Episode 133: Rules Are For Pussies!

07/07/201707/07/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

Craig and Renee are both in Sydney and catch up around the kitchen table to discuss a bunch of things happening in the Agile universe:

Renee is watching “The Leftovers” while Craig has been binge watching “Mad Men” and they talk about TV show podcasts such as “The West Wing Weekly“
ANZ (one of Australia’s big four banks) is diving into Agile (everywhere but bank branches)
Silicon Valley Agile (Scrum) reference (NSFW!)
UK is wasting 37 million pounds per year on failed Agile projects (but the devil is in the detail not the headline)
IBM calling remote workers back to the office – is it about trust, staff reductions or something else?
The Thomas Allen Curve
17 Essential Hacks Every Scrum Master Should Know

"SAFe doesn't require your management to change in any meaningful way" says @jboogie at #CraftConf
— Dan North (@tastapod) April…

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Episode 132: Usability Made Easy with Steve Krug

28/06/201728/06/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Tony, Craig and Renee are at Agile Australia and catch up with Steve Krug and talk usability and along the way try to figure out whether Tony is lean, agile or just old…

“Don’t Make Me Think” book, now in 3rd edition
Agile Australia keynote “You’re not doing usability testing? Are you…nuts?“
need to start doing usability early, to find issues early and have time to fix it
Laura Klein’s book “UX For Lean Startups” is a good book on lean
issues with lean from a usability perspective is failure and disruption
usability is a user advocate role
cubicle test – draw a paper prototype and ask the person in the next cubicle to fill it out and observe the issues
CX is basically UX owned by marketing!
UX is design where usability is more about testing
start by taking to customers then do regularly…

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Episode 131: Program Management Envato Style with Adrian Fittolani

21/06/201721/06/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Renee, Tony snd Craig are at Agile Australia and sit down with Adrian Fittolani from Envato and discuss program management and monte carlo simulations. Renee also makes an estimate that is super accurate!

Envato – a marketplace for creative assets
Lisa Frazier talk at Agile Australia “Leadership in the Digital World“
utilise bottom up program management at Envato, they have 4 main themes as a company and use self organising themes to meet those themes
had to evolve from co-located teams as could not find local resources, they now have any person working in any team wherever they are and make that work, they try to keep teams in close timezones and use asynchronous communication tools, have a policy to work anywhere and additionally a policy to travel and work from anywhere in the world for 3 months
the teams responsibility is to radiate program status, currently using…

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Episode 130: Agile Australia 2016 Vox Pop #2

31/05/201731/05/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony are roaming the conference floor again at Agile Australia in Melbourne talking to more interesting people in the Australian Agile community:

Sarah Pollard (Super Retail Group) on the talk by Margarette Purvis on “Creating a kaizen culture proves transformative for Food Bank For New York City” and Richard Weissel talk on “The Heart of Agile is in your Local Primary School” and in our organisations understanding what we need to change
Joanne Robertson (Tatts Group) on her first Agile conference, Luke Hohmann’s “Awesome Superproblems” keynote and Innovation Games book
Cathy Tang (Westpac) and the journey from event management to Agile and the Jennfier Frahm talk on “Enterprise agility through OCM and Agile”
Keynotes from Steve Krug and Luke Hohmann
Stewart Gleadow (Bilue) and the balance of design thinking, feasibility and business value in mobile development, Kate Darling robotics keynote

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Episode 129 – Agile Australia 2016 Vox Pop #1

31/05/201731/05/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and do a lap of the convention centre floor:

Keynotes from Peter Halacsy from Prezi, Jeff Smith from IBM and Kate Darling on robots and human interaction
Daniel Fajerman and Anubhav Berry from Australia Post and how they have dealt with business disruption, Cameron Gough talk “Scaling as the Tide Turns”
Daniel Ginn (Tatts Group), Daniel Pike and Brett Barber (LGIAsuper) on the digital transformation in their respective industries

The Agile Revolution-129 (13 minutes)

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Episode 128 – Elabor8-ing the Agile BA with Ryan McKergow

04/05/201704/05/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig chats with Ryan McKergow, a Business Analyst and Agile Consultant at Elabor8, at the YOW! West conference in Perth about being an Agile BA:

Business Analysts work with business people to understand the problem they want to solve and then work with developers to take those expectations and help them build the system
Writing stories and requirements is the boring part of the job – the exciting part is getting different people problem solving together
Paul Rayner’s YOW! West “EventStorming” keynote and Craig’s brainwave around Value Stream Mapping
Ryan’s talk “Don’t Be A Zombie Reading Your Stories…” at YOW! West
Story Kickoff – having a conversation at the start of a story (one of the three C’s), get the whole team in front of a whiteboard and drawing it out
Reduce the amount of time between analysis and development as much as possible…

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Episode 127 – Storming DD’s with Paul Rayner

28/04/201728/04/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig chats with Paul Rayner, a BDD and DDD expert who helps people bridge the gap of collaborative design between developers and business representatives, at YOW! West in Perth, and two old friends talk about the following:

* Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tool workshop (2011 in Salt Lake City)
* “Domain Driven Design” (Eric Evans) and “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” (Michael Feathers)
* The heart of DDD is about developing a rich model to allow you to deal with complex business domains
* Domain Driven Design Europe conference
* Design done well should pay off immediately, as well as in the medium to long term as well
* There are lot of overlaps between DDD and BDD, particularly the use of an ubiquitous language, BDD is a test first way to drive out your domain model
* YOW! West Keynote “EventStorming”
* Given When Then has…

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Episode 126 – Agile Snotfest

19/04/201719/04/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Renee has been busy being sick (and Tony and Craig are sick of being busy) and thus it has been a long time between cough syrup for our Revolutionists…

The Scrum Guide was updated in July 2016 to add some value(s)
Renee has a copy of the Scrum Body of Knowledge (for $#!^$ and giggles)
The need for an Agile Manifesto 2.0, will it go away?
Ghostbusters, Splash and Top Gun
Modern Agile – “Agile is old, we need to make it modern” or Craig’s article “Agile 2016 Keynote: Modern Agile” on InfoQ as well as the original article “Modern Agile“
Tony and Craig already spoke about Modern Agile in “Episode 116: The Heart of Modern Agile“
Mike Cohn blog on “The Dangers of a Definition of Ready“, is it essential to teams and the crossover with the definition of…

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Episode 125: 10 Minutes with Dan North

27/01/201727/01/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

After many failed attempts to get him on the podcast, Craig finally catches up with Dan North at YOW! Conference on his way out the door to the airport and in a quick chat they cover:

BDD – developing an application by looking at its behaviour from the perspective of its stakeholders (people who’s live you touch)
Given When Then – “given” is setting up the world in a well known way, “when” is me interacting with the application as a stakeholder and “then” is what I expect to happen
BDD is not the same as writing automated tests, they are orthogonal – “Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing“
Software, Faster – collection of patterns for people who have been around Agile and are asking “now what” – “Software, Faster” book in progress
YOW! 2015 talk “Delivery Mapping: Turning the Lights On“

TheAgileRevolution-125 (12 minutes)

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Episode 124: Talking Testing with Anne-Marie Charrett

18/01/201718/01/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Anne-Marie Charrett who is well known in the testing community as a trainer, coach and consultant but also for her support of the community:

Don Reinertsen talk “Thriving in a Stochastic World“
Context-Driven Testing
Testing is a verb – it’s a doing thing and not an output, but the challenge is you cannot see doing
Anne-Marie’s class in Exploratory Testing
Where there is risk and failure, there is a job for testing
Exploratory testing – the key is feedback and using the learning to feedback into the next test
Agile testing – don’t try and test everything and don’t try and automate everything either, rather adopt a risk based approach
Unit testing – the usefulness depends on the programmer and the context and figuring out what you are trying to achieve
Sydney Testers Meetup
Speak Easy – Speak Easy…

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