Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are privileged to spend some time with Don Reinertsen, who is considered one of the leading thinkers in the field of lean product development and author of numerous books including “Principles of Product Development Flow”
Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, hated math and thus preferred to sit on the factory floor and tweak processes, hence it was not a theory driven approach but rather empirically driven
Need to understand why things work so you can transfer it to other domains, a big shortcoming in lean manufacturing is that they don’t have much of a mathematical view on what they are doing
Craig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Aino Vonge Corry who is one of our very few repeat guests on the Agile Revolution. She describes herself as someone who puts speakers on stage, makes developers communicate and messes with the heads of students!
Part of the YOW! conference organising committee
Important to find examples that relate to all of the students in the class (not just a subset)
Microservice lectures – no more than 15 minutes lecture and then a learning activity
If there is interactivity then there is a reason to turn up to a live lecture
Need to respect and acknowledge that other people take in knowledge at different paces, this is important in activities that we give people time to think
People need to relate ideas to the things they are doing now to take…
Learn about the Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2017 themes we used to organize our speaker search for the event in Boston, April 19-21, 2017: Core Technical Practices, Team Technical Practices, and Technical Practices at the Organizational Level.
Craig and Tony sit down for a conversation at YOW! Conference with Betty Enyonam Kumahor (stands for good for me, on the way there) who is a technology leader in Africa:
Tony and Enyo are mutual members of the Alistair Cockburn fan club
Software engineering uptake in Africa is very low, need more technologists because it is is not an industry it is an enabler
Lots of diversity challenges in Africa – lees than 1% of the South African IT industry is women, but also diversity in languages, education and belief systems
Diversity is a multi-pronged issue, need to be patient but not complacent to move the needle forward, give girls the confidence to be competent and to push the boundaries
Frugal innovation in Africa – building technology in a space of constraints such as inadequate power, everything happens by mobile…
At the recent YOW! Night in Brisbane (as well and Sydney and Melbourne), Lindsay Holmwood (the Head of Technology at the DTA) presented “Breaking the Cylinders of Excellence”. It was a rare experience to hear the story of how the DTA is using cutting edge development practices to help the government catch up with, and even exceed, the public sector.
DTA – aid transformation in government, small agency
Delivery hubs in Sydney and Canberra – help identify and plug capability gaps in teams
Prototype of how government services could work gov.au/alpha
Digital Service Standard – 13 characteristics on what good looks like in government, useful in organisations as well
Cloud.gov.au – government cloud service, usage growing, continuous delivery pipeline (which is a major change for government who are used to 2 changes per year)
The unit of delivery is the team – not about individuals, but the team – borrowed from GDS
Government is slow, but government is designed to be stable, they cannot fail, they have characteristics that are resistant to change
Myth that organisations must choose between speed and reliability, high performing organisations deploy more frequently, have shorter lead times, fewer failures and recover faster, but they also have a greater profit
Want to deliver like a startup but be stable like a government
Not a lot of cross pollination between departments currently
Read the policy! – quite often the process is not mandated
Document what works and doesn’t so it becomes a repeatable pattern – ie. running a meetup inhouse, don’t tell me I can’t do it, tell me how I can run it without being thrown in jail!
Stick with technologies the government is comfortable with if you are changing the delivery engine
Security matters – prevention is a battle you will always lose, detection is your best defence – aggregate and log in one place, identify threat signatures, etc
Embed security people on big services so it is part of the architecture
Proactive testing between different governments around the world on similar platforms
Simplest security breaches make the most mess – infected excel macros, leaving free USB keys in the foyer that are malware infected
Need to put user needs first – alpha mockup using tools like Jeckyll, then beta then live
Lots of people strictly interpret the design and delivery guides – they are guides not rules!
Create a longer runway by pulling tech forward – turn down the volume of design, turn up the volume of tech
If it hurts, do it more often!
Fixed cost delivery with agile is a thing, agile is a way to de-risk in the government
Don’t put manual testing on the critical deployment path – have special skills on hand for accessibility, performance and security
Craig and Tony are once again roaming the lunch hall at YOW! 2015 in Brisbane, where they catch up with a number of people including:
Dave Thomas – founder of YOW! Conference discusses the success of YOW! Conference in Australia and how he didn’t go to Snowbird for the signing of the Agile Manifesto
Craig is at the YOW! Connected conference and talks to Mark Pedersen, the CTO at KJR, and they talk all things quality and testing:
the changing role of a tester in an Agile environment, it clarifies the role rather than making it blurrier
in an Agile environment it does not make sense to have a Test Manager role anymore
the number of dedicated testing roles are decreasing, but becoming more important and valuable
most organisations say that they use both waterfall and agile frequently
build your skills in either a quasi analysis / product owner / acceptance criteria role or get up to speed with sensible technical automation tools for your tech stack
TDD – good idea but not many organsations practicing it in a dedicated way, unit testing in most industries is a luxury
BDD – does not make TDD obsolete, defining acceptance criteria upfront helps understand…
Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are privileged to spend some time with Don Reinertsen, who is considered one of the leading thinkers in the field of lean product development and author of numerous books including “Principles of Product Development Flow”
Craig Smith 
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