Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

You know what happens at conferences: surrounded by so many thought leaders and industry colleagues and inundated with information from sessions, workshops, games, lightning talks, etc., your brain gets overloaded. "Knowledge paralysis" sets in, where you learned so much that you can't remember any of it. That's what prompted Jason to bring his "Fun Over Study" learning lounge idea to Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2016. The learning lounge is an experiment (and experience) aimed at helping conference-goers apply and reinforce learnings obtained during the conference. There's nothing new to learn at the lounge: conference-goers bring the knowledge from sessions attended and the lounge facilitators figure out how to create an experience that locks in the learning, reinforces and makes it applicable beyond just the conference. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

"Tools should be secondary to what you're trying to achieve with BDD and the value that it brings," says Kate Falanga, Director of QA at Huge, of some people's fascination with BDD tools. Kate's session at Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2016 was a workshop called "Behavior-Driven Development for Non-Coders" and aimed to promote "shift left" testing: starting testing earlier in the development cycle (toward the left, if you're looking at the dev workflow). Part of Kate's workshop centered around acting out a story kickoff session with "a really terrible user story that I wrote." The goal was to focus on communication and for participants to feel how it changed the user story. The story kickoff session or huddle serves to clearly identify the requirements in a user story before any development takes place and as a result the best huddle with have the developer, the tester and the Product Owner. This ensures that any low-hanging fruit (both problems and opportunities) are addressed at the development stage, rather than later when changes are much more expensive. If you're gonna invite someone else into the huddle (or "Three Amigos" as some cheekily call it), Kate says consider a visual UX or design expert. Kate Falanga (Director, Quality Assurance at Huge) has over 14 years of digital experience. At Huge she works with a full time team of quality assurance professionals as well as actively supports projects and project teams with testing mentorship. As part of her role she works alongside other leadership within the company on overall technical strategy. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Woody Zuill is an Agile coach working on the "original Mob programming team". As is befitting since Woody coined the term "mob programming"--which is, as he puts it "pair programming, except for everybody here is going to be involved." For him, mob programming is a natural evolution of pair programming. Like in pair programming where each pair helps problem-solve and vet the resulting code, in mob programming, "When you work with a whole group, you get the best of everybody... We're not looking into getting the most out of everybody... We're looking to get the best out of everybody into everything we do." That's why what began as informal or scheduled work sessions became the de facto programming style of Woody and his team. Woody Zuill has been a software developer for 30+ years and is an Agile enthusiast. He has been instrumental in promoting a "No Estimates" approach to Agile product delivery. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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 Manifesto signatory James Grenning is your Agile wingman: when you need Agile technical coaching help, he can do it all. For Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2016, he's focusing on the three critical skills of refactoring: 1. Detecting smells in code. 2. Bright idea about how to build the code differently 3. How to transform the code into the new state James also talks about how Agile has changes since years ago when he signed the Agile Manifesto. One of the biggest changes: the majority of the signatories were developers and tech-minded individuals, but largely Agile has become more focused on process management. James Grenning trains, coaches and consults worldwide bringing modern technical and management practices to embedded systems development. He is the author of Test-Driven Development for Embedded C (http://wingman-sw.com/tddec). He invented Planning Poker, and participated in the creation of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. SolutionsIQ's Neville Poole hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Kent Graziano is excited to achieve one of his goals for presenting at Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2016: educating people about Data Vault in his session "Agile Data Engineering: Introduction to Data Vault Data Modeling". As a technical evangelist, Kent is passionate about introducing people to concepts that are necessary in today's Big Data-driven economy. (For interested parties, according to Kent's presentation: "The Data Vault is a detail oriented, historical tracking and uniquely linked set of normalized tables that support one or more functional areas of business.") Kent Graziano is a Senior Technical Evangelist for Snowflake Computing and an award winning author, speaker, and trainer, in the areas of data modeling, data architecture, and data warehousing. SolutionsIQ's Neville Poole hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Alex Schladebeck is both a tester and a Product Owner. Who'da thunk that a tester (i.e., the person constantly trying to think how the user might experience a product) and a Product Owner (i.e., the person responsible for ensuring that the user gets the value they want) could perhaps have similar ideas about product design and development. Alex is at AATC2016 to turn "potentials" into "slayers" (and, yes, that is a Buffy reference). The goal of her session is to promote the concept of taking the testing responsibilities, which are often quite difficult and unreasonable ("You never have enough testers to do all of the testing"), and spreading them out across the team to make it more manageable. Alex Schladebeck is the head of Test Consulting at BREDEX GmbH and is also Product Owner for Jubula, the open source test tool. Within both roles, shes responsible for making sure that customers needs are satisfied, be it in terms of quality assurance services for their projects or features for implementation. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Fred George brings the concept of "managerless processes" to the Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2016 with his session on "Programmer Anarchy". At the heart of it the idea that if you replace traditional roles like QA and BA with more programmers, you create an environment when the dev team can work with the customer at a higher (than user story) level, create much more code, experiment in live environments, fail fast and learn how to better the product. He shares that, at a recent client, "we were deploying something new into production every three and a half minutes." The key was fast failures: if the release failed to reach certain targets, it was pulled down and iterated upon before it was redeployed to gather more real-time data. Fred George is an industry consultant, and has been writing code for over 46 years in (by his count) over 70 languages. He started ThoughtWorks University in Bangalore, India, based on a commercial programming training program he developed in the 90s. SolutionsIQ's Neville Poole hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Tuba Kuklen knows that people are uncomfortable with the human aspects of change. But Tuba is working to turn that touchy-feely stuff into data that stakeholders up and down the organization can embrace. Technology is particularly difficult, she says, because people tend to race through decisions about technology without considering how it will likely affect people and their processes. Another important aspect of lasting change: engaged leadership and sponsors. Equipped with data about how much the people affected by a change underway understand it, change leaders can help demonstrate how important it is for leaders to be involved in individual transformations as well as the overall organizational transformation. Tuba Kuklen is Executive Director/ Performance Improvement Director at Central Transaction Operations (CTO) for JPMorgan Chase & Co. since 2012. Tuba is responsible for developing new programs to expand Operational Excellence capabilities in CTO and leading Organizational Change Management team to manage people side of change. SolutionsIQ's Dan Fuller hosts at Change Management 2016 (http://www.acmpconference.com/Join-Us). About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Amitai Schlair chats with Agile Amped about his DevOps Dojo session for the Agile Alliance Technical Conference. Ditching the "traditional" approach to DevOps, Amitai's workshop focused on a simple, iterative exercise (printing labels), made obvious the artificial divide between Dev and Ops--and any two departments in a single value chain. The takeaway seems almost too simple: the dev team should ask the operations team for their requirements before and during product delivery. Amitai Schlair is a software development coach, legacy code wrestler, non-award-winning musician, and award-winning bad poet. He publishes fixed-length micropodcasts at Agile in 3 Minutes, writes variable-length articles at schmonz.com, and contributes code and direction to notable open-source projects such as NetBSD, pkgsrc, and ikiwiki. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Emergent architecture is all well and good but, as Rebecca Wirfs-Brock puts it, "sometimes what emerges out of the swamp... may not be what you want, in terms of scalability or performance or reliability." Rebecca has a passion for ensuring that the often complex requirements used to define what companies want actually yields the software architecture and quality that they expect. Rebecca's session at the Agile Alliance Technical Conference is a workshop called "Being Agile about Architectural Qualities" and she shares with Agile Amped what she hopes it will accomplish. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock is a self-defined "design geek who invented Responsibility-Driven Design and the xDriven meme." She is keen about team effectiveness, communicating complex requirements, software quality, pragmatic TDD, and techniques for architecting and reducing risk on agile projects and programs. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Kevin Donohue (Sr. Developer) and Gabriel Ortiz (Sr. Developer) from Alaska Airlines sit down with Agile Amped to talk about the joys of mob programming. Gabriel's team paved the way for the adoption of mob programming (also called "swarming") at Alaska Airlines after attending the On Agile virtual conference last year. One year into its implementation and the Alaska teams are still using mob programming. Benefits of mob programming include better product quality and quicker cross-pollination and knowledge sharing. In addition, "mobbing" enabled people not always invited in development, such QA, to participate in the process, learn, and also provide input. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Refactoring is a big deal to Bryan Beecham. So much so that after looking at the role refactoring code plays in his life, he had an epiphany: "We are the code... If you're software what would you do [to improve yourself]... Are there parts of you that maybe you don't like... People think physically right away, but a lot of those aren't physical." Human refactoring (humanrefactor.wordpress.com) is about applying some technical practices to daily life. Befittingly Bryan is going "Inside Refactoring" in his AATC2016 presentation. Bryan Beecham is an international speaker, coach, trainer, and agile consultant. His passion is to help improve companies, teams and individuals through continuous improvement and increasing awareness. SolutionsIQ's Neville Poole hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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 traveled from her native Finland to speak at the Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2016 about "Exploratory Testing in API". According to Maaret, much of what's keeping non-technical people from understanding development and testing is not having a GUI to interact with and explore. "I wanted to create an experience ... where we actually take some API, which looks like code and doesn't have a user interface" and create a GUI for individuals to do exploratory testing on. In this session she applies her 20 years of experience in testing and, more recently, mob testing to enable non-developers to participate in exploratory testing in a mob development environment. Maaret Pyhäjärvi is a software specialist with emphasis on testing. She works with a 10-person software development team at Granlund Oy as the testing specialist. On the side, she delivers hands-on testing trainings and consults on testing through Altom Consulting Oy. SolutionsIQ's Neville Poole hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

"Cheezy" Jeff Morgan and Ardita Karaj chat with Agile Amped about their AATC2016 session "Test Driven: Deliberate Collaboration", where the two will perform live automation test-drive development (ATDD) for all to see. One goal of their presentation is make visible the fact that much of what people consider collaboration is really hand-offs: the developer plugs away at the code in her corner then chucks it over to the tester, who's often afraid to even touch the code. In their session, Cheezy and Ardita want to demonstrate what real team collaboration looks like. Chief technology officer and a cofounder of LeanDog, Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan has been teaching classes and coaching teams on agile and lean techniques since early 2004. Ardita Karaj is a passionate Agile coach, trainer, change agent and consultant in the Toronto area. Working at EPAM Systems, she brings more than 15 years of software development experience from different commercial and public organizations. SolutionsIQ's Neville Poole hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Melissa Perri is passionate about creating products that users will really love and also creating great teams with sustainable processes and a clear understanding of the end user. Melissa wants to go "Beyond 'Pretty'" in her AATC2016 conference talk, where she aims to change how people think about UX design. People tend to think that design is "very nebulous and fluffy, it's just making things pretty, but it's actually a very systematic and scientific approach to getting people to use your products." Sometimes that means taking a step back and using a holistic approach to addressing user needs and concerns that can't easily be fixed piecemeal. Melissa Perri is a product manager, UX designer and speaker based in New York City. As CEO of ProdUX Labs, Melissa works on strategy and training for product management and UX teams around the world. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Arlo Belshee spends all of his time working in "legacy" organizations: "legacy code, legacy culture, legacy team practices". In software, "legacy" generally means "full of bugs". But Arlo has an interesting concept: what if creating buggy code, we didn't. Arlo's topic at the Agile Alliance Technical Conference concerns eliminating bugs by not creating them in the first place, because, after all, bugs are optional and there are ways to develop without creating this. Arlo has lots of passion around this and has even created a new initiative with a nifty hashtag: #BugZero. Similar to the concept of "inbox zero" (zeroing out your email inbox to improve your efficacy), bug zero means "get the bugs out of your code and keep it that way." SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

After talking with Agile tester extraordinaire Lisa Crispin about test automation code, George Dinwiddie noticed that "the example test codes online are really tiny... They teach people enough to understand the test framework, but... over time they have a hard time putting the tests into practice." The problem is that as the code becomes larger and more complex, it's harder to maintain it long term. In his AATC2016 session, "The Evolutionary Anatomy of Test Automation Code", George will share some patterns he's noticed for making tests maintainable long term as the system gets larger and more complex as well as ideas about how to organize test codes. The trick, according to George, is to start thinking about the organization early, before the code is large and complex, so that when that does happen, you're better prepared. George Dinwiddie helps organizations develop software more effectively. He brings thirty-five years of development experience from electronic hardware and embedded firmware to business information technology. SolutionsIQ's Neville Poole hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

James Lewis visits with Agile Amped at the first ever Agile Alliance Technical Conference to discuss microservices and Conway's Law. James is a self-described "coding architect" with Thoughtworks out of London, where he often leads teams and helps them build better software. Conway's Law, according to James, essentially says that how your teams look is how your software will end up looking. Says James, "If you have loosely coupled teams, then you have loosely coupled software. If you have tightly coupled teams, then you'll have tightly coupled software." A modular approach to building software, however would enable you to change software more easily and quickly without having to throw the whole thing out when you need to fix it. Together, these are the topics of James' session at AATC2016: "Microservices and Conway's Law". SolutionsIQ's Neville Poole hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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 tester JoEllen Carter sits down with Agile Amped at Mile High Agile 2016 to chat about using "Testing to Build the Right Thing", the topic and title of the hands-on session she presented with Lisa Crispin. After enjoying their experience diving into story mapping, the duo decided to share it with a wider audience. Though testers aren't always invited to story mapping sessions traditionally, JoEllen points out that testers can help determine where weaknesses in a story are before it gets build into the product. JoEllen Carter has more than ten years of experience defining the role of tester on agile teams. Her experience in software development and testing began in the highly regulated and QA-intensive nuclear power industry, and now includes direct marketing donor management software, staffing software, e-commerce systems, and project management software. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Rose Fan has been an Agile road warrior for six years. To make her life (and others') easier, Rose is interested in how to set up highly effective distribute teams, whether it's one or two remote team members or it's a fully remote or 100% distributed team, where everyone is working from a different location, across different time zones. Rose gives advice on what team members in the various configurations can do to work at their most effective. Rose Fan is a lead consultant with ThoughtWorks, a global IT organization that has helped revolutionize the IT industry by being at the forefront of Agile and Continuous Delivery practices. She's eager to share her experiences and conclusions to other Agile technologists. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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 tester extraordinaire Lisa Crispin is back for another round with Agile Amped. This time she's talking about her presentation at Mile High Agile "Agile Testing to Build the Right Thing" (co-presented with JoEllen Carter). She also touches on some trends that she sees, some positive (e.g., people in the Agile field are recognizing testers as really valuable), others not so much (companies expecting that hiring an SDET will solve all their code quality problems). Lisa Crispin is the co-author of More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team (2014, with Janet Gregory), Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (2009, also with Janet Gregory), co-author of Testing Extreme Programming (2002, with Tip House). Lisa enjoys working as a tester and sharing her experiences in the agile and testing communities. See our last podcast with Lisa here: http://www.solutionsiq.com/resources/... SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Jurgen Appelo, author of Management 3.0 and keynote speaker for Mile High Agile 2016, is back with his new book "Managing for Happiness" (due for release in June). Agile Amped was excited to sit down with him and discuss, among other things, the virtuous cycle between happiness and success, how frameworks can't simply be "installed" on people and how "recipes" or "workouts" for successful management resonate more with him. The goal in all this is to foster happiness throughout our organizations and empower managers to contribute to the proliferation of happiness. Because the research is clear: happy workers are more productive workers. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

There's always room for pie, right? Well, this isn't that kind of slice. Richard Lawrence introduces Agile Amped to a concept he calls feature mining, which he uses to "find the first slice" of work to do on a project. Feature mining asks four important questions of the group of the "right" people (i.e., people who can actually contribute to the solution of the problem at hand): 1. What makes it valuable? 2. Why is it big (and why don't we just go build it this afternoon)? 3. Where is the risk? 4. Where is the uncertainty? For each question, participants generate a list of answers. Then the group brainstorms different ways to slice the lists. (Surprisingly, answers tend to jump out at participants at this point.) Then comes the hard part: actually doing the work involved in the agreed-upon first slice. Richard Lawrence trains and coaches teams and organizations to become happier and more productive. Richard is one of a handful of Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coaches and is a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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 in the Agile industry has had it: that one moment when you realize the effect Agile could have on you, your team, or your organization. Michele Sliger has become a connoisseur of such moments and collects them like butterflies, which are on display at http://www.sligerconsulting.com/light.... But can an organization also have a lightbulb moment? Michele Sliger has worked in software development for over 25 years and is the owner of Sliger Consulting Inc. She is the co-author of The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility. SolutionsIQ's Evan Campbell hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Dan Sharp stops by Agile Amped to discuss his Mile High Agile 2016 talk "Refactoring to Deeper Insight: Lessons Learned Applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD)" (co-presented with Paul Rayner). DDD is a new approach to refactoring legacy code, which is often a confusing mess of code in many languages like a huge pot of spaghetti with way too many cooks throwing ingredients in. This approach sheds light on refactoring legacy code by rethinking the system in design terms: how are objects being modeled, what are the naming conventions, how to ensure that each part of the system only does what it's supposed to do and nothing more, etc. Dan provides an example that hits close to home: his own experience redesigning a product for his employer Nexia. Dan Sharp is a life-long geek, having been fascinated with computers since early childhood. Dan is Senior Software Architect for the Nexia™ team at Ingersoll Rand, affording him the luxury of a startup environment backed by a multi-billion dollar company. SolutionsIQ's Evan Campbell hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Today's businesses and organizations are faced with problems and opportunities that have never been faced before, and knowledge workers are important in the charge to resolve these problems. And yet these same businesses and organizations still operate under assumptions that don't apply to knowledge work and don't take into consideration the degree of difficulty and novelty inherent in the problem space. In her presentation at Mile High Agile this year (co-presented with Matt Barcomb), Cat Swetel proposes that businesses start implementing a more value-based roadmapping approach populated with options not commitments. "It's insane to dictate when a thing will be done when it hasn't been done before or it hasn't been done before in this context." Cat Swetel is a nerdy technologist with a finance degree. When she's not helping teams and technology organizations improve processes and quality of work life, she's probably reading feminist literature or making jokes about Bitcoin. Currently she's very interested in smart contracts and the so-called trust web SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Playing cards, index cards and dice are some of the tools that Mike Clement uses to make learning fun because, as he puts it, "Learning shouldn't be an arduous activity." Mike's session at Mile High Agile this year is on "Playing to Learn". Many of the games that Mike uses, including the suggestively titled "Die Card Die!", teach Agile and Lean principles and engages players in a way that is both informative and enjoyable. "I can't force you to learn anything," Mike emphasizes to Agile Amped. "You're gonna learn what you're gonna learn and you're going to take the lessons that you're gonna take." To reinforce learning, Mike leverages debriefs where one person's a-ha moment may cause other lights to go on. Mike Clement is a husband, father of four, and currently a Software Craftsman and Co-founder of Greater Sum. Passionate about agile technical excellence, Mike founded and organizes Software Craftsmanship Atlanta, founded Utah Software Craftsmanship and previously organized the Agile Roots conference. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Women Who Code is an international, non-profit organization supporting women in technical careers. They even support casual coders, who may not be working professionally as coders but are still contributing to the tech space. Rylee Keys sits down with Agile Amped to discuss how this organization strives to inspire women to excel in technology and technical careers, in particular as it pertains to Denver and Boulder, CO. Rylee Keys is a software developer with a background in Agile, mobile, healthcare, eCommerce and social media SaaS platforms. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Pairing is a common concept for development teams: two developers working to produce superior code together. While their pairing role may change (e.g. from driver to navigator, etc.), it's generally assumed that pairing is only useful within development teams, but couldn't it be useful elsewhere as well? Pradeepa Narayanaswamy has been pioneering an approach to pair testing within Agile teams and also external stakeholders that provides each individual in the pair a new perspective of the application being developed and iterated on. Pradeepa shares with Agile Amped her experience of working with a salesperson to gain a new perspective on how customers actually use the application. The result is quicker, more valuable feedback that the developer can use early in the development cycle while it is still cheap, rather than late in the cycle. As an Agile Coach, Trainer and Consultant, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy is a self-proclaimed "Agile Passionista" who strongly believes in the agile principles used in transforming organizations to build superior quality products. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

It's all too common for the "business" to provide conflicting priorities for development teams, and Dominica DeGrandis is helping to get them re-aligned. She shares her experience with how LeanKit approached this exact problem internally. Dominica is presenting "From Divided to United--Aligning Technical and Business Teams" at Mile High Agile this year. Dominica DeGrandis teaches Kanban Flow to Devops enthusiasts. Her passion involves helping organizations improve workflow and optimize throughput. She is keen on providing visibility and transparency across teams to reveal mutually critical information. As Director of Learning & Development at LeanKit, Dominica combines experience, practice and theory to help teams level up their capability. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

Managers in an Agile organization have it tough: leadership and delivery teams have been given a clear understanding of how to "be Agile". Managers, though, have for a long time been left to fend for themselves. Steve Martin shares with Agile Amped that there is a way for managers to make their way back from the "land of the lost"--and he even has a nifty exercise, which he shares with us here! Steve Martin is a Principal Enterprise Agile Consultant at SolutionsIQ with over 20 years experience helping companies deliver exceptional results. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

According to Chris Shinkle, businesses that have been focused primarily on one thing (manufacturing hardware, developing new medications) are struggling to build the software that now drives... well, everything. Enter gamification. Gamification is more than just points and badges. Chris discusses how it can be used to increase engagement in users not of games but of future medications. The example he gives pertains to Alzheimer's medication. There's no shortage of new medications to bring to market, Chris says, but there is a real problem with engaging individuals willing to participate for the entirety of clinical trials. Who knows if this approach couldn't be the difference between "Game Over" and "1Up" for this area and countless others? Chris Shinkle is a thought leader and initiator of new ideas and continuous improvement at SEP. He has used these methods leading large, complex projects. He uses these ideas to train SEP engineers and coach clients. SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

But, really, if your organization is like most and is still operating under some grandiose "big master plan" (which is really just a big bad lies, since plans change quickly and frequently), then Matt Barcomb invites you to consider a more flow-based roadmapping approach that's more fluid and fits better with reality. Matt touches on the Lean principles (just in time, work in progress, etc.) that guide flow-based roadmapping, which is the topic of his conference presentation, to be delivered with Cat Swetel. Matt Barcomb has over 18 years of experience as a product development leader who takes a pragmatic, systems approach to change. He partners with organizations to help leadership teams develop & deploy strategy as well as optimize product management & development. Matt enjoys challenging mental models, simplifying the seemingly complex, and uncovering the "why" behind the "what". And he spits at least one rhyme in this podcast, while SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers 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

AgileCamp speaker Jim Saliba discusses his talk "Coaching Agile Teams for High Engagement".Jim often finds that Agile coaches in the field aren't actually coaching; they're teaching and mentoring. Jim encourages coaches to be "inquisitive and ask questions and get people to decide on their own options of growth."

Teams and individuals that take ownership of their work out perform those that don't, often by 50%! For high performance teams, ownership is essential. Learn how to help teams take ownership.

Mahesh Singh of Digite thinks that, whether or not Scrum is working for a team, they should consider using Kanban. The two approaches aren't in conflict with each other, because Kanban can be applied to any development process including Scrum.

Since 2006, Salesforce has practiced its own flavor of Enterprise-Scale Agile. After 9 years, in a department with heavy service components and new people everywhere, what are the challenges to preserving a healthy agile culture?

Kathryn Kuhn knows metrics. "There's no one metric to rule the team or that tells you the whole story." Kathryn is a transformation consultant (aka "Very senior Agile coach with Rally") that is often assigned to help really large companies deal with really large problems. Her AgileCamp session "Unlock Excellence with Agile Metrics" focused on three categories of outcomes that she helps her clients with:1. Adoption2. Operational3. BusinessYour metrics should provide the same kind of guidance as a car dashboard: no one metric is more important than any other (provided the tank is full, of course). Also of interest: EMPLOYEE Net Promoter score. Certainly something to think about.

Lead Agile coach at Western Digital Steve Sanoff discusses some of the technical aspects of his work coaching in the content solutions department of the company. He has his hands full with six teams operating under a model similar to Spotify's leveraging Continuous Integration (CI), two-week Sprints and a quick two-month release cycle. Steve presented on "The Funny Thing About Not Being Agile" at AgileCamp. The presentation touched on how the stupid things that people do when learning how to do and be Agile can be funny in retrospect. He also shared stories that coaches might be able to use in the field to tactfully show a client that someone else had a similar bonehead idea and the results were later laughable.

At the intersection of hardware, software, and innovation is WIKISPEED. An Agile hardware and engineering company of 500 collaborators in twenty countries, Team WIKISPEED uses test-first development practices, is run by Scrum teams, and produces road-legal cars, micro-houses, and social-good projects. Joe Justice shares how their 100-MPG road car was created in just three months through object-oriented design, iterative development, and agile project management. Joe describes how agile software techniques are applied to physical engineering and manufacturing, and how cross-functional team members can eliminate the constraints we imagine around traditional manufacturing. "We produce new modules of our car every week," he says. "We demo them every Thursday." Each module goes through a Sprint release cycle, a test cycle, and a release and ship once a week. The same Sprint process can be used in all kinds of product industries including, of all things, champagne.

Self-described "mentor-capitalist" talks anti-heroic leadership with Agile Amped at AgileCamp 2015 in Silicon Valley. Today's leadership, which includes managers, is often at a loss of how to provide leadership in their organizations. The literature of the day touts self-organizing teams who "don't need managers." Leaders and management, therefore, don't have clear models for how to help their own people succeed. Their people teeter between death by micromanagement and death by no management at all. Time to abandon the concept of "the one throat to choke"--because everyone up and down the organization is wising up to the fact that success is a team sport, not an Olympic competition.David is a proponent for helping leaders evolve into mentors, coaches, and advisers within their companies. Says David, "We've promoted leaders over the years based on what they know," but Agile doesn't buy into the follow-the-leader paradigm: Agile, operating under the assumption that the answer is not yet known, means iterating toward success. Hero-leaders don't work in today's creative economy. Enter the servant leader.

Father, mother, son, daughter--all of these terms connote both being and doing. What does it mean to be a daughter or mother, father or son? Manager and leader are other words with the concepts of being and doing built into it: what is a manager/leader and what does he or she do? Luke is championing the term "Agilist" as a person who is and does Agile. When doing and being are aligned--in other words, when an individual is and does their role, whether father or leader--their output is better. Luke proposes what he calls "serious play" as a way to get individuals to be and do their roles. "When you're in a state of play," he shares, "your doing and being are more aligned. You're actually in a place mentally when you're fully engaged."

After many years of experience with Agile transformations, Nicola has found that these changes often don't stick long term. At the root of this is the organization's culture type. Nicola often starts out at clients defining what their culture is. For example, is it a culture of fear? Such organizations tend not to allow failure or experimentation. Or perhaps it's a culture of "nice"? Seems nice, right? Except that these organizations tend not to embrace constructive debate and have employees that say they will go along with a decision but don't actually.

Widely recognized as a leading authority on software development, Dean Leffingwell is an author, serial entrepreneur, and software development methodologist. He is the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework, and author of five books on software development. His most recent books Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise, and Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, form much of the basis of modern thinking on Lean-Agile software development principles and practices. Catch up with him has he discusses his Agile 2015 experience, the Future of SAFe and trends in the industry.

In agile, we have broad ambitions with no defining principles. We often talk about agile teams, people, departments, organizations and political campaigns, as if the definition of "agile" was obvious. And yet the Agile Manifesto and its principles were written for software development teams. Furthermore, many CEOs tell us how agile they are, because "we can move teams around on a whim" or because "we run sprints every week," but their teams can't produce working products rapidly, increasingly add technical debt, or shamble into work demoralized. Until we frame agile concepts around more general principles and modern psychological and system science research, our best advice will remain marginalized as the dreams of "software zealots."

The FAST Agile is a combination of Open Space Technology, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), and Story Mapping. After watching hundreds of participants use open space technology to organize and hold a conference, Ron decided that such self-organization practices could also be applied to software development.Rather than relying control mechanisms like SAFe and LeSS, FAST Agile is a scalable agile framework that relies and individuals and interactions along with pulling work in to teams. Utilizing a 2 day sprint, FAST Agile implicitly requires teams to break their work down in to small chunks and to swarm the work in a #MobProgramming fashion.

In our journey to help create "more productive, humane, sustainable work places", we in the Agile community often have a tendency to look for a one-size-fits-all solution. But Agile transformations are as unique as the snowflakes requiring them. Diana Larsen's Agile Fluency model, which the industry veteran and pioneer discussed with us at Agile2015, offers a range of possible ways of operating to suit client and even practitioner needs.But first she wanted to clear up a common misconception: The Agile Fluency model isn't a maturity model. Diana shared. "It's a best-fit model... Getting to the end of the scale isn't necessarily the right place to be." The Agile Fluency model, then, can be thought of as having four bus zones: you have to go through each zone to get to subsequent zones -- but Zone 1 may be the best place for you to be, in which case you get off the bus and thrive there. The Agile Fluency model aims to help organizations identify the benefits and tradeoffs they are willing to make and then help them locate the zone in the model that maps best to the identified criteria.

From the perspective of the professional coach, coaching executive leaders is different than most other coaching situations. With executives, you are not only a facilitator of their inner process of discovery, as is true with any other professional coaching process: you are also their disorienting partner, provoking them into new ways of thinking. You are their thinking partner, sharing models, frameworks, concepts and ideas that inform them and expand their repertoire of ideas. You're their truth-teller, giving them feedback that no one else will, reminding them of what they are committed to even as they want to run away. Finally, you are their mentor: teaching them about and guiding them through the nuances of enterprise and leadership agility.

One of the most challenging and trouble-prone aspects of product development is discovering the right product requirements to deliver at the right time—and for the right customer. User stories and product backlogs are useful tools, but they aren't the only elements you'll need. Ellen shares her common-sense approach to agile requirements that will help you reduce risk and deliver value. Survey powerful ways to have colorful and collaborative requirements conversations. Discover how acceptance tests, prototypes, and models articulate important details. Understand the characteristics of a healthy backlog and review the methods that agile teams use when mining the backlog for business value.

Innovation, innovation, innovation. It's all you hear in meetings and all you read about in business books and magazines. The confusing aspect behind all of the innovation hype is that we rarely put thought behind how we design environments for which innovation can emerge. I've found that rarely does meaningful innovation occur when people are directly incentivized or tasked with doing so. The best you can do as a leader, is empower your people and design an environment where innovation can emerge.