Talk of values came up recently, and Atlassian as always was held up as an inspiration. The video covers it all, but I have always admired their values:
- Open Company, No Bullshit
- Build with Heart and Balance
- Don’t #@!% the Customer
- Play, as a Team
Agile
Episode 85: Scrum Australia 2014 Vox Pop
Tony and and sometimes over modulated Craig (with Renee popping up from time to time) roam the floor at lunchtime at Scrum Australia in Sydney and talk to some interesting Scrum folks along the way about their thoughts on the conference and the Scrum community in general:
- Shane Sendall (Suncorp) – end to end delivery and design patterns for teams, minimum loveable products, looking at flow efficiency
- Justin Urbanski (Rally) – Scrum Alliance Coaching Clinic, minimum viable bureacracy, scaling
- Ben Hogan (Tabar) and Martyn Frank (CBA) – teams overcommitting, Scrum in 60 seconds, visual facilitation inspired by Lynne Cazaly, kanban in curriculum development in universities
- Neil Killick (MYOB) – spoke with Craig Brown running the #noestimates Puzzle Game, 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes, Tony suggests #lotsofestimates, Neil’s posts on #noestimates
- Jason Yip (ThoughtWorks) and Sunish Chabba –…
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Episode 83: Making Impacts with Gojko Adzic
Gojko Adzic “does computers” which means he helps people deliver software and he caught up with Craig on a recent YOW! DepthFirst tour of Australia. Gojko is the author of numerous books including “Bridging The Communication Gap“, “Specification by Example“, “Impact Mapping” and “50 Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories“.
- XP – started with “Extreme Programming Explained” which was really about developers ruling the world – XP is not dead, it won!
- TDD has crossed the chasm to mainstream
- Sturgeons Law – 90% of anything is going to be crap
- Continuous integration and automation has opened up a world of possibilities
- “Bridging the Communication Gap” – about finding ways to break dysfunctional processes in organisations
- “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
- The most valuable companies in the world are software companies
- It’s more about the right people…
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Episode 82: The Heckle Revolution
Craig joins Darren Rogan, Ben Morgan and Leigh Appel in a special cross over episode with the Hack && Heckle Podcast to talk Agile and preview the upcoming YOW! conference that will be covered by both podcasts.
This episode has been released simulatenously as 088 The Heckle Revolution by Hack && Heckle.
Discussion points included:
- Hack && Heckle interview with Scott Hanselman from YOW! 2013
- Hack && Heckle intervoew with Ed Kmett from YOW! Lambda Jam 2014
- Hack && Heckle Tech Project Tools Overview including Sprintly, Trello, JIRA and Pivotal Tracker
- Half Arsed Agile Manifesto
- 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes – The Lean Startup, Scaling Agile, Holacracy, Spotify Tribes and Agile Marketing
- Not marketers, growth hackers!
- 50 in 50 keynote from YOW! 2010
- YOW! 2014 preview, discount code is HECKLEREVOLUTION
TheAgileRevolution-82 (39 minutes)
Episode 81: Resetting Agile & Devops with Justin Hennessy
Sitting in a sometimes noisy coffee shop on a unusually cold Brisbane day, Craig sits down for a chat with Justin Hennessy, a Scrum Master, Devops and System Administrator all rolled into one!
- “An Agile Team Reset” article on the Scrum Alliance
- The High Performance Tree by Lyssa Adkins
- resetting awesome
- early Agile experience shaped by “User Stories Applied” by Mike Cohn
- “Coaching Agile Teams” by Lyssa Adkins reshapes the way of thinking about about teams
- Agile in Adelaide versus Agile in Brisbane
- Coaching Circles with Lyssa Adkins
- Devops is more of a culture than a title
- being a Scrum Master on a single team is hard and the full-time role debate
- infrastructure has become a form of coding in itself
- infrastructure resource as part of a core Agile team
- better management and testing of configuration artefacts, unit testing and CI frameworks
- infrastructure deployment tools are often just another…
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Episode 80: Context Matters in SAFe with Em Campbell-Pretty
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne; Craig, Renee and Tony catch up with Em Campbell-Pretty to talk about the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as well as Impact Mapping and a variety of other topics:
- Em’s Agile journey and how she came to Agile from the business side and discovered SAFe before it was SAFe
- Australia’s first Agile release train and the SAFe Telstra Enterprise Data Warehouse Case Study
- Pretty Agile blog – Adventures in Scaling Agile
- Scaling Software Agility and Agile Software Requirements books by Dean Leffingwell
- did SAFe without PSI Planning – doing textbook SAFe you will most likely fail – apply it to your context
- SAFe is designed for big enterprise and is just where you start
- Leading SAFe training – focus on lean principles and leadership
- Epic – Feature – Story – why?
- if your wall isn’t changing then your process is probably not changing (inspect and adapt)
- key…
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Scrum Australia 2014: 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes
My presentation from Scrum Australia 2014 called “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes” is available on Slideshare.
With 73% of the world using Scrum as their predominant Agile method, this session will open up your eyes to the many other Agile and edgy Agile methods and movements in the world today. For many, Agile is a toolbox of potential methods, practices and techniques, and like any good toolbox it is often more about using the right tool for the problem that will result in meaningful results.
Take a rapid journey into the world of methods like Mikado, Nonban, Vanguard and movements like Holacracy, Drive and Stoos where we will uncover 40 methods and movements in 40 minutes to help strengthen your toolbox.
Huge recognition to Renee Troughton who created the basis for this talk as part of her Enterprise Transformation Meta Model work.
Honoured to have Henrik Kniberg, Nick Muldoon and Adam Weisbart in the audience for this talk and lots of good feedback on Twitter.
Lean Metrics & Time Tracking
- used Kanban – work item types to allocate capacity and 3 levels of service (standard, coordinated, expedite)
- JIRA was the tool but was not the most ideal choice and not really up to the task
- reported by type on backlog, work in progress, throughput (number of work items not size), velocity (throughput and velocity were similar which showed average size), cycle time, class of service mix, due date performance, estimation accuracy, cancelled WIP (started and then cancelled work) and demand balancing (clearing out the backlog)
- flow efficiency – percentage of time you work on an item versus in progress, also referred to as touch time – using time tracking in JIRA to do this
- time allocation – value add, failure load (defects), transaction cost (overheads of planning and releasing), coordination cost (management), used percentage of time spent rather than actual hours
The one things that got me thinking during this presentation was the flow efficiency report.
Early on my journey of being an Iteration Manager, my teams used to track times per card. We used to use XPlanner which had some reasoanbly easy functionality for tracking time (one of the good features was as the Iteration Manager I could enter time for my team if needed, tools like JIRA require the developer to record that data if you want it assigned to that developer). We used to use thee metrics for comparing estimates to actuals but over time I came to the conclusion that we would be much better off just making sure that the cards were completing on time (an average of 3 times) and splitting cards out if they appeared to big.
Lately, a number of people in my Agile classes have been arguing that time track is beneficial. My usual response to this (like for all metrics) that it is OK if it adds value, but my recommendation is not to waste your time. Even more so, this opens up the estimation debate that I also believe that a lot of time should not be wasted on (#noestimates), but that is a discussion for another post. My main reasoning is often we need to track for other sources (like timesheets) in different systems, and the overhead does not justify the effort. If teams need time metrics (often to see if time is being wasted away from the core work of the team, say on production support or corporate meetings), I suggest they are done at a team level and rounded to the nearest hour, and collected as time not spent not on project work.
In the graph above, flow efficiency is a good way for showing waste in the system (in this example, the team could potentially be way more effcient), but it relied on the team tracking time (in this case using the time tracking feature in JIRA against each card). I really like it as a graph, I am just not sure the effort to produce it is justified.
Some discussion in the Q&A revolved around recording time tracking (or similar metrics) is OK if the team understands it is an incentive for better metrics, and I can’t disagree with that thought. Just in my experience as an Iteration Manager, getting reliable and timely time and effort metrics ha been painful and the reward outweighed the effort.
Episode 79: Vomit Value with Jim Benson
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne, Jim Benson of Personal Kanban fame takes some time to talk with Craig, Renee, Tony and (a very silent) Kim Ballestrin and along the way they talk about:
- early work implementing David J. Anderson’s Agile Management which resulted in Jim focussing on the person (Personal Kanban) and David focussing on the organisation (Kanban method) – two different viewpoints on the same solution set
- XP, Scrum, Kanban method and Personal Kanban exemplify the people who created them
- The Oath of Non Allegiance
- Scrum vs Kanban
- Why Limit WIP and Why Plans Fail books out now and working on an upcoming book about meetings
- Individuals and interactions is redundant – relevant in 2001 to shake people out of complacency
- Agile is anti-manager
- Agile in knowledge work
- WIP limits and avoiding “death flow”
- Vomit Value – user stories with spurious and arbitrary value in a…
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Episode 64: Interstate 40 East with Nick Muldoon
On a road trip to Agile 2013 from Dallas to Nashville, Craig chats to Nick Muldoon while cruising in a Chevy Equinox eastbound on Interstate 40 between Memphis and Nashville. Nick is an Agile Coach at Twitter and formerly the Product manager for GreenHopper at Atlassian and whilst doing 65 miles an hour they chat about:
- Interstate 40
- Memphis – Graceland, Sun Records, Beale Street, BBQ
- Atlassian and Greenhopper (renamed JIRA Agile at Agile 2013)
- FOLIO for JIRA
- Drive (Dan Pink) and
Fed-ExShip It Days - Peter Senge and the Learning Organisation
- Atlassian Blogs
- JIRA Issue Collector
- Agile approach at Atlassian and on the Greenhopper team
- Twitter – 1,200 engineers to work 140 characters!
- #Music (We Are Hunted)
- The Fail Whale is harpooned and scaling Twitter (Agile, teams and platform)
- SprintZero: The Physics of Agile Marketing
- The convergence of Lean Startup, Growth Hacking and Agile…
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Craig Smith 
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