ally.

Why listen to this podcast:

• The ideas around agile fluency have evolved through feedback and use in the field

• New ideas take time to be adopted in organisations and agile is far from prevalent

• Agile ways of working will become “the way we do things” but it will take time

• There is a diagnostic instrument which allows teams to undertake self-reflection and explore areas they want to improve

• The organisation design community have a lot of knowledge about things that the agile community can learn from

• Diversity and inclusiveness are still issues in the agile and broader IT community, but things are improving

• The single most powerful tool to combat racism/sexism and help diversity and inclusion grow is the action of bystanders

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In this podcast recorded after the JAFAC 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Miki Szikszai and Sandy Mamoli about Snapper’s adoption of holacracy.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Clarity of purpose is key for an organisation looking to improve their ways of working

• The sign of a good coach is when they realise they need to step away so the client can stand on their own

• The most important skills are around collaboration, teamwork, innovation and empathy, not technologies and tools

• Holacracy is a system to create a self-organising organisation where decisions are made at the right level with a hierarchy of purpose rather than a hierarchy of people

• Holacracy amplifies the culture you already have – so get the culture right first

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2zLL7cx

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jim Rose of Circle CI about building a great engineering culture in a distributed, remote team.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Hiring engineers is a difficult task

• Working in a completely remote organisation takes a particular type of person

• It’s crucial that the engineering teams understand and empathise with their customers

• You won’t find new and creative ways to solve problems unless you experiment and try new things, and some of those things won’t work

• Ensure that your recruiting and hiring practices match the values of the company and that the onboarding process reinforces this

• Ensure there is no “in vs out” – ensure everyone has the experience irrespective of where they are located

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2PB0oHh

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