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:
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:
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…
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
At the recent YOW! Night in Melbourne (as well and Sydney and Brisbane), Daryl Wilding-McBride (the CTO of DiUS) presented “What I Learned while Teaching Kids at Flying Robot School”. It was an interesting story on the importance of social good for those of us in the technical space.
Waking hours capacity – families, hobbies, paid work, unpaid work
Not all work has equal social impact – pays the bills > interesting > impactful > worthwhile
Worthwhile work creates a legacy and passes the BBQ test (something you are proud to convey and recognised as value by the other person)
80000hours.org – the average hours you have from university to retirement, help you decide how to spend that time and be effective
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:
Craig Smith 
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