Engineering Culture by InfoQ

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby about their memories of Gerald M. (Jerry) Weinberg who passed away on the 7th of August 2018.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Jerry Weinberg was a highly respected thinker and author

• He was instrumental in defining some of the key elements of systems thinking and quality practices for software development

• The rule of three – one option is a trap, two is a dilemma and three breaks logjam thinking to enable creativity

• “It’s always a human problem”

• Jerry inspired people to look at things in different ways

• Jerry’s advice to anyone who wanted to be like him – become the best version of yourself

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Michael Cote from Pivotal Labs about “programming the business” to enable support for automation and moving towards DevOps.

Why listen to this podcast:

• It’s possible to move from deploying on a yearly basis to a daily basis

• Adopting a new process or approach often improves things dramatically, frequently because what was being done before was not effective rather than because of the effectiveness of the new way

• Change the structures so teams are focused on products, not projects, ensure all the roles needed are in the team and that they are fully dedicated to working on the product

• The rift in many organizations between “the business” and IT means that business people don’t expect the software to be agile and responsive to their needs

• Businesses which were founded in the tech space are inherently agile and they run using these approaches all the time. The challenge is bringing “traditional” businesses down the same path

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dan Kreigh about his experiences as the lead structural analyst working on SpaceShipOne and his personal interest in designing and building a flying car.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Building SpaceShipOne was an iterative and incremental project

• There are many parallels between the development of SpaceShipOne and an agile software product

• Dan’s definition of a flying car is one that you can drive on the freeway and to the store, then drive to an airport and take off and fly to your next destination

• There are a number of debates about the best designs for flying cars with multiple different approaches to addressing the challenges

• Dan’s approach is to build a flying car which will fit in a home garage using well understood technologies and incremental development

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jeff Dalton about the challenges of agile adoption in large organizations and the need to teach agile leaders how to teach so they can lead the cultural shift that is needed

Why listen to this podcast:

• The marketing of agility is going far better than the actual on the ground adoption

• When process-centric, low trust organisations adopt agile they bring that approach to their agile practices

• The link between the soft skills and the hard technical practices of agile is what enables high quality and real agility, but many senior managers haven’t made the connection for themselves

• There is no need for a new framework – the need is to enable leaders to leverage agility and teach that to other leaders and to their teams

• The re-emergence of a focus on craftsmanship is a great thing, but it is not enough

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Edith Harbaugh of Launch Darkly on the way she and her cofounder have deliberately engineered their organisation’s culture

Why listen to this podcast:

• A good engineering culture is one where there is a lot of respect for different people and roles

• Start by good intent on behalf of your colleagues – everyone is doing their best

• Be open to continually learning – mistakes will happen, learn from them in a blame-free way

• Another aspect of respect is ensuring meetings are purposeful, have the right people involved, have a clear agenda and stay on time

• To build mastery it’s OK to be bad at something in the beginning and deliberately get better

• Sharing the reason why the customer chooses the product, rather than how much was earned from the sale, is motivational

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

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Matt Abrahams of BoldEcho and Stanford Graduate School of Business on becoming effective communicators, especially around speaking in public.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Everyone has a story to tell

• Make sure you understand who you are speaking to and what it is that you can do to help them

• It’s important to structuring your message in such a way as to make it easy for your audience to understand

• All communication should have a goal which has three parts - information, emotion and action (what, so what, now what)

• Overcoming imposter syndrome – most audiences are there to learn, they want you to be successful

• It takes bravery to admit that we’re not great communicators and start on a path of learning to improve

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Pooja Brown, VP of Engineering at Docusign about building great engineering culture.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Great culture comes when people are aligned with the organisation’s mission

• There are ways to bring the voice of the customer to the ears of the team and doing so creates empathy and results in better products

• Transparency and openness around what matters to the company helps ensure people align with those goals

• Every engineer is responsible for ensuring that the code they write is reliable, available and secure

• Fairness and transparency are key to great culture

• Being a people manager requires technical knowledge for credibility but is not about providing technical leadership; many people confuse the two

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

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Jarrod Overson of Shape Security about the reason for and the content in the Beyond Being an Individual Contributor track at QCon San Francisco, and he offers advice for current and aspirant technical leaders.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Many technologists get the opportunity to move into leadership roles but receive no training or guidance about what skills such a role needs

• Solving other people’s problems as quickly as possible is an important aspect of a leadership role – this is very different to being an individual contributor where the focus is on solving your own problems

• Advice for aspirant leaders: assume you are in the role you want and practice doing everything you think should be done in that role

• There is a bias among software developers against what is perceived as “old” knowledge – practices that have been around for decades and centuries – this is very wrong

• The problems of software engineering have not yet all been solved so there is still a lot of learning to be done, you can’t just repeat what has been done elsewhere before and expect it to work

• Software engineering is a creative, artistic skill done by creative, artistic people and a leader needs to understand how such people are motivated

• Culture and motivation comes from the top of a company and spreads all the way down

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

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Susan McIntosh, an InfoQ editor, agile practitioner and scrum master who works in the area of cultural change about the impacts that the lack of diversity in tech has and some ways to address the inherent imbalances in the system.

Why listen to this podcast:

• There is a significant diversity challenge in the information technology industry

• Women are the primary decision makers in shopping but the IT industry as a whole doesn’t consider the women’s perspective when designing and building products

• The common misconception that confidence equates to competence and how that impacts people who may be very competent but may be uncomfortable putting themselves forward

• Some advice on how organisations can encourage people to “bring your whole self to work” and create a safe, supportive culture

• Being valued as a complete person in the workplace improves engagement and commitment to the organisation, and benefits the employee, employer and customers

• A diverse group will have a wide variety of experiences and can use these diverse ideas to produce products which provide better value for the customers they are building products for

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2kYJ6Tp

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Chris Manuel who heads the global test engineering service for Mindtree about continuous testing, cultural change and creating a culture of quality in organisations

Why listen to this podcast:

• The application portfolio of every organisation has become much more complex and this needs different ways of approaching the testing challenges that just having legions of people banging away at keyboards

• The value of moving away from testing at the end to injecting quality throughout the lifecycle

• This needs to extend beyond just testing functionality in the product, it needs rethinking about testing at the different levels and different targets in parallel

• The value of bringing analytics into the right-hand side of the software development lifecycle and feeding that information into the ongoing development activities

• There are lots of things that prevent the effective collaboration and mitigate against developer-tester collaboration in many organisations

• Even in organisations that have adopted agile approaches, most haven’t truly addressed the cultural changes needed to have a one-team, quality first mindset

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

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