Agile

Episode 69: DevOps with Michael Nygard

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Michael NygardAt YOW 2013 in Sydney, Craig and Renee catch up with Michael Nygard and discuss the world of DevOps including:

  • Michael’s book “Release it!: Design and Deploy Production Ready Software“
  • What DevOps really is
  • The values of DevOps and its relationship to the Agile Manifesto
  • Could DevOps have occurred without Agile?
  • How much of Release it is still holding well?
  • Anti-patterns in DevOps (eg. a separate DevOps group)
  • Cognitect and Closure
  • Development is production
  • Where does ITIL fit in with DevOps?
  • Why Problem Management may no longer be relevant
  • How good are we really in DevOps?

You can contact Michael on twitter at @mtnygard or at the Think Relevance Blog.

The Agile Revolution-69 (28 minutes)

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Episode 68: Together Again Like Peas & Carrots

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peascarrotsCan you believe it ! Yes it’s a real Forest Gump moment, the revolutionists are finally back together again just like peas and carrots . They are back to their best discussing :

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Episode 67: A Boys Night Out

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boysnightoutCraig and Tony take the opportunity in Renee’s absence to talk about the year that was , conferences and workshops attended and generally cover all things Agile: 

Twitter Quotes: @RonJeffries, @WendyAppell, @drunkcod

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Episode 66: Agile Coaching with Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd

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Michael-Craig-LyssaAt YOW 2013 in Sydney, Craig, Renee and Jeremie Benazra catch up with Lyssa Adkins, author of “Coaching Agile Teams” and Michael Spayd, both Agile Coaches at the Agile Coaching Institute and chew the fat on:

  • What is Agile?
  • Lyssa’s “Coaching Agile Teams” book
  • The difficulties in being an Agile Coach
  • The XP Coach
  • Coaching as a more mature version of leadership
  • Where professional coaching fits into Agile Coaching
  • Why Agile Coaches are sought after whereas general organisational coaching is less prevalent
  • The training of managers and its impact on mindsets
  • Michael’s “Coaching the Agile Enterprise” book
  • Team coaches vs enterprise coaches – what is the difference
  • Scrum Mastering an enterprise transformation
  • ICAgile
  • How to teach a pig to sing
  • The coaching oath of non-allegiance
  • Certified Scrum Coach versus ICAgile Coach
  • The myriad of skill sets needed as an Agile Coach
  • Agile…

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Agile Encore 2013: Visual Management: Leading With What You Can See

/ Craig Smith / 1 Comment

AgileEncore2013My presentation from the Agile Encore 2013 conference called “Visual Management: Leading With What You Can See” is available on Slideshare.

Renee Troughton was unfortunately unable to join me to present this reprise of the talk we presented together at Agile Australia 2013.

Using task boards or story walls is a key Agile practice, but are you making the most of it? Visual Management is more than just putting cards on a wall, it is a growing style of management that focuses on managing work only by what you can see rather than reports or paper being shuffled around. Visual Management allows you to understand the constraints in the system, mitigate risks before they become issues, report on progress from the micro to the macro. Visual Management can also be used to demonstrate to customers and clients where the work they care about is at. This presentation is all about taking the management of your work to the next stage of transparency. Discover:

* How to identify when your story wall isn’t telling you everything and how to adjust it
* What the three different types of story walls are and which one is more suitable to certain circumstances
* Different ways to visualise your product backlogWhy queue columns and limiting work in progress is so important regardless of whether you are using Scrum or Kanban
* How symbols and tokens can be used to give more information
* What else can you use other than story walls to visualise information
* How to ingrain Visual Management into both the team and management structures of your organisation
* Visualising Your Quality, Testing and Team
* What is systemic flow mapping and why is it important

Unfortunately the talk was interrupted about three-quarters of the way through by a rogue video conference call into the auditorium. My attempt to try and answer questions why people were trying to fix the problem were interrupted by audio coming through the call. We soldiered on – but it interrupted the flow.

And here are some feedback from the feedback forms – much appreciated!

  • Lots of ideas
  • Very informative with real world examples
  • Delivered as per advertised. Was relevant and interesting to listen to. Some great take outs
  • More relevant to where we are as an organisation
  • Big wall
  • Most applicable as I am a newbie
  • Kept the audience engaged from start to finish
  • The task based techniques most relevant
  • Gave more understanding of how to do better Agile

 

Episode 65: Becoming Agile… with Greg Smith

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GregSmithAt Agile 2013 in Nashville, TN, Craig catches up with his old friend Greg Smith (no relation), co-author of “Becoming Agile… In An Imperfect World” and Agile Coach at GS Solutions Group. Greg regularly assists Fortune 500 with their adoption of Agile and the quote of the podcast has to be “discipline or good software practices are proportionally inverse to how much money you make!”. Some of the topics of conversation were:

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Episode 63: The Lean-Agile Project with Al Shalloway

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alan_shallowayAt Agile 2013 in Nashville, TN, Craig talks to Al Shalloway from Net Objectives in the open space area (ironically in front of a waterfall) about his current areas of interest in the Lean Agile community. Al has been a leading voice in the Agile community for many years, is the author of many software development and Agile related books and is a SAFe Program Consultant as well as a co-founder of the Lean Software & Systems Consortium. The topics discussed include:

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Episode 62: Agile 2013 Days 3, 4 & 5

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Agile2013Craig continues his daily reports from Agile 2013 in Nashville with some observations on the sessions he attended on days 3, 4 and 5.

More in-depth notes will be available on Craig’s blog soon.

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Agile 2013: 7 Deadly Sins of Agile Software Test Automation

/ Craig Smith / 1 Comment

Agile2013_Speaker_bannerMy presentation from the Agile 2013 conference called “ 7 Deadly Sins of Agile Software Test Automation” is available on Slideshare.

Adrian Smith was unfortunately unable to join me to present this extended version of the talk that he has presented previously at Agile Australia and Fusion.

Automated software testing is a key enabler for teams wanting to build high quality software that can be progressively enhanced and continuously released. To ensure development practices are sustainable, automated testing must be treated as a first-class citizen and not all approaches are created equal. Some approaches can accumulate technical debt, cause duplication of effort and even team dysfunctions.

The seven deadly sins of automated software testing are a set of common anti-patterns that have been found to erode the value of automated testing resulting in long term maintenance issues and ultimately affecting the ability of development teams to respond to change and continuously deliver.

Taking the classic seven sins (Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Envy, Rage, Pride, Greed) as they might be applied to test automation we will discuss how to identify each automated sin and more importantly provide guidance on recommended solutions and how to avoid them in the first place.

A full house for the talk, some really positive feedback and heaps of questions following the talk, so thanks to everyone who attended!

And here are the comments from the feedback cards that were handed in and nothing negative!:

  • Great speaker, am so glad I came here
  • Excellent slides, pictures
  • Very humorous – kept me awake!
  • Super content, gave me some great ideas to take back to my workplace. THANKYOU!
  • Great analogy, good tips / info
  • By far, the absolute best QA session I have attended this week. I wish my entire company could have heard this presentation. It was engaging, meaningful and practical information that I can take directly back to my colleagues. Well done!
  • Very good session, got a lot out of it – got some good direction, fun presentation
  • Best session I have attended! Great speaker delivering the content in a very entertaining manner
  • Excellent session! Craig is a great speaker, content was SO good! Nice I can go get preso and link to templates and materials
  • Pragmatic testing!! 🙂
  • Enjoyed the session, this will make me look for other opportunities (tools) for automation testing
  • Great speaker! Although new to testing sessions, I gained good insight from this session to put into use back at the business! 🙂
  • This was the most insightful and best talk I’ve attended thus far
  • Excellent session