Engineering Culture by InfoQ

In this podcast, recorded at the Agile New Zealand conference in November 2016, Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to David West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org, about the history of Scrum, the importance of empiricism and improving the profession of software delivery.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Between 12 and 15 million people use Scrum on a daily basis

- Scrum.org’s mission is about improving the profession of software delivery, not having more people use the Scrum framework

- Empiricism and the scientific method are fundamental to being a professional in an industry

- The Scrum delivery team needs to include “all the skills you need to deliver working software” into the hands of end users so operations and deployment skills are a crucial part of Scrum

- To enable teams to be successful, management needs to provide absolute clarity of the objective, move out of the way of the teams and support the ScrumMaster in removing impediments

- The moral responsibility of software professionals to show integrity in their work

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor in the Culture & Methods area, spoke to Richard Kasperowski at the QCon San Francisco conference.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Agile is not new, and the ideas help organisations focus on building the right thing and building it right

- High performing teams have some specific characteristics which can be measured

- Over 200 different things have been identified as “the one thing” needed for high performance

- All the research shows that the social/cultural factors are more important than technical skills for high performance

- The behaviour patterns of the Core Protocols seem to cause high performing teams

- To work well as a high performing team, the members must be able to connect with each other effectively

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

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq

Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8

Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ

Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq

Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2mkjFtM

In our podcast this week Shane Hastie speaks to Michael Lopp, VP of Engineering at Slack, about intentional culture and continuous delivery.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Leadership is a craft that needs to be learned

- Characteristics and common challenges of high-growth startups

- Aspects of culture include how do we get things done, how do we treat each other, how do we make decisions, who has power and influence, what are the things that we value?

- The importance of making values explicit and experiential

- The importance of the small group of influencers in any organisation who spread the culture to others

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2mP3Qjj

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

Like InfoQ on Facebook: http://bit.ly/2jmlyG8

Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/InfoQ

Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq

Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2mP3Qjj

In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Ted DesMaisons and Lisa Rowland who spoke at QCon San Francisco on The Improvisor's Code: Engineering Your Best Self

Why listen to this podcast:

- The skills of improve are applicable outside a theatrical setting

- You don’t have to be an extrovert to use these ideas

- These are intra-personal skills as well as inter-personal – they help develop mindfulness and awareness at the individual level

- The study of improvisation gets us good at agility, adapting to changing circumstances

More on this:

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2lZBp13

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

In this podcast Ben Linders, an InfoQ editor in the Culture & Methods area, spoke to Lianping Chen of Paddy Power about their adoption of continuous delivery.

Why listen to this podcast:

- An introduction to continuous delivery

- It is possible and feasible to go faster while maintaining and improving the quality of the products being built

- The benefits from adopting continuous delivery include reduced time from completing development to getting product into production and getting faster customer feedback

- The way you elicit and represent requirements also needs to change when adopting continuous delivery

- Implementing continuous delivery needs significant investment in time and money – don’t underestimate the costs involved and plan the adoption to deliver benefits early and get some quick wins

More on this:

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2mgLhA8

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Doug Kirkpatrick, organisational change expert, author and advocate for new ways of working.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Decentralization is replacing hierarchy and bureaucracy. Organisations need to be directly connected to the outside world and agilely adapt to changes in their ecosystems

• The idea of people managing other people will fade and be replaced by people connecting to a mission and meaning, and managing themselves in the same way they manage themselves in their lives

• Mandating a change is command and control in a different guise – people need to be part of the change and opt in to be part of the changed organisation

• Two simple, yet profound, principles:

o No use of force – abandon command and control authority

o People keep commitments that they make

• Speaking up when something seems wrong is a crucial self-managing competency. If you choose not to speak up about a particular issue, you have chosen to tolerate it

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2l35tWS

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Pat Reed of iHoriz about value innovation, adaptive leadership and what’s needed to create real business agility.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Business agility is about adapting and thriving in extreme uncertainty

- Make value visible – really understand who your customer is and how value is derived in your organisation, then focus on only doing things that truly add value

- The management practice of “doing more with less” is both delusional and counter-productive

- We know about the need for WIP limits and the impact of context switching on productivity, yet somehow some managers believe their organisations are immune from these realities

- Value must be measured in terms of making an impactful difference to a customer or to the business

- Fast failure and learning are critical to innovation and sustainable organisation success

- Being able to adapt quicker than the competition, quicker than the customer’s changing needs is imperative for business success today

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2lcedge

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Matt Sakaguchi about his talk at QCon San Francisco 2016 and the research Google has done on what makes effective teams.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Psychological safety – people feel comfortable taking a risk or asking a question and know they will be supported by their team mates, they feel safe to share personal and “crazy” ideas

- Dependability – the knowledge that team mates will deliver quality outputs and meet their commitments

- Structure & clarity – the team has well defined roles and responsibilities, everyone knows what they are supposed to do and they do it

- Meaning – the work has personal meaning to the individual team membersImpact – the team members can see the value they bring to the greater good through their work

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2jNF7H8

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sara Bayless Da Costa, visual storyteller and design thinking evangelist at Fjord. Bayless Da Costa gave a talk at QCon San Francisco on Rapid Prototyping Methods. They spoke about prototyping, collaborative design, designing for new interfaces and new skills that designers need in order to be successful with new technologies.

Why listen to this podcast:

- The importance of taking a collaborative design approach with multiple roles involved – design is not just done by designers

- Design and development work well together to deliver an exceptional customer experience

- The importance of empathy when understanding people’s needsVisual storytelling is a powerful way to convey messages and inform good decision making

- Evergreen needs – human needs have not fundamentally changed, but the way we solve them is constantly evolving

- Designers need new and different skills to be effective in this new world

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2kkWzT1

6m:40s - The value and importance of visual story-telling

7m:55s - The “hero’s journey” story of product creation to solve real problems for real users

8m:28s - Story telling is important across the entire design and development process

9m:17s - Contrasting the current story with the future story of the customer experience

9m:40s - Storyboarding as a technique for sketching the end-to-end customer experience

9m:53s - Creating a video from customer interviews to understand and communicate their story

More on this:

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/2kkWzT1

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Alexandre Freire Kawakami, a Director at Industrial Logic about his talk Enabling Awesome Engineering Teams, the ideas behind Modern Agile and the importance of feedback loops and real usage data for product development.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Overview of his talk on enabling awesome engineering teamsThe contradiction between values-driven and process-driven change

- Modern Agile is designed to help people and organisations get over the process obsession

- Working software is not enough – achieving better outcomes for customers is what’s important

- By having analytics and usage data available we can learn what works and what doesn’t and make better decisions

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2j2usrx

6m:15s - Modern agile is about a community sharing ideas and stories about working towards four principles:

Deliver value continuously

Make people awesome

Experiment and learn rapidly

Make safety a prerequisite

6m:40s - Some techniques which can help achieve these values, depending on the culture fit

7m:25s - The benefits of single piece flow

8m:10s - The importance of safety to make experimentation and learning possible

9m:40s - It’s about building a community- not selling ideas

9m:55s - Some practices which can be taught

10m:22s - Not all organisations want to change at the same rate and to the same extent, and that’s OK

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2j2usrx

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/2cMnjfW