Engineering Culture by InfoQ

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Seb Rose, a dispassionate developer, and one of the principals of Cucumber Limited about his work at Cucumber, the Cyber-dojo charity, designing a robust certification program and involving testers in code reviews Why listen to this podcast: • Cucumber is more than a testing tool – it is...

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Lyssa Adkins and Halim Dunsky about the current state of agile coaching, the competencies and skills that coaches need to develop and the journey that the Agile Coaching Institute has taken since they became part of Accenture Why listen to this podcast: • The wide range of approaches whi...

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jeff Patton about moving from project to product thinking; whole team product ownership and satisfying the real customer needs. Why listen to this podcast: • There is a lack of focus on product in the agile community – the emphasis has been on projects • “Project” and “product” are used...

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Phil Brock and Paul Hammond of the Agile Alliance about the current state of the Alliance and plans for the future. Why listen to this podcast: • Agile 2018 had around 2400 attendees, from 54 countries and 900 companies, with over 270 sessions across the five days of the conference • The...

In this podcast recorded at QCon New York, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sangeeta Narayanan of Netflix about improving the developer experience, and why it matters. Why listen to this podcast: • Developer Experience is about making it easy and simple for software to be developed, released and operated • It’s about identifying and removing whatever creates friction in th...

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Simon Powers of Adventures with Agile about helping organisations move from siloed groups to large product teams, he gave advice for new managers and discussed the trends he sees happening in large organisations. Why listen to this podcast: • The challenges of making businesses more succ...

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dominic Price from Atlassian about his opening keynote at the Agile 2018 conference. Why listen to this podcast: • Agile is an answer to teams working together effectively, but it is not the only answer • A lot of large-scale “transformations” are about AGILE being thrust around as a com...

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Diana Larsen about the evolution of the Agile Fluency model, the rate of adoption of new ideas in organisations, organisation design and being an ally. Why listen to this podcast: • The ideas around agile fluency have evolved through feedback and use in the field • New ideas take time to...

In this podcast recorded after the JAFAC 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Miki Szikszai and Sandy Mamoli about Snapper’s adoption of holacracy. Why listen to this podcast: • Clarity of purpose is key for an organisation looking to improve their ways of working • The sign of a good coach is when they realise they need to step away so the client can stand on the...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jim Rose of Circle CI about building a great engineering culture in a distributed, remote team. Why listen to this podcast: • Hiring engineers is a difficult task • Working in a completely remote organisation takes a particular type of person • It’s crucial that the engineering teams understand and empathise with their custo...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jeff Foster of Red Gate on their approach to continuous learning through 10% time, open space and running an internal conference. Why listen to this podcast: • The best software is software that people • The only secret to great engineering is simplicity • No matter how hard you try to enable people to take the 10% time, the...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jutta Eckstein and John Buck about their new book: Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space and Sociocracy – BOSSA-Nova Why listen to this podcast: • The pressing question: if democracy is good, why aren’t businesses using it • The new book is a theoretical framework for organizations to help agile spread philo...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Fred George about the need to solve “fuzzy problems” and approaches to doing so. Why listen to this podcast: • Fuzzy problems are ones which don’t have precise answers but they are the places where most money is being made in the modern economy • Applying the thinking that works for traditional problems to fuzzy problems cau...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Todd Little, CEO of LeanKanban Inc about how organizations can use Kanban to identify bottlenecks and improve flow in their business processes. Why listen to this podcast: • Kanban is a more natural way of working for more experienced teams • Kanban tells you to start wherever you are at and make change incrementally • Only...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Linda Rising about Daniel Kahneman’s work on Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, overcoming bias in the employment process and resisting social pressure in decision making. Why listen to this podcast: • Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast Thinking Slow based on the research he did with Amos Tversky into how the human brain works,...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Bernie Maloney of Persistent Systems about servant leadership and bringing out human potential. Why listen to this podcast: - Servant leadership is about creating a space through which other people can succeed and stepping back to let them do so. It matters because it requires empathy and compassion. - Organizations that don...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, Chief Product Owner of Scrum.org about the state of Scrum, the latest revision to the Scrum Guide, the rise of Digital and the way Scrum.org maintains its courseware. Why listen to this podcast: • Scrum continues to be the dominant force in agile/digital/lean startup approaches • As complexity grows in our world t...

In this podcast recorded at the Agile India conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to John Le Drew about solving technical problems by addressing the people issues. Why listen to this podcast: • Very diverse teams will naturally have conflict, but they still produce better outcomes despite the journey being more of a struggle to get there • Cognitive biases are real and...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Aurynn Shaw about how DevOps, Microservices and other “technical” approaches are in fact cultural constraints on technical ideas and what’s needed to make the culture sustainable. Key takeaways: * Running and testing a program on the developer desktop is not running the program * You must rethink the approach to building the...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sanjeev Sharma, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, on the challenges for large enterprises adopting DevOps at scale and what it really means to have a DevOps culture Why listen to this podcast: • There is no single “why” for adopting DevOps – each organisation is unique and the adoption approach should be based around what the...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby about their memories of Gerald M. (Jerry) Weinberg who passed away on the 7th of August 2018. Why listen to this podcast: • Jerry Weinberg was a highly respected thinker and author • He was instrumental in defining some of the key elements of systems thinking and quality practices for softwar...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Michael Cote from Pivotal Labs about “programming the business” to enable support for automation and moving towards DevOps. Why listen to this podcast: • It’s possible to move from deploying on a yearly basis to a daily basis • Adopting a new process or approach often improves things dramatically, frequently because what was...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dan Kreigh about his experiences as the lead structural analyst working on SpaceShipOne and his personal interest in designing and building a flying car. Why listen to this podcast: • Building SpaceShipOne was an iterative and incremental project • There are many parallels between the development of SpaceShipOne and an agile...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jeff Dalton about the challenges of agile adoption in large organizations and the need to teach agile leaders how to teach so they can lead the cultural shift that is needed Why listen to this podcast: • The marketing of agility is going far better than the actual on the ground adoption • When process-centric, low trust orga...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Edith Harbaugh of Launch Darkly on the way she and her cofounder have deliberately engineered their organisation’s culture Why listen to this podcast: • A good engineering culture is one where there is a lot of respect for different people and roles • Start by good intent on behalf of your colleagues – everyone is doing thei...