Troubleshooting Agile

Prompted by a listener, we look at a tool from Jim Dethmer called The Line. This leads us to discuss the value of being emotionally self-aware with a variety of examples from our recent consulting practise and bringing in several tools for increasing this awareness, including Six Thinking Hats, the Ladder of Inference, and the Core Protocols. SHOW LINKS: - Jim Dethmer on "Leading Above the Line":...

How do you know if a software team is any good? How can you compare teams and the commercial value they are producing? And what are metrics good for anyway? We discuss these, especially the latter, concluding that metrics are triggers for questions not answers in themselves. We look at burn-up and burn-down charts and cycle time, though none of these are fully satisfying. SHOW LINKS: - Phases of t...

A listener asks us what to do when a story takes longer than one sprint. Our suggestions involve turpentine, slicing elephants and walking skeletons. SHOW LINKS: - Story splitting: https://agileforall.com/new-story-splitting-resource/ - Elephant carpaccio: https://alistair.cockburn.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Elephant-Carpaccio-exercise-instructions.pdf - Walking Skeleton: https://gojko.net/2014...

We tell the story of a company demanding that developers finish a huge project "so they can test it just once", and then explain why this is only a good idea if you intend to shield yourself from all learning. SHOW LINKS: - The Goal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) - Externalities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality *** 
 Our new book, Agile Conversations, will be out in May...

Squirrel tells the story of the most painful manual testing experience he's ever been part of, and we discuss the value of manual testing, how humans differ from machines, and approaches to application verification that don't involve torture. SHOW LINKS: - Cockburn's "Characterizing people as non-linear 1st order components in software development": https://ameyakarve.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/char...

Squirrel's client is struggling to deliver because product managers are a bottleneck. The Theory of Constraints gives us a framework for addressing these problems - and typing faster or adding developers are not part of the solution! SHOW LINKS: - The Goal: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113934.The_Goal - Theory of Constraints; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints - Subordinati...

No matter how safe you make your retrospectives and other discussions, if your team don't have the skills to share information, you're running a substantial risk that someone will withhold information and you'll make a less than informed decision. We discuss ways to acquire and use information-sharing skills yourself and with your team. SHOW LINKS: - Blog post on withholding information: https://s...

We talk to Mirco Hering about agile dogmatism, the value of diversity, how to experiment with your processes, using stories to drive change, and his book Devops for the Modern Enterprise. SHOW LINKS: - Crossing the Chasm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm - Devops for the Modern Enterprise: https://itrevolution.com/book/devops_modern_enterprise/ - Mirco: https://twitter.com/mircoher...

A special episode - audio of our talk on "conversational transformation" at the Las Vegas Devops Enterprise Summit. Practical steps you can take today to get your team on track to a successful digital/agile/devops transformation, using effective if difficult conversations. - Video of the talk and info on the book: https://www.conversationaltransformation.com/ *** 
 Our new book, Agile Conversation...

After Squirrel argued passionately in a previous episode that non-functional requirements should be eliminated, we invite medtech expert and portfolio CTO Alex Hudson to visit and describe why he finds NFRs helpful. It turns out that the two positions are closer together than we might have thought, and we get fascinating stories about medical device design and 30-second page loads along the way. S...

We review our holiday reading and watching plans for listeners who might want to join us in exploring lean and agile ideas over the break. We also list our top 5 episodes from 2019 and preview a few events planned for 2020. SHOW LINKS: - Ed Catmull on conversations and other challenges at Pixar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc - Kent Beck on throughput vs latency: https://medium.com/@k...

Squirrel gets hot under the collar about non-functional "requirements", and after he gets his rant off his chest, we discover NFRs are all too often just excuses to avoid a conversation. In addition, we touch on the "ilities", security, and ethical considerations for software developers. SHOW LINKS: - The "ilities": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-functional_requirement *** 
Our new book, Agile...

Mark Schwartz, author of War and Peace and IT, describes his experience in the CIO trenches, where low trust between "the business" and IT bogs the organisation down in lengthy acquisition processes and contract negotiations rather than delivering business objectives. We touch on value stream mapping, how to use devops and its relatives devsecops and finops, briefing and back briefing, and what we...

Last week, Domenica DeGrandis talked with us about making work visible. Today, we distinguish that idea from a related one, that of making your *output* visible. How can your team show its results frequently? What symptoms indicate that this might help you? What results can you expect from showing meaningful business value often? SHOW LINKS: - Domenica's Making Work Visible book: https://itrevolut...

Sunday is the new Monday, and that’s a bad thing - says our guest today, Dominica DeGrandis, author of Making Work Visible. How can you move from default yes to an effective, smooth flow of work? Dominica addresses this question while touching on queueing theory, empathy, and hope! SHOW LINKS: - Dominica’s Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/dominicad - Domenica’s web site: https://ddegrandis.com/ -...

Have you ever "flipped the bozo bit" on someone, concluding that he or she is completely clueless and communication is hopeless? We tell some tales of bozo bits we've seen flipped, describe some causes and consequences including the idea of "duelling ladders", and suggest how to get out of the bozo bit trap. SHOW LINKS: - The Bozo Bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit - Jim McCarthy's book o...

Today we finish our conversation with author, podcaster, and DevOps expert John Willis https://twitter.com/botchagalupe . John covers a wide variety of topics at lightning speed, including: SHA - a hash algorithm, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1 CAB - Change Advisory Board, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change-advisory_board Jim Benson on Kanban - http://personalkanban.com/pk/about-us/...

Today we speak to author, podcaster, and DevOps expert John Willis https://twitter.com/botchagalupe . John covers a wide variety of topics at lightning speed, including: SHA - a hash algorithm, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1 CAB - Change Advisory Board, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change-advisory_board Jim Benson on Kanban - http://personalkanban.com/pk/about-us/team/jim-benson/ And...

Listener Jamie let us know about a sequel to one of our favourite blog posts, John Cutler on the Feature Factory. We focus on just one of John's well-made points, the idea of lowering Work In Progress to improve throughput. We tell a story about on "death by spreadsheet" project management and the futile and counterproductive attempt to get utilisation to 100%. This brings us back to lean methods,...

Our new book is all about what people miss in their digital/agile/lean/devops transformations: cultural changes that underlie human-centred development and the conversations that can lead you to those changes. Inspired by the book Accelerate!, we look at Westrum's Three Cultures and reflect on how the culture you're in affects how you transform to the culture you want. SHOW LINKS: - Accelerate!: h...

Alistair Cockburn gets us thinking about how agile methods are spreading, even to non-software teams like sales. Further, we bring in the idea of Wardley Mapping to see how, ironically, this very spread can lead to the conclusion that agile development is headed for the dustbin, but conclude (phew!) that agile methods have a healthy future. Apologies for a minor audio problem about 12 minutes in....

Following on further from Avery Pennarun's intriguing article on "what executives do", we ask how, exactly, executives (and others!) can trigger action, if they are not themselves going to carry it out? It turns out we've covered our favourite technique for this before - Bungay's Briefing and Back Briefing - but this time we have a scoring checklist that can help you use the technique, and two new...

We respond to an intriguing and dense article from Avery Pennarun about what executives do. He takes us back to Andy Grove’s classic High Output Management and we reflect on the leverage leaders can use, how they and their staff can fool themselves into thinking they have the right information, and a mindset exercise to help you find “unknown unknowns”. SHOW LINKS: - What do executives do, anyway?...

We conclude our conversation with Ryan Singer, Head of Strategy at Basecamp and author of Shape Up, by asking him how the team functions without requiring code reviews or QA checks. Then he goes on to describe in detail their "hill" metaphor for progress measurement and why this method provides a useful narrative that goes way beyond sprint duration or story points. SHOW LINKS: - Shape Up: https:/...

We continue chatting with Ryan Singer, Head of Strategy at Basecamp and author of Shape Up. Ryan explains the "shaping" and "betting" processes in more detail, including who does the various roles and what is crucial to get right when you set up a design-and-build system like the one they advocate. SHOW LINKS: - Shape Up: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/?ref=df - Daring Fireball intro to Shape Up: ht...