#modernagileshow

Episode 46 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Stephen Parry (@LeanVoices), Managing Director of The Sense and Adapt Academy and author of the pivotal book, Sense and Respond (2005). Based out of the UK, Stephen has decades of experience helping organizations actually transform (go beyond an existing form) rather than just improve. He tells an amazing story about how he helped Fujitsu win a 10-year contract with a major airline, beating huge competitors, by focusing on business value rather than what the customer requested. Stephen describes how many organizations get stuck focusing on improving and fail to fundamentally change the organization by changing how the organization changes. He describes what Sense and Respond really means and why he changed the name to Sense and Adapt. Learn more about Stephen at https://www.lloydparry.com and http://leanvoices.com.

Episode 45 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Esther Derby, CEO of Esther Derby Associates, and the author of Behind Closed Doors, Agile Retrospectives and 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change. Esther explains how well-intentioned management often achieves superficial change by rolling out packaged processes on top of existing organizational structures and management policies. She describes how micro changes offer a better starting point. Esther asks her clients questions that identify what exactly is contributing to negative patterns, and in turn exposes the system to the system. Her questions inspire people to naturally begin making improvements, a “change by attraction” approach, in which people are attracted to change rather than being forced into it. She points out how change rarely happens when people feel "downstatused" or defensive or when change is demanded via coercive or positional power. Micro-shifts are an alternative to “extreme disruption” and while some may think they are s

Episode 44 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan, a veteran agilist, lean practitioner, DevOps leader and co-founder of Industrial Logic Canada. Jeff describes the fabulous Lean/DevOps transformation he’s led with teams in a conservative Canadian bank. The teams used to only do 4-5 deployments per year. They now do 4-5 deployments per day! The teams used Scrum and had many QA people to help test software. Through Cheezy’s work, they eliminated all QA staff, got rid of all ScrumMasters and switched to a lightweight, Kanban approach. Cheezy describes the agility of his teams as they’ve had to release emergency features related to the Canadian government’s response to COVID-19. Allowing individuals who badly need money to survive during the crises to use a direct deposit service, rather than waiting for a check in the mail, is an example of a feature that Cheezy’s teams were able to get into production within 2-3 days of getting the requirements. This Lean/DevOps work has dram

Episode 43 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp), a Lead Quality Engineer at FSecure, an agile practitioner and the author of Strong Style Pair Programming, Mob Programming Guidebook and Exploratory Testing. Maaret describes the culture at FSecure and the benefits her team discovered when they experimented with removing the Product Owner from their team (though there is still a Product Management group in the company). Her team found that the benefits included far greater productivity, solving problems they hadn’t managed to solve in years and becoming far more data-driven. Maaret describes the “superpower” have having a “feature team” that works across three different technical stacks, and how #NoProductOwner, #NoEstimates and #NoJira are working nicely. She describes how her teams have shortened releases from every six months to every two weeks. Maaret’s team runs about 300,000 automated tests everyday on 14,000 virtual machines. Only a few of the FSecure developers

Episode 42 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Ellen Gottesdiener, CEO of EBG Consulting (ebgconsulting.com) and the author of Discover to Deliver and Requirements by Collaboration. Ellen, an expert in product management and agile development, begins by noting that many agile teams pay more attention to user stories than to product discovery. They become optimized to deliver the wrong things faster rather than learning to cycle efficiently between discovery and delivery. Ellen talks about the importance of being product-led (not project-led) and customer-focused. She discusses the problems of having product management “throw requirements over the wall” to delivery people, rather than functioning as one, cross-functional team. Ellen believes that the agile community tends to miss the point on product management and that has caused a rift with the product management community and all of their strategic, non-tactical, work. Ellen describes her model for collaborative engagements, which she calls

Episode 41 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Rich Sheridan (@menloprez), president of Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the author of Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer. Rich describes some of the lessons he learned from the innovative entrepreneurs who run Zingermann’s Deli as well as the book, The Great Game Of Business. Such learnings include open book finance, great customer service, how to take care of people and how to collaborate with others in every aspect of a business. Rich describes his company’s mission, which is to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. He compares the work of human systems to flying an airplane, including the “lift” of human energy, the “thrust” of a purpose-driven mission to pull people forward, limiting the “weight” of bureaucracy and the “drag” of fear. We discuss the difference between how the Wright Brothers learned to fly as compared to the failed experiments of the well-funded, celebrated scientist and secretary of the Smi

Episode 40 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Elisabeth Hendrickson, a veteran tester, developer, agilist, trainer, author and former executive of Research and Development at Pivotal. We discuss how Elisabeth first got into agile development and what a paradigm shift Extreme Programming (XP) was for her. We discuss her definition of agile and how she has applied agile principles to her work. We discuss how the testing community first reacted to practices like Test-Driven Development. We also discuss Exploratory Testing, the impact it’s had on agile development and Elisabeth’s book on the subject, called Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing.

#ModernAgile 39 of the Modern Agile Show features my interview with David Parker, an experienced lean/agile coach. This interview is largely about David's excellent work to thoroughly improve the talent acquisition process of a major brand-name company. David used #lean principles to visualize the work, focus on value, help people collaborate, remove bottlenecks, parallelize work and ultimately produce a far more efficient and effective hiring process.

Episode 37 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Diana Larsen, co-founder and chief connector of the Agile Fluency project, co-author of the books, Agile Retrospectives, Liftoff and Five Rules for Accelerated Learning. Diana is an expert in helping people learn. She and Joshua discuss the story of the learning that resulted from a large team’s end-of-project retrospective, including how HR’s 42-page individual performance review had choked productivity in the team. Diana discusses the vital practice of Chartering, she explains her Five Rules for Accelerated Learning and discusses how important learning is to being agile. Diana tells the story of how the Agile Fluency game helped a leadership team figure out how they needed to collaborate and understand each other better. Diana and Joshua discuss how to get to your edge in learning instead of staying in your comfort zone. Check out AgileFluency.org for more information and Diana and her work.

Episode 38 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with David Bland, a veteran lean and agile coach and co-author of the book, Testing Business Ideas. The book features a catalog of 44 experiments that help people learn faster whether their ideas are desirable, viable and feasible. David shares stories about how a small San Francisco startup and a large insurance company both used experiments described in the book to de-risk their ideas and quickly learn from the market. David and Josh discuss how intuition, vision and ethics relate to testing business ideas, how important it is to create an environment in which it is safe to experiment and learn rapidly and how ideas from David’s book relates to Modern Agile’s four principles. David explains the challenges that relate to adopting the ideas from his book and he talks about the importance of having a healthy skepticism about what to build, talking to users and aligning work with company vision. Finally, David talks about Assumption Mapping, and how it h

Episode 36 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Pat Reed, an executive coach with extensive agile experience at companies like The Gap, Disney, Universal Studios and many others. She’s known for guiding executives and leaders in large scale agile transformations within huge organizations. Joshua and Pat discuss her experiences spearheading the Australian government’s movement to agility and they go deep into the use of agile in accounting and people operations, as well as Pat’s use of Modern Agile principles.

Episode 35 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Ainsley Nies, a longstanding contributor to the Agile community, instructor of the Agile Management course at Golden Gate University and a co-author of the excellent book, “Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams.” Ainsley and Josh discuss the benefits and nuances of chartering, an agile practice they both love and use frequently.

Episode 34 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Wil Pannell, a self-taught programmer, agile/lean practitioner and in-demand coach at Industrial Logic. Wil is a scholar who is constantly improving his skills in technology and process. He is passionate about improving racial diversity in tech. Joshua and Wil discuss Wil's journey to agile engineering practices, the future of agile education and the urgency for more diversity in tech.

Episode 33 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Emilia D’Anzica, an industry leader in the emerging field of customer success. Emilia is currently a partner at Winning by Design, which recently acquired her self-founded company, Customer Growth Advisors. Emilia shares her story as a CS strategist and consultant, where she has helped companies increase sales by ditching the standard sales process for a more personal and emotional sales experience, focused on enlarging the impact a product/service has on a customer, and increasing sales from renewal of the product/service.

Episode 32 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Mike Rizzi, a veteran software developer, engineer, pragmatic geek, lean/agile coach, honorary Gujurati and DJ. Mike tells a fabulous sorry about practicing financial safety in software development at a healthcare company. integrating a seemingly small feature into a huge automated interface that is connected to over 1,200 backend systems and the challenges of staying agile in that space. Also, Mike shares a story about his how his lifelong ski instructor lived Lean and intuitively applied agile principles to his teaching.

Episode 31 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Stas Zvinyatskyovsky, a managing Director at Solutions IQ/Accenture, a software architect and engineering leader. We talk about the epic journey that Stas co-led to help Yahoo move from a slow, manual, error-prone development process to a smooth, fast and reliable process with continuous deployment. We discuss the cultural issues and challenges associated with this difficult journey, which Stas calls Taking the Elephant Out of the Tar Pit.

Episode 30 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Ted M. Young, a veteran software practitioner, designer and instructor. Ted and I discuss the difference between using scaffolding and safety nets when changing code and what is means to program safely. We also discuss the need for awesome examples of great code from which people can learn, the idea of a “microlith” (a micro edition of a monolith) and we end with a discussion of viscosity in code and the importance of developing a sense of self awareness as a developer.

Episode 29 of the Modern Agile Show features Joshua Kerievsky discussing Retrospectives. He tells a story of a team’s iteration retrospectives and how the same problem kept coming up, with no resolution in sight. Finally, by making it safe for an individual to speak up, he was able to help the person get past a problem. This reveals a need for a fabulous tool by Norm Kerth, the author of Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews. The tool helps teams assess how safe they feel to speak up. Using this tool, before a retrospectives begins, is a valuable way to understand what people are comfortable to say or not say and it can reveal when a team has a psychological safety issue.

Episode 28 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Arlo Belshee, a pioneering agilest who is constantly pushing the boundaries of agility, from planning to programming. Arlo was at the deliver:Agile conference in Austin, Texas to talk about mastering legacy code via ultra-safe refactorings. Arlo describes “recipes” that people can execute manually on languages that have lacked automated refactoring tools (like C++). Together with his colleagues at Tableaux software, Arlo has helped to find a way to solve the classic chicken-and-egg problem of not being able to refactor because you lack tests and not being able to test code without first refactoring. The safe recipes use the type system and rely on the compiler to ensure that you can indeed refactor without automated tests and that the design transformations you make are perfectly safe. Each recipe involves micro-changes that together help you safely make important design changes. Arlo explains how his approach to ultra safe refactoring helped him

Episode 27 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Sam McAfee, a product management coach and author of the book, Startup Patterns. Sam explains some of the main reasons why enterprise agile teams fail, based on a popular Medium.com post that he wrote. He explains that organizations that have achieved success in a product area have operationalized work to contain risk and drive out variability. Unfortunately, that work tends to not fit so well with innovation work. Rigid, top-down, command-and-control style management rarely fits well a strong, self-directed team-based model. Financial incentives and annual reviews also tend to get in the way, as they tend to be focused on individuals rather than teams. Sam describes the importance of building a flexible, adaptable learning culture in order for enterprise agile to thrive. You need supportive leaders at the top and it can help to develop an innovative space or area that is separate from the main business. Innovation work needs some structure, clear