The Agile Revolution

By The Agile Revolution

Join Craig, Tony and Renee on a journey through the world of Agile as they look at recent blogs related to Agile, investigate practices and techniques, look at tools and answer your questions. The rev... more

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FAQs about The Agile Revolution:

How many episodes does The Agile Revolution have?

The podcast currently has 259 episodes available.

The Agile Revolution episodes:

April 06, 2021Episode 194: Business Agility Sparks at Lithespeed with Sanjiv Augustine
Renee and Craig are at Agile2019 in Washington, DC and catch up with Sanjiv Augustine, author of “Managing Agile Projects” and “Scaling Agile” and founder and CEO of Lithespeed:
Craig’s InfoQ interview with Sanjiv
“Leadership is about managing change while management is about managing complexity… you need to be both”
Lithespeed = flexible speed
“Reinventing Organisations” by Frederick Laloux and the Morningstar model
The Agile community is excited about the benefits of the teal level but not the responsibility
Business Agility Sparks – need to shift left from IT to the business and shift right to DevOps and shift up into leadership
What makes you successful at the executive level is working with others
Agile Value Management Office (VMO) is a cross functional leadership team that manages the flow of work from end to end
PMO is more oriented towards best practices process, whereas the Agile VMO is more about flow of work to a business outcome (rather than output)
Collaborate with external auditors to determine what documentation is really needed and the controls required
Basic agile transformation model – build a true end to end value stream team, implement lean discovery and dual track discovery / delivery and an Agile VMO
Agile VMO is needed when there are obstructions to the flow of value
Dynamic strategy (top down, bottom up and outside in) and decision making velocity (speed to make a decision) and ensuring leadership is not a bottleneck to decisions
We still have work to go in taking Agile to other parts of the organisation and taking it to the executive and the board room
“Only the paranoid survive” – Andy Grove
“If we are in danger of being disrupted, why don’t we disrupt ourselves” – Andy Grove
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44min
February 15, 2021Episode 193: Agile Australia 2019 Vox Pop #2
Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and once again chat to some old friends from the Australian Agile community:
Keynotes from Ali Walker and Marty Cagan
Elabor8 (nice plug Tony)
Sharon Robson from enterprising agility – enjoying the recognition that Agile adoption starts from the top down, agile at scale is about the thinking and thought processes being applied throughout the entire organisation, looking forward to Sandra Davey on “Upon retrospective: the board went Agile“
Steve Lawrence – a member of the “11 club”, agile should be a mechanism to create greater value not reduce headcount, every small step you take is a step forward
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19min
February 15, 2021Episode 192: Agile Australia 2019 Vox Pop #1
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and run into some old friends:
Cathy Tang – “stroke the ego and crack the whip”, making the leap from logistics to Scrum Master
Rachel Slattery – Agile Australia Director and Director of Slatts Group, surprised by the large number of new attendees
Keynotes by Emma Murray and Jez Humble
Hayley Pepper from Sunsuper – enjoyed talk by Roger Almeida “Lessons from leading a “you build it, you run it” team” about platform teams
Charlotte Hinton from Service Innovation Lab and organiser of AgileWelly – each year we hear similar problems and are we making traction, enjoyed talk by Sarah Taraporewalla “Complex is easy, it’s simple that’s hard“
https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/theagilerevolution-192.mp3
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15min
January 15, 2021Episode 191: Accelerating DevOps with Jez Humble
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and after many years of chasing him around finally get to speak to Jez Humble, co-author of many fine books including “Continuous Delivery“, “Lean Enterprise“, “The DevOps Handbook” and “Accelerate” and they discuss:
Accelerate is based on a research program where practices are validated on the impact they had on various organisations
Agile Australia keynote “The Key to High Performing Tech Organizations“
There is enormous scope to extend the Accelerate-type research to the rest of the value stream
“Thinking Fast and Slow” – Daniel Kahneman shows that you can measure psychological and behavioural science
Project Aristotle by Google – were able to replicate results around culture
State of DevOps Report
Jeff Smith at Suncorp
We all want to ensure that people and data are safe – need to find better ways to achieve control objectives that don’t slow people down
“Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests” – Nat Pryce and Steve Freeman
Unless you spend weeks or months doing test first it is very hard to get into
UC Berkeley classes
Rebecca Parsons drops in!
Trunk Based Development argument
The books and frameworks help but you need try and fail by yourself
https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/theagilerevolution-191.mp3
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28min
January 08, 2021Episode 190: Talking Agile Live From The Man Cave with Serge Beaumont
Renee, Craig and Tony are together to chat with Serge Beaumont, Principal Agile Coach at Xebia, live from his man cave and despite showing their lack of mathematical skills in relation to dice they chat about:
In relation to culture, if the human connections are there you can handle just about anything
A foundational cultural aspect at Xebia is that they implemented Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE) – every second Tuesday the team has dinner and then has a mini-conference of about 20 streams
Xebia were at the foundation of the ING Agile transformation
Gloomhaven
Rode PodMic
You need leadership that truly believes in culture as a powerful thing
Renee does story maps like trees and Serge prefers to ensure that he finds his epic on the horizontal slice rather than using the activities on the vertical backbone, building towards an MVP
All backlogs should be tree structures
An epic is a user story that is too big
Deltas go in the backlog and constraints go in the definition of done
two rules for scaling – autonomy over coordination and Scrum is a fractal
Scrum@Scale
If you think you can assume a big framework forever, you are not Agile – you need to change constantly and not take the rules too seriously
“If SAFe is the only thing they will do to accept Agile, I’ll take it…”
HIP sprints – Hardening Innovation Planning sprints
Bol.com agile transformation – now have a variant of holacracy in place called Spark
TomTom agile transformation
Webinar “Coordinating multiple Scrum teams in times of remote working“
Webinar “Preventing And Dealing With Burn Out From Someone Who Has Experienced It All“
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52min
January 04, 2021Episode 189: The Alistair Cockburn Fan Club with Martin Kearns
Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and they (finally) catch up with Martin Kearns, the Chief Digital Officer at Innodev and co-organiser of Scrum Australia, and they chat about:
Alistair Cockburn gets mentioned at around the 2:30 minute mark, and Martin was responsible for first bringing him to Australia
Being coached is being open to an experience you aren’t controlling
Certified Agile Leadership
Agile is always going to hurt, need to prepare for pain and enjoy it
Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation – need to understand the environmental factors that are forcing Agility into organisations
Knowledge of customers is more superior than ever before – due to education and social intelligence (Target inappropriate clothing for children)
VUCA is here to stay – accept that you need to listen
Australia Post is a good agile example organisation – reinvented themselves through identity services, travel insurance, etc
Australian government has a greater openness to Agile than the private sector – Energy Safe Victoria understand purposefulness
FailAgility
Agile Contracts
https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/theagilerevolution-189.mp3
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30min
December 30, 2020Episode 188: Doing Agile Right with Steve Berez & Tony Christensen
Tony and Craig catch up with Tony Christensen and Steve Berez, co-author of “Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos” as well as from Bain & Company and they chat about:
Saw a lot of companies doing agile wrong and a lot of pain suffering and probably worse off than when they started – book is to try to share learning and get agile on the right track
The conditions for agile to flourish need to change, particularly beyond team level
RBS – one of the key impediments was funding, changed to funding persistent teams
Most organisations have a dissatisfaction with their financial process – need to have an honest conversation around the pain points of trust and process and seeing the promise of early return
Bosch – were not innovating as quickly as they needed to, now using Agile for product design, manufacturing process and supply change operations – use Agile wherever a change need is required
Best way to manage a transformation is in an agile way – problem is unfortunately a transformation has to be funded using the existing processes and adapt the process as you go
Where Agile works well is where it is more organic – give the teams the tools for success and get out of the way
Saab Gripen Fighter Jet – built using Agile
Set the ambition to be a continuous internal learning organisation
We need good recipes – Toyota and Spotify are good examples – sharing is of benefit to each other
Persistent teams are recommended to get the best results. – there is a compelling economic argument for this as well
How Agile Is Powering Healthcare Innovation – healthcare has had to innovate at a much more rapid pace than traditionally due to the global pandemic – built around small empowered teams that are focussed on the problem
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55min
December 28, 2020Episode 187: Domain Driven Yak Symmathesy with Jessica Kerr
Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat to Jessica Kerr, software developer, consultant and symmathecist (look it up or listen to the podcast) and apart from our first live podcast sneeze they talk about:
YOW! 2018 keynote “The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming“
YOW! 2018 talk “Shaving the Golden Yak“
Great teams make great people – if you want to become great as a developer, focus on the team
You can’t document what is obvious to you – whenever you say the word obviously, replace it with “I cant explain it, but…”
Yak shaving – all the tasks that you do that get in the way of your work
If you are an agile person but you wish agile had more code in it – go to the Domain Driven Design community
We need to embrace complexity in the business domain – the code should be a tool to learn about the business domain
Code doesn’t wait for design, it participates in design
Atomist – automation for DevOps
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31min
July 13, 2020Episode 186: Managing the Unmanageable with Ron Lichty
Craig fires some questions at Ron Lichty, co-author of “Managing the Unmanageable” and the “Study of Product Team Performance“:
Author of machine Language programming books “Programming the Apple IIGS in Assembly Language” and “Programming the 65816“
Managing the Finder team at Apple – hired for stellar C++ coding ability and customer empathy
Software development is a team sport – including QA, a dedicated product manager / product owner and designers
After Dark and Flying Toasters at Berkeley Systems
“Managing the Unmnageable” is 9 chapters and around 300 rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom (the creamy centre), the tools used to manage software development teams plus the authors own insights
There were very few books (7 at the time) on managing software developers (unlike project management and agile)
Fred Brooks – “The Mythical Man-Month“
Situational Leadership – opens your eyes to delegating and supporting the people on your team
The most important rule – always be recruiting
The Study of Product Team Performance – effective onboarding correlates with the highest performance teams (yet 7% consider this to be a best practice)
Self organising teams are where every single member of the team is a leader from their expertise
A team created definition of done may be one of the most important practices in Agile
The frequency of standups correlates with the performance of the team
The Daily Standup was not intended to be a status meeting but rather a replanning meeting
Teams that have stories for their entire backlog are correlated with the highest level of team performance
Steve Bockman – “Practical Estimation” and “Predictability“
Pragmatic Institute framework – the skills of a Product Management
Ambiguities in the requirements typically popup in the middle of the programming, which is why it is so valuable to have a Product Owner nearby to address these
Software development is a team sport – what gates teams is collaboration and communication – we need to nurture and provide support for that to thrive
We have two ears and one mouth and we need to use them in that proportion
We can’t over communicate in software development
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50min
June 13, 2020Episode 185: Heart of Agile Academy with Alistair Cockburn & Soledad Pinter
Tony, Renee and Craig speak to Alistair Cockburn and Soledad Pinter about the newly launched Heart of Agile Academy:
The Heart of Agile Academy is the opportunity to reset Agile learning with a clean sheet of paper
The core design decisions were to remove the classes being tied to a title and to be better at the specialities that make up the Heart of Agile
Heart of Agile is just four words or focus areas: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect and Improve
Alistair and Ahmed Sidky tried to solve this problem in 2010 when they launched ICAgile
There are over 3,000 different certification programs for Agile
The Academy has courses at different levels that are taught by Agile experts from around the world (and in multiple languages)
There is an accreditation ladder and process for bringing on new courses and trainers
Designed to be a marketplace for Agile classes and open for business now!
The values of the Heart of Agile community are openness, dialogue and humanity
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51min

FAQs about The Agile Revolution:

How many episodes does The Agile Revolution have?

The podcast currently has 259 episodes available.