Agile Weekly Podcast

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water, Drew LeSueur and Derek Neighbors discuss an article by Esther Derby entitled But Are They Working Hard? How can you tell if a senior developers is acting in a way that befits their title? Should we reward the hardest worker for working hardest? What makes a senior developer better than other developers? Should we ever care if the developers are working hard?

Drew LeSueur, Derek Neighbors, Clayton Lengel-Zigich and Roy van de Water discuss an article by Jamie Flinchbaugh entitled Don't just change the process if people aren't following the existing one. Is the process really the issue? Process only highlights culture problems, it doesn't solve them How do you know when it really is time to change the process? A short feedback cycle is important to evaluate the problems that are being highlighted.

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water and Deb Spicer discuss 10 Destructive Behaviors That Can Bring Down a Team’s Success: 10 behaviors observed over 25 years Deb's book, Power Teams VIP Why is lip service so prevalent? How can a manager keep good team members while helping everyone improve? Dealing with culture and millennials What's the worst behavior for the team? How to improve bad behaviors Are some people just not right for the team?

Roy van de Water, Drew LeSueur and Chris Sims discuss: Transparency in compensation Using Scrum to run a Scrum consultancy Elements of Scrum and Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction

Roy van de Water, Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Derek Neighbors, and Gerry Kirk discuss: Kanban in your personal life Kanban in work life as a one-man team Personal kanban can help save your marriage Personal insights from Kanban Personal Scrum? Personal Kanban boards Burnout

Roy van de Water,  Derek Neighbors, and Kane Mar Discuss: Star teams over star individuals Need for individual performance reviews? Team decisions Individual and team compensation, now and in the future Cultural change in organizations Ways to give individual feedback

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water and Scott Dunn discuss: StrengthsFinder 2.0 Playing to your Strengths Introducing Strengths to your team Strengths and self-organizing teams When Strengths go wrong

Derek Neighbors, Roy van de Water, Clayton Lengel-Zigich, David Bland discuss Lean Startup principles in Agile: Lots of companies dealing with unknowns Product teams Release early, release often Validate, Experiment, Iterate Culture preventing engagement? Executives communicate with teams How to get the "C" level to change Eric Ries "Lean Startup" / Steve Blank Is it a panacea? Radical culture problems abound Confusion about what lean startup means Risk adverse culture problems when you have golden egg to protect? Alignment across enterprise Cross functional teams How do you maintain it? Give freedom, be creative Innovation team (I'm a special snowflake) Executive support mandatory

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water and Mike Vizdos discuss: Do we estimate defects? How do I get "credit" for doing defects? What counts as a defect? New defect comes in what do we do with it? How should defects effect velocity? Why so defensive? How to deal with predictability? Definition of done factors in. Transparency is what is important. Use the retrospective Luke. Please don't punish me. Person that writes the check decides. Zero defect mentality. Hardening sprint.  Say What? Developer Hat v Scrum Master Hat  

Roy van de Water and special guest Jurgen Appelo, author of Management 3.0, discuss: Managers in Agile Environments to enable innovation Experimentation in Agile Self-organizing teams How to help organizations change Stoos

Derek Neighbors, Clayton Lengel-Zigich and special guest Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals, discuss: Agile outside of software Lean in healthcare Lean as management principles Lean is not cost cutting Risk and quality in Lean Bad processes and lean improvements Improving flow  

Derek Neighbors and Corey Haines discuss: Getting kids interested in programming The Microsoft stack Traveling pair programmer Meandering programmers Software Craftsmanship TDD and experience Global Day of Code Retreat Code Retreat Community Contribution Fund

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water and Jade Meskill talk about potentially shippable software. * Impossible!? * How do you define what is potentially shippable? * Does the product need to be pollished and perfect? * Focusing on small problems (rather than the whole system) helps us deliver value sooner. * It's not an excuse to code yourself into a dead end. * Value does not necessarily have to be targeted at Users, it might be the CEO or some other stakeholder.

Derek Neighbors, Roy van de Water, Clayton Lengel-Zigich and Jade Meskill discuss a variety of topics. * What do you do when someone clearly doesn't fit in with the team? * How do you get to the point where you can let a team be self organizing and still mitigate the associated risk? * Should you hire quality people or try to get the most qualified people for a particular position?

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water and Jade Meskill discuss a 'hypothetical' scenario in which a Scrum team has a deadline approaching and it looks like the team will not be able to complete all of the features to meet the release. How do you deal with this situation that happens to so many teams regardless of software process. * Do you throw out the process? * How do you break it to the product owner owner? * Would removing the overhead of the process make things better? * At what point do you, as a Scrum Master, step in and prevent the team from self organizing themselves in to fatal failure?