The Modern Agile Show

Episode 36 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Pat Reed, an executive coach with extensive agile experience at companies like The Gap, Disney, Universal Studios and many others. She’s known for guiding executives and leaders in large scale agile transformations within huge organizations. Joshua and Pat discuss her experiences spearheading the Australian government’s movement to agility and they go deep into the use of agile in accounting and people operations, as well as Pat’s use of Modern Agile principles.

Episode 35 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Ainsley Nies, a longstanding contributor to the Agile community, instructor of the Agile Management course at Golden Gate University and a co-author of the excellent book, “Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams.” Ainsley and Josh discuss the benefits and nuances of chartering, an agile practice they both love and use frequently.

Episode 34 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Wil Pannell, a self-taught programmer, agile/lean practitioner and in-demand coach at Industrial Logic. Wil is a scholar who is constantly improving his skills in technology and process. He is passionate about improving racial diversity in tech. Joshua and Wil discuss Wil's journey to agile engineering practices, the future of agile education and the urgency for more diversity in tech.

Episode 33 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Emilia D’Anzica, an industry leader in the emerging field of customer success. Emilia is currently a partner at Winning by Design, which recently acquired her self-founded company, Customer Growth Advisors. Emilia shares her story as a CS strategist and consultant, where she has helped companies increase sales by ditching the standard sales process for a more personal and emotional sales experience, focused on enlarging the impact a product/service has on a customer, and increasing sales from renewal of the product/service.

Episode 32 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Mike Rizzi, a veteran software developer, engineer, pragmatic geek, lean/agile coach, honorary Gujurati and DJ. Mike tells a fabulous sorry about practicing financial safety in software development at a healthcare company. integrating a seemingly small feature into a huge automated interface that is connected to over 1,200 backend systems and the challenges of staying agile in that space. Also, Mike shares a story about his how his lifelong ski instructor lived Lean and intuitively applied agile principles to his teaching.

Episode 31 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Stas Zvinyatskyovsky, a managing Director at Solutions IQ/Accenture, a software architect and engineering leader. We talk about the epic journey that Stas co-led to help Yahoo move from a slow, manual, error-prone development process to a smooth, fast and reliable process with continuous deployment. We discuss the cultural issues and challenges associated with this difficult journey, which Stas calls Taking the Elephant Out of the Tar Pit.

Episode 30 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Ted M. Young, a veteran software practitioner, designer and instructor. Ted and I discuss the difference between using scaffolding and safety nets when changing code and what is means to program safely. We also discuss the need for awesome examples of great code from which people can learn, the idea of a “microlith” (a micro edition of a monolith) and we end with a discussion of viscosity in code and the importance of developing a sense of self awareness as a developer.

Episode 29 of the Modern Agile Show features Joshua Kerievsky discussing Retrospectives. He tells a story of a team’s iteration retrospectives and how the same problem kept coming up, with no resolution in sight. Finally, by making it safe for an individual to speak up, he was able to help the person get past a problem. This reveals a need for a fabulous tool by Norm Kerth, the author of Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews. The tool helps teams assess how safe they feel to speak up. Using this tool, before a retrospectives begins, is a valuable way to understand what people are comfortable to say or not say and it can reveal when a team has a psychological safety issue.

Episode 28 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Arlo Belshee, a pioneering agilest who is constantly pushing the boundaries of agility, from planning to programming. Arlo was at the deliver:Agile conference in Austin, Texas to talk about mastering legacy code via ultra-safe refactorings. Arlo describes “recipes” that people can execute manually on languages that have lacked automated refactoring tools (like C++). Together with his colleagues at Tableaux software, Arlo has helped to find a way to solve the classic chicken-and-egg problem of not being able to refactor because you lack tests and not being able to test code without first refactoring. The safe recipes use the type system and rely on the compiler to ensure that you can indeed refactor without automated tests and that the design transformations you make are perfectly safe. Each recipe involves micro-changes that together help you safely make important design changes. Arlo explains how his approach to ultra safe refactoring helped him and his colleagues make design changes in legacy Microsoft products, like Foxpro. This is the essence of the Modern Agile principle, Make Safety A Prerequisite. Also also mentions a practice called “safeguarding”, a practice of analyzing a defect stream after an incident occurs. His teams performs RCA (root cause analysis) to identify the hazards that were present when an incident occurred, followed by “remediation”, which is a small, time-boxed fix to make the code less hazardous.

Episode 27 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Sam McAfee, a product management coach and author of the book, Startup Patterns. Sam explains some of the main reasons why enterprise agile teams fail, based on a popular Medium.com post that he wrote. He explains that organizations that have achieved success in a product area have operationalized work to contain risk and drive out variability. Unfortunately, that work tends to not fit so well with innovation work. Rigid, top-down, command-and-control style management rarely fits well a strong, self-directed team-based model. Financial incentives and annual reviews also tend to get in the way, as they tend to be focused on individuals rather than teams. Sam describes the importance of building a flexible, adaptable learning culture in order for enterprise agile to thrive. You need supportive leaders at the top and it can help to develop an innovative space or area that is separate from the main business. Innovation work needs some structure, clear goals and a e safe-to-fail culture. Sam sees a need to outfit innovation spaces with mini-versions of core business functions like HR, legal, etc.