It was a pleasure to be asked by Deepti Jain to represent the Agile Alliance as part of the Agile Career bootcamp for the Agility Today 2021 festival. The video of the ask me anything session is available on YouTube.
Agile
Draft Published of the Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching
The Agile Coaching Ethics Initiative has published a draft code of ethics that aims to raise the standards around agile coaching. It runs under the auspices of the Agile Alliance to independently represent the wider agile community.
The January 2021 draft of Code of Ethical Conduct consists of 18 points covering 9 subject areas:
- Confidentiality and information security
- Acting within your ability
- Introspection and continuing professional development
- Conflicts of interest
- Social responsibility, including diversity and inclusion
- Ensuring the relationship is valuable for both coach and the client
- Agreeing on boundaries
- Abuse of power
- Responsibility to the profession
The Ethics Scenarios provide guidance on how the code relates to common challenges experienced by agile coaches, whether they are experienced or new to the role.
The expectation is that anyone taking on agile coaching at any level in an organisation will be able to use this code to help guide their behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas.
For questions and feedback on the code of ethics and the related agile scenarios, you can contact the initiative team at AgileCoachingEthics@agilealliance.org.
InfoQ interviewed Craig Smith and Shane Hastie about the code of ethical conduct.
Source: Draft Published of the Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching
Agile Coaching Ethics Initiative – Key Accomplishments & Highlights
The team working on the Agile Alliance Agile Coaching Ethics Initiative has been working steadily over the last six months and we have now published a draft Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching
Source: Agile Coaching Ethics Initiative – Key Accomplishments & Highlights
Episode 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…
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40 Agile Methods Goes Viral
Since first running the “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes” talk in 2014, the sketch note graphic that Lynne Cazaly created as part of the talk has ended up in numerous articles, presentations and in multiple languages.

Here are the ones that I am aware of:
Steve Denning has used the graphic numerous times in his articles on Forbes
… Yet what exactly is Agile? How do you explain Agile when there are more than forty different variants of Agile, as depicted in this graphic by Australian designer Lynne Cazaly… And what about all those Agile practices? There are more than 70 different Agile practices. Even the Agile Manifesto, with its four values and twelve principles can be a cognitive stretch for newcomers. How on earth can you explain such a bewildering blizzard of seemingly different ideas?
… There is also Agile in the sense of the various Agile brands promoted by consultants and trainers, of which there are hundreds. These are multiple variants of the same underlying idea of Agile. Yet often there is an insistence on using particular terms and specific named processes, which are defined in this way for the commercial purpose of distinguishing their offering from competing consultants and trainers. The result is mass confusion as shown in the diagram below.
What Is Agile? The Four Essential Elements
… For one thing, many different flavors of Agile have been disseminated by advocates, as shown in the figure below. These variants were issued with the best intentions. But in the resulting cacophony, it is easy to lose sight of what is essential to Agile. And it’s even easier for critics to conclude that perhaps Agile is no more than noise and confusion.
Why Finding The Real Meaning Of Agile Is Hard
“I talked to 50+ leaders and consultants about what ‘agile’ means,” the legendary professor of management science at the Stanford Engineering School, Robert I. Sutton, wrote on Twitter late last week. “Read 10+ books. I agree with many principles and grasped it when it focused on software. I am now confused. It has become a huge tent with varied jargon monoxide. Consider this graphic via @stevedenning.”
The Five Biggest Challenges Facing Agile
… Today there are multiple versions of what is meant by Agile…
Other references
Flow Framework — a fad, or here to stay? – Karsh Kunwar
Agile methods and frameworks are a dime a dozen (see below), with more methods & frameworks sprouting into existence all the time. Therefore, when I first heard of the new kid on the block — Flow Framework, I was both curious and skeptical.
Agile software development at a glance – Axon Active
When we speak of Agile methodologies, we speak of a way of working that entails a range of widely-adopted lightweight frameworks and methods. Not surprisingly, they include more than 40 Agile methods (see below). The most popular are Scrum, XP, Crystal, among others, whose inventions dated from the early 1940s to the 1990s even before the term “Agile” was coined.
Transforming Software Delivery – Roman Dumiak
OnAgile2017 – the Agile Alliance even used it for a conference, and yet the talk was never accepted in the USA!
Battle of the Frameworks: Choosing Agile Approaches in Government Project – Agile Government Leadership
Julien Karoubi – LinkedIn – it even attracted a post in French
“Les coachs agiles sont dogmatiques…” 👺
Il y a une différence entre donner un conseil, un avis, une préférence et forcer quelqu’un ! 🤗
Chacun peut avoir ses habitudes et ses références.
Historiquement, l’organisation du travail n’etait pas discutable dans l’entreprise.🤐
Plutôt séquentielle, plutôt hiérarchique, plutôt comme à l’usine (spécialisation et standardisation), plutôt pas le choix…😑
Désormais on a ➕ de choix, PRÉDICTIF ou ADAPTATIF, avec ou sans frameworks, avec beaucoup de possibilités au niveau des concepts.🎁
Mais on ne force personne ! 🕊
Offrir des choix, des orientations avec des arguments, fait aussi parti de ce métier :
Tout n’est pas égal à tout 🤔
Oui il y a des avancées, des plébiscites, des effets d’annonce, de l’excitation, de la naïveté des débuts, de l’ouverture, mais surtout de l’espoir.🌞
Plus de 40 méthodes, ce n’est pas une mauvaise nouvelle. 🤷♂️
Voici les slides :
https://lnkd.in/e3tzUY5Voici la vidéo :
https://lnkd.in/eVuF–NThks Craig Smith
Ceux qui empêche la réflexion, le choix, l’expression et l’argumentation, j’ai une pensée émue pour vous 😘
Episode 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…
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Episode 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…
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Episode 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…
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Top 10 Agile Alliance Blog Posts of 2020
Episode 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…
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