Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

How would our education system be different using agile principles and values?  In this InDepth edition, our conversation focuses around the American School in Leysin, Switzerland, and their experiments over the past 3 yrs in Agile in Education.  My guests are Paul Magnuson ( Director of Curriculum & Director of the Middle School) and Bill Tihen ( Director of IT, Teacher, and runs the Makers Space )  Empowering students, making learning visible, and creating life long learners are goals for Paul and Bill as they lead this movement at Leysin.  You can find Paul and Bill and the Leysin School at https://www.las.ch/  Special thanks to John Miller for introducing me, and making this conversation possible.  you can find John on Twitter at @agileschools  The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQ YouTube, http://bit.ly/ SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

The journey to become a CST is a long and rewarding one.  In this episode, I get to discuss Karim Harbott's journey to becoming a CST just 2 days after  he found out he had received the certification.  Richard Cheng is a CST and a volunteer on the Trainer Approval Committee ( TAC) . He shares his side of the journey and what the TAC is looking for, some tips, and encouragement.  One story, two perspectives.  It should be interesting.  The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQ YouTube, http://bit.ly/ SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

How does a large enterprise organization keep up, much less lead?  Disruptive Innovation changes the landscape of products, and companies should want to be on the delivering end of this instead of the receiving end.   Many companies focus on Sustaining Innovation, but if they really want to be leaders in their product offerings, they should be investing in Disruptive innovation.  Jeff explains what is not working, and what does, and gives some great examples of success. He lays out a model he calls " Innovation Colony" and why he believes this should be a focus.  The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQ YouTube, http://bit.ly/ SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Empowerment sounds like a good thing - right? What Alan is sharing is that this isn't enough.  We talk through a leader/follower spectrum and identify different styles of leadership, and the types of followers that they help create.  Alan makes a strong case for the manager to be a catalyst that inspires co-leaders.  If you are a manager ( in almost any capacity/environment) this discussion should provide you value.  How you lead, helps create behaviors in those you lead.  The slides that were mentioned in this podcast can be found here The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQ YouTube, http://bit.ly/ SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Technology is built by people all over the world.  Keeping them working as a team is one of Mark's specialties.  Mark really knows distributed agile, with over 30 yrs in the software and coaching space. He has spent nearly the last 3 in a 100% distributed environment.  On this InDepth distributed podcast, Mark talks about the different types of distributed teams, and offers tips for keeping people engaged.  We talk a bit on the Agile Manifesto and how it still applies, plus he does give some sage advise on the tools we use to connect.  If you have people working in multiple locations, this is the interview you should not miss.  The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQ YouTube, http://bit.ly/ SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

In his Agile2016 session "The Technical Debt Trap", Doc Norton takes all the way back to the metaphor that started it all. Doc says Ward Cunningham coined the term "technical debt" not as shorthand for lousy code but for clean code implemented with your current understanding of the requirements and covered with tests. In short, "technical debt" isn't code that you intend to clean up later: it's clean code created when the dev's knowledge is impartial that the dev can then easily refactor when they learn more about the problem. The danger with the current meaning of technical debt is that the term is benign enough that we don't give it enough attention. "In a great extent, we're using the metaphor to abdicate our own professional responsibility..." Things that teams can start doing now: create debt stories and discuss with the business what the real value of that debt is. John Esposito, Editor-in-Chief of DZone, SolutionsIQ partner, hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Scrum.org CEO and Product Owner Dave West has come a long way from being a RUP Product Manager to where he is today. After realizing RUP wasn't helping developers or enabling them to build great software, Dave took a Scrum class where a light bulb went off. He saw that if you gave a team enough safety, the right problems to solve, access to the right people and some discipline in the form of XP practices (refactoring, continuous integration, etc.), you can get generate massive amounts of value. Scrum turns 21 in 2016, so what do the next twenty years look like? Dave says some of it centers on scaling product delivery, using evidence-based measurements (EBM) (i.e., value, release frequency and innovation), and actually getting to done.  John Esposito, Editor-in-Chief of DZone, SolutionsIQ partner, hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

The Agile Mindset.  We've all heard that term, but what does it mean? What effects can it have on an organization if they are just adopting the frameworks without the mindsets? Ken Rubin and I spend this episode discussing the Agile Mindset. He shares how it effects delivering working software in companies, how he uses it in his family, and even as an angel investor in how it helps him make decisions on who ( and who not) to fund.  Ken also shares  his unique “Colonel Klink” test (from Hogan’s Heroes)  to help determine if someone has and agile mindset or not.   About Agile Amped: The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

David Bernstein, author of the book "Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software", stops by Agile Amped to educate us on "What makes great developers great?" While developers are generally thought of as being analytical, dividing and separating things apart, David says, "The great developers that I know are also good at integrating." He adds that, while many devs focus intensely on writing code, "what we really want to do is create implementations of intent." David's book is about making code maintainable and understandable, helping you see connections between processes in the code so you can remove redundancy. The importance of simplicity and elegance in the code becomes obvious when you start to scale enterprise software with millions of lines of code, where a single change can cause a domino effect of broken code. In order to keep code simple, David advocates for treating programming primarily as a way to communicate intent to another human (including your future self) and secondarily as a way to get the computer to do what you want. John Esposito, Editor-in-Chief of DZone, SolutionsIQ partner, hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Maaret Pyhäjärvi is a tester and Llewellyn Falco is a developer, and they have been pair-programming wrong... or have they? They call it strong-style pairing. It's common in pairing for the one with the idea to drive, grabbing the keyboard and running with their idea. In other words, the person with the idea is the driver, while their pair is the navigator. But if you don't know where the driver is going, you can't navigate. Strong-style is kind of a role reversal where the person with the idea lets their pair drive and instead takes on the navigator role. This way both people in the pair actively contribute. The problem with the traditional driver-navigator model is that the "navigator" doesn't have anything to do if the driver is also the ideator. The navigator can get bored or disengaged. What's more is that strong-style pairing can help pairs build trust more quickly and to help each other with new dev tricks and techniques. This concept can also be used in Mob Programming. John Esposito, Editor-in-Chief of DZone, SolutionsIQ partner, hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Scott Ambler literally wrote the book on the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. As Scott says, "Disciplined Agile is all about giving people choices and explicitly sharing the decision points that you're at in Agile projects and IT efforts in general." In addition to DAD, Scott also talks about his Agile2016 session on "The Agile Database Techniques Stack: Bridging the Agile/Data Cultural Divide". Without Agile database development, Agile wouldn't be possible. Yet despite efforts to realize database testing, refactoring and other Agile practices, the data community is still working with a traditional mindset. Data warehousing is typically slow and risky, accustomed to being bottleneck for the rest of the org. Scott also sounds off on microservices, too many technology stacks, and COBOL as a still viable dev language career-wise. John Esposito, Editor-in-Chief of DZone, SolutionsIQ partner, hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Ellen Gottesdiener, CEO and founder of EBG Consulting, says that, while teams are pretty good today at delivery, there's room for improvement in the "discovery" department "so we can make sure we're making the right stuff that we're feeding to the delivery team." In her Agile2016 Stalwart session, Ellen fielded many questions about product management and Product Ownership. Says Ellen, "We're moving into the age of 'product'" where the value is the product, not the project. "Product Management is a broader discipline dedicated to the care and feeding of the entire lifecycle of the product (not project), from inception to decline." Ellen also has a wakeup call for the Agile community: "We need to make sure we're building the right product and building it right. We have to focus on the discipline around product management using Agile because that's where the value's from." SolutionsIQ's Mike Alexander hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

"Coaching can be a very lonely role, because you're the one dealing with the dysfunctions," said Craig Smith, an Agile coach from Brisbane, Australia. For this reason and many others, Craig set out to try to improve the overall coaching experience. Craig was collaborating with a colleague on this one night when he saw an episode of Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares". Craig was instantly struck by Gordon's "coaching" style, and the gears went to work. In his Agile2016 session "Coaching Nightmares: Insights We Can Learn from Gordon Ramsay", Craig shows snippets of Gordon Ramsay at work in the kitchen and asks participants, "What can we learn from this? As a coach, what would I do?" One of the big things about Ramsay's style is that he calls it like it is because he has no stake in the game. However, coaches may resist the urge to do that, maybe because they are tied to the company or are working for a consultancy that would rather they not. But, Craig says, "In order to get people to really change, we need to call it [like it is]." SolutionsIQ's Mike Alexander hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Agile transformation is the job of managers. Not "A" job, but " THE" job in this new world paradigm.  Mick shares with us theincredibly important role of managers in an agile environment and how many are currentlyfailing. He offers actionable tips for managers that may find themselveswondering about their new role, and how to succeed.  And according to Mick, sometimes the role of the manager is to be a sh*t umbrella.  About Agile Amped   The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community throughcompelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas.Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Ampedoffers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates,subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com.   Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes,http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like:http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Everyone has baggage, and everyone lets that baggage affect their interactions with others through the stereotypes, biases and judgments that they make, often at a subconscious level. Natalie Warnert spoke on bias in the Agile workplace in her Agile2016 session "Objectivity or Subjectivity: Owning Your Own Bias and Interactions". The thrust is to get people to recognize that they have personal biases as well as biases fueled by societal stereotypes, and then to get them to understand how to keep those biases and judgments in check. This is especially powerful for leaders who have to model the behavior they want to see in others. By enhancing their own self-awareness, leaders can understand how their own personal biases are affecting their interactions with their reports. Says Natalie, "We have the right as humans to think whatever we want... [But] we also want to be able to catch ourselves in the act and say, 'How are these things influencing my interactions in either a positive or negative way?'"  Mandy Ross from Sococo, SolutionsIQ partner, hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook