Software Crafts Podcast

This week, Steve Pereira will be challenged with the heuristic “Remove bias and duplication” from the Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Remove_bias_and_duplication). We will discuss different contexts where duplication can hinder or accelerate, and the importance of value streams. He shares his experiences about using weak signals to detect friction within organisations, helping them to reorganise to enable the flow.

Steve recommends the following resources:

• Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling
• Value Stream resources at https://visible.is/#thinking 
• Mastering Software Delivery with Value Stream Management from Jeff Keyes

Steve (@SteveElsewhere) is a DevOps enthusiast and an expert in software team performance with more than 20 years of experience. His main focus during all these years has been on using mapping techniques to guide ambitious and struggling teams towards their true north.

He is the founder of the consulting firm "Visible" where he coaches teams to boost flow and value using his 4 Key Maps of DevOps. Previously, he has been founding CTO of Statflo, build and release engineer, and a lifetime workflow automator. He also leads the 6500+ member Toronto DevOps community with a regular meetup, events, and annual conference. Being also an agency consultant, finance IT manager, and a tech support phone jockey, he is focused on the flow of value, all the time.

In this episode, our guest Trond Hjorteland is challenged with the heuristic “Complex systems evolve out of simple systems that worked” from Embedded Artistry repository (https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2018/04/26/embedded-rules-of-thumb/). We discussed how communication is important, and moving from the big picture to code and back. He shares the techniques and practices to have crucial discussions with people with different perspectives involved in the creation of software.

Trond recommends the following resources:

• Anything from Umberto Eco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco)
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
• Ackoff's Best: His Classic Writings on Management by Russell l. Ackoff
• The Infinite Monkey Cage podcast
• The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast

Trond (@trondhjort) is an IT architect and aspiring sociotechnical systems designer from the consulting firm Scienta.no and has many years experience with large, complex, and business-critical systems, primarily as a developer and architect on middleware and backend applications. His main interests are service-orientation, domain-driven design, event-driven architectures, and sociotechnical systems, working in industries like telecom, media, TV, and public sector. Mantra: Great products emerge from collaborative sensemaking and design.

“Design for constant evolution” is the heuristic for our guest, Edzo Botjes. The heuristic is part of the Simon Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Design_for_constant_evolution). Edzo discusses resilient and antifragile systems as part of his research. We discuss how organisations are addressing these topics, and what are the current market needs, given that it is a complex topic.

Edzo suggests:

• Foundations of Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering from Jan A.P. Hoogervorst
• Rethinking the Fifth Discipline from Robert Louis Flood

Edzo Botjes (@edzob) is an Enterprise Engineer with more than 15+ years’ experience. He believes that Enterprise Engineering covers Enterprise Architecture and the skills needed to implement innovation, governance, and architecture realistically. This implies that Group Psychology, IT Security Architecture, Technology Innovation, and Ethics are a few topics that should be included in the developing strategy and architecture.  In 2020 Edzo wrote his Master titled "Defining Antifragility and the application on Organisation Design” and graduated with the highest distinction.

Edzo is currently working on the new version of DYA, a view on Enterprise Architecture. Edzo is since this year part of Xebia Security with specialisation on the resilient organisation.

New year, new episode. Mykola Gurov is the first guest of the year, and we challenge him with the heuristic “Diagnose before cure” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/diagnose-before-cure/). Mykola shares his opinion about observability and the importance to challenge our assumptions and bias. Focus on the purpose of the software rather than the technical details. We discuss testing in production, the different techniques to be effective, reduce the feedback cycle, and do it safely. We end up talking about the differences between traditional approaches to testing software versus modern ones.

Mykola recommends:

• Unit testing is overrated blog post by Alexey Gulob (https://tyrrrz.me/blog/unit-testing-is-overrated)
• Testing of Microservices blog post by André Schaffer (https://engineering.atspotify.com/2018/01/11/testing-of-microservices/)

Mykola (@ngurov) is a software engineer. Working at bol.com since 2015. Mostly within “feature delivery” teams (logistics, supply chain) with occasional detours towards platform development. He is a proponent and adopter of rapid feedback techniques in software development: thorough functional testing in development; progressive feature delivery and trunk-based development; testing on production (shadow and live). On the technical side, he is a believer in micro-services; preference for higher-tier testing instead of heavy use of mocks.

Today Laveena Ramchandani will share her experiences about the heuristic “Tests should be fast, reliable and independent” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/independent-tests/). We discuss how to combine these 3 qualities to the test practices. We deep dive into the field of Data Science, and how test practices can be applied or re-think to deliver software with high levels of excellence.

Laveena recommends the following resources:

• How to avoid the testing Swiss Cheese Syndrome by Marc Rambert (https://conference.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/avoid-testing-swiss-cheese-syndrome/)
• The Tester's Pocketbook by Paul Gerrard

• Accelerating Software Quality: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the Age of DevOps by Eran Kinsbruner
• Laveena Ramchandani blogs (https://laveenaramchandani01.medium.com/) 

Laveena (LinkedIn) is working in Tech for over 7 years now. Her expertise is in software testing and quality assurance, a good mix of both technical and business awareness. She has learnt a lot through her career and is looking forward to gaining more knowledge and at the same time inspiring more testers around the world.

This week we feature Melissa Benua as our guest. She will share her experiences and opinion about the heuristic “Distribute power and decision making” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Distribute_power_and_decision_making).

She will share her heuristics to move between different leadership styles, such as Command and Control and Misson Command. We discuss the merits of the different styles, as well as how a manager can sense and discuss it with the people and the teams. We end up with the differences between an enterprise and a scale-up, and the trade-offs for a manager. 

Melissa recommends:

• State of DevOps report - https://cloud.google.com/devops 
• Accelerate book from Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim

Melissa Benua (@queenofcode) has worked in nearly every software development role—dev, test, DevOps, and program management—at companies big and small and somewhere in-between. She's created and run high availability, high-quality services for PlayFab, Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One, and now for mParticle's enormous data platform. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while growing the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing significant code churn. Now a director of engineering with mParticle, she’s passionate not only about maximizing efficiency both in her product code and in her developer tools but also about sharing best practices among colleagues and the tech world at large. 

Gitte Klitgaard is our guest. She will tell us her experiences and practices with the pattern “Blameless inquiry” for the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/blameless-inquiry). We will explore the different behaviours at a team and individual level, and how we can nurture a healthy culture. We discuss some tabu topics, such as mental health; what should organisations pay attention to, and how to act in order to protect people.

Gitte recommends:

• Amy Edmonson - Building a psychologically safe workplace (https://diversity.lbl.gov/2019/09/24/tedx-talk-on-psychological-safety/)
• Brené Brown - The power of vulnerability (https://brenebrown.com/videos/ted-talk-the-power-of-vulnerability/)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
• Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler 

Gitte (@nativewired) has been an agile coach at leading companies like Spotify, LEGO and IBM for more than a decade and has been independent since 2013. Her main focus in the last years have been communication and implementing psychological safety as well as responsibility and accountability. It is essential for Gitte to be authentic, to cut to the chase, and help people become themselves, so they can succeed at work and outside.

She also spends time being a speaker, mentor, and trainer and have so far keynoted on three continents - often about the things that we forget to talk about.

Gitte describes herself as “curious, hippie, friend, hugger, geek and learner”

This week Manuel Pais is our guest. We challenge him with the pattern “Internal Evangelism” from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/internal-evangelism). How the different Team Topologies archetypes and their relationship with this pattern. Our conversation goes into the necessary skills to be an influential evangelist, what a team should do from an evangelism point of view, and also to the management traits. 

Manuel recommends:

• Team Topologies Book: https://teamtopologies.com/book 
• Thoughtworks enabling team case study: Chapter 5, Page 88
• IBM enabling team case study: Chapter 7, Page 146
• Platform internal "evangelism" at HelloFresh: https://engineering.hellofresh.com/advocating-for-a-product-mindset-within-platform-teams-and-how-we-do-it-at-hellotech-part-1-fc1fbf8ae015
• Platform branding example from NAV's platform team: https://nais.io/

Manuel Pais (@manupaisable) is co-author of Team Topologies: organising business and technology teams for fast flow. Recognised by TechBeacon as a DevOps thought leader, Manuel is an independent IT organisational consultant and trainer, focused on team interactions, delivery practices and accelerating flow. Manuel is also a LinkedIn instructor on Accelerating Continuous Delivery in the Enterprise.

This week Xin Yao is our guest. She will share her opinion about the heuristic “Think Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, and Elegant (FIRE)” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Think_Fast.2C_Inexpensive.2C_Restrained.2C_and_Elegant_.28FIRE.29). We navigate between the four principles and Xin’s experience as a sociotechnical architect. She shares her experiences within a sociotechnical system, and what is changing in the role of a software architect.

Xin recommends the following resources:

• The Simplicity Cycle: A Field Guide to Making Things Better Without Making Them Worse by Dan Ward
• Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides) by Marshall B. Rosenberg
• Learn Wardley Mapping (https://learnwardleymapping.com/) 
• Virtual DDD (https://virtualddd.com/) 

Xin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/xinxin/ and @xin_yy)  is a sociotechnical software architect in Danske Bank. She explores Domain-Driven Design in her organisation's IT modernisation journey from a mainframe-centric landscape to cloud-based services. 

She regularly facilitates collaborative domain modelling workshops, using visual discovery techniques such as event storming and Wardley Mapping to co-create shared domain understanding and link to customer value. She is particularly curious of whether blending DDD into her org's current agile transformation initiative can give its habitual top-down architecture gestation culture a gentle nudge toward a democratic metamorphosis. Xin dreams of and works on elevating software architecture to a communication tool cross disciplines, owned and evolved by agile teams organically.

New week, new episode. And the guest is Khaled Souf, and I challenge him with the heuristic “Split functionality into small units” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/thirty-minute-methods/). Khaled will explain how he approaches software, and what are the tools, practices and techniques that he uses to deliver value. We also discuss inclusion and diversity as a critical aspect for organisations to strive!

Khaled recommends:

• Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
• Patterns, Principles, and Practices of Domain-Driven Design by Scott Millett and Nick Tune
• DDD Crew GitHub repo (https://github.com/ddd-crew)
• The Software Craftsman: Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride by Sandro Mancuso
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Khaled (@khaledsouf) is a passionate Senior dev/trainer/coach/DDD Distiller based in Montréal. He has been working for several years in Paris (France). He is also an organiser of the Software Crafters Montréal Meetup and the Unconference SOCRATES Canada. Currently, he works at Zenika Montréal as a senior consultant.