The Modern Agile Show

Episode 26 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Mary and Tom Poppendieck, co-authors of numerous excellent books, including Lean Software Development, Leading Lean Software Development and The Lean Mindset. Mary gave a wonderful keynote at the Scandinavian Agile conference (2018) called Proxies and Permissions. In that talk, Mary pointed out that she and Tom believe that “people ought to be able to figure things out for themselves” rather than being fed recipes. In Mary’s talk she highlighted Bret Victor's (@worrydream) Designer’s Principle (from his talk, Inventing on Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwX...) that “creators need an immediate connection with what they create.” Mary describes how important it is for people on agile teams to be "autonomous and asynchronous”, to get feedback rapidly from what they build instead of waiting a long time to see the impact of what you do. This is especially true if you are running experiments. Mary and Tom discuss a variety of “proxies” that stand in the way of fast feedback and autonomy. Mary explains how “speed and safety” go hand in hand. Mary believes that many agile scaling approaches are “a crutch” for organizations that have tight dependencies between people and architecture issues that require lots of people to talk, rather than being able to work autonomously, as they do at Amazon. Mary and Tom discuss how they see the four Modern Agile principles and how they relate to their Lean work. Finally, Mary describes how teams need a “concept of leadership”, someone who works as part of the team and helps teach the team how to work well, solve problems and learn.

Episode 25 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Vasco Duarte, an agile/lean expert, leader of the #NoEstimates movement, author of the #NoEstimates book and host of the popular ScrumMaster podcast. Vasco talks about how to conduct high-speed experiments (e.g. within 24 hours) so we invest in knowledge acquisition, not estimates. Vasco explains how he helped a car company test voice activation in cars without spending tons of time and money. Instead of estimating when voice activation would be available, he helped the company quickly gain knowledge about the value of the feature. Vasco describes how he uses throughput, rather than estimates, to help companies realize what is possible and avoid wasting millions of euros. Vasco says that the lost art of agile is “slicing work down” based on testing your core hypothesis. He mentions the need to get to incremental funding, rather than big upfront funding approaches. We discuss how critical it is to make sure you have a team that can actually work together and get work done, before anything else. Finally, Vasco mentions how he uses impact mapping and story mapping to help manage work and describes a backlog as a “mental disease that prevents us from forgetting bad ideas.”

Episode 24 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Karl Scotland, veteran agile/lean leader, focused on helping to build learning organizations. Karl discusses how to work with agile strategically. He recognized that four statements I’d written in the first Modern Agile blog were actually strategies and he observed that they might be a better guide than even the four values of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. He observes that strategies are generative and enable constraints rather than govern us. He explains what the phrase, “Don’t be a tabby cat trying to be a cheetah” means. He mentions the importance of Richard Rumelt’s book, Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Finally, Karl discusses his work on what he calls the X Matrix.

Episode 23 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Colleen Johnson, Founder and CEO of ScatterSpoke, a tool for more effective team retrospectives. Colleen recounts how difficult it can be to put the agile practices to work when you’re building your own product. She mentions the ease of falling into “MVP bloat”, adding too many features to your early product and not delivering early enough. Colleen describes how ScatterSpoke supports the practice of Continuous Retrospectives by letting people continuously submit (via tools like Slack) messages that get saved in ScatterSpoke. Colleen mentions her work with responsive roadmapping, a pull-based and capacity-oriented approach to roadmapping that constantly considers changing customer needs instead of nailing down a concrete plan that isn’t supposed to change.

Episode 22 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Woody Zuill, father of Mob Programming, a pioneer of #NoEstimates and an experienced Lean/Agile trainer and coach. Woody describes the early origins and influences of Mob Programming, including the study groups that he conducted at Hunter Industries. Woody describes the importance of daily Retrospectives in order to improve every day. He also explains how Mob Programming helps humans work well together and how the practice of mobbing helped him become a better person.

Episode 21 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with John P. Cutler, expert product manager, systems thinker, prolific writer and thought leader. John recalls when he first came across Modern Agile and what inspires him about it. We discuss the question, “Is Modern Agile most applicable for individuals or teams/organizations?” We look into how John experiments and learns rapidly in order to deliver value continuously. We discuss which Modern Agile principle we’d start with and John answers the question, “What is your biggest frustration when working with a new organization?"

Episode 20 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with David Hussman, veteran agile leader, product geek and founder/CEO of DevJam. We discuss his talk, "Learning in Product: How Wrong are You Ready to Be?" We reminisce about Extreme Programming and the nature of the early community that formed around it. We discuss how to handle known vs. unknown software work, how we change the way we work when moving from complicated to complex efforts, as well as what David’s been up to in the Chaos community.

Episode 19 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Brian Beckman, physicist and principal engineer in robotics at Amazon. Brian met Richard Feynman when he was a child and teenager and became greatly inspired by him. Brian tells a marvelous story that illustrates how serious Amazon is about investing in “customer obsession” and how the company embraces experimentation to discover faster, safer and cheaper ways to serve customers. He explains the necessity of Amazon’s drone delivery service, how it won’t be deployed until it’s safe, as well as why and when Amazon transitioned to microservices. Finally, Brian answers my question, “are people psychologically safe at Amazon?"

Episode 18 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Jennifer Marsman, an expert in machine learning and artificial intelligence and a principal software development engineer at Microsoft. Jennifer spoke at YOW! 2017 about her experiment to use machine learning to analyze brain wave data to determine if people were telling the truth. She explains how supervised machine learning and deep learning via neural networks are helping make people awesome. Finally, she explains how Microsoft’s culture is changing, including how they are encouraging people to conduct experiments and have a growth mindset.

Episode 17 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery. an independent software programmer and consultant and YOW! 2017 keynote speaker. Dave believes in applying the scientific method to software development and sees Continuous Delivery as a platform for experimentation. He believes that the biggest impact you can have in a software team is to get members of the team sitting next to people using the software and learning from what they observe. He explains how Continuous Compliance flows out of Continuous Delivery to provide rich, valuable audits trails for auditors.Finally, Dave tells us about how he Makes Safety A Prerequisite via "unconditional positive regard” (a concept he learned from his wife, Katherine) and how he creates high-trust team environments.