Episode 159: What Colour Agile Would You Like Today with Nigel Dalton

16/03/201916/03/2019 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and is sitting with Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group and the Australian “Godfather of Agile” and they reminisce about:

Anita Sengupta’s YOW! Hong Kong keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration“
Akin’s Rules of Spacecraft Design – “don’t mess it up, there are people involved”
Nigel Dalton’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Agile is the Last Thing You Need“
The two early experiments of Agile in Australia – Lonely Planet and Suncorp
The success of the REA technology teams today was the move into multidisciplinary teams where the influence comes from product – it was a difficult decision and chaos at the time
John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations“
ANZ is disrupting the power base of senior management – Shayne Elliott video about their way of working and Bluenotes…

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Episode 155: Continuous Delivery Culture at Pushpay with Ian Randall

09/01/201909/01/2019 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and sits down with Ian Randall, Engineering Lead at Pushpay and co-organiser of the Codemania conference in New Zealand and they chat about:

The size of the New Zealand banking system and small number of banks makes it very easy to innovate in the payments space
YOW! West talk “From Inception to Production – A Continuous Delivery Story“
The more times you the do the things that are hard and hurt, opens up the opportunities for automation
Blameless Retrospective (John Allspaw, Etsy, 2012) – promise that there will be no retribution or consequence for decisions that anybody made during an incident, they made the best decisions that they knew at the time, they were operating in a system that allowed you to make that system in the moment – therefore means that people are not afraid to make decisions because…

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Episode 149: Continuous Delivery with Dave Farley

16/12/201816/12/2018 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig, Tony and honorary Revolutionist Pete Sellars are at YOW! Conference and sit down with Dave Farley, co-author of “Continuous Delivery” and they chat about the following

There are anti-patterns with doing XP at scale, continuous delivery was born from the learnings from that
Continuous delivery is just extending continuous integration to more of the software development practice (and continuous integration requires test driven development)
Continuous delivery works because it is the application of the scientific method to software development
If you work in an iterative, imperative, experimental way and you take continuous learning seriously and take cycle time as a serious measurement you will naturally drive out agile, lean, systems theory and DevOps
YOW! 2016 presentation “The Rationale for Continuous Delivery“
Most common two ways to introduce continuous delivery to your organisation – need to get cover from senior management to make change or…

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Episode 133: Rules Are For Pussies!

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

The Agile Revolution Podcast

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 122: Learning to Learn with Aino Vonge Corry

07/01/201707/01/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

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
YOW! 2015 talk “A Comment on How We Learn“
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…

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Episode 112: Inside Spotify with Anders Ivarsson

06/07/201606/07/2016 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Renee and Craig are at the Agile Australia conference and talk to Anders Ivarsson, an organisational coach at Spotify, and learn some of approaches that make Spotify tick:

Agile Australia talk “Autonomy and Leadership at Spotify” and workshop “Organisational Improvement: Design-inspired Problem Solving”
Agile Coaches spend time with squads versus a new role of organisational coach that looks at the culture, ways of working, vision and systemic wastes
Spotify is not a model
Original Spotify scaling paper, never imagined the spread or the impact
Spotify have shared a lot of the things that have worked well, but they do also have challenges as well – one is alignment across teams as the organisation gets bigger so they have been working on visualisation and prioritisation
Spotify Culture videos (Part 1 and Part 2)
use microservices to ensure that the organisation can work in the…

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Episode 101: The Lean Mindset with Mary and Tom Poppendieck

15/01/201615/01/2016 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig catches up with two luminaries in the Agile and Lean space, Mary and Tom Poppendieck at YOW! Conference to talk about agile, lean, rapid feedback, culture and leadership. The discussion points include:

Making the link between lean and software development and discovering that waterfall makes no sense
The origins of the first book: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
Agile is not lean in software development, Agile is lean in a delivery organisation
How long does it take you to put a single line of code into Production?
The manifestation of lean really kicked off in 2010 with both the rise of DevOps and the Lean Startup
Delivery organisations versus engineering organisations and the journey of Agile
Agile has not well addressed delivering the right stuff, solving the right problem and the architecture of rapid deployment
Only two goals at ING: Deliver every two weeks and don’t crash production, resulted…

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David Mole on Self Selecting Teams and Drive

29/11/201529/11/2015 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

David Mole talks about implementing Spotify inspired squads and tribes at Trade Me, as well as the results of experiments in self-selection of teams and inspiration from the work of Daniel Pink.