Engineering Culture By Infoq

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Pablo Santos of Plastic SCM about what it takes to create a great engineering culture, dealing with skills shortages, engaging remote workers and getting the highest value out of DevOps. Why listen to this podcast: • Attracting the right people is a constant challenge in the technology space • Having interesting and challenging work is important • Remote workers are common today and it’s important to focus on keeping them engaged • DevOps is a way to create a continuous flow of stable changes and get them into production quickly • The art of splitting the work is key to DevOps and it is something that takes significant understanding and careful design More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2ZZhAYn You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jossie Haines and Aneri Shah of Tile on the culture at Tile, mentoring, diversity & inclusion and retaining women in technology Why listen to this podcast: • Genuine collaborative and supportive cultures don’t just happen • Corporate values need to be real to people, so they feel able to live them every day • Looking at diversity and inclusion is not a stand-alone activity – you need to address all aspects of the employee experience • Mentoring is important because under-represented groups tend to have the most challenges in the workplace and a proven way to help them achieve success is to provide them with mentors and sponsors • 56% of women leave the tech industries after 10-20 years due to their treatment in the workplace – this has to change and we know what to do to change it More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2ZvoILL You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Lee Cunningham about the latest State of Agile report, recently released by Collabnet/VersionOne. Why listen to this podcast: • This is the 13th year the State of Agile report has been released • There is a strengthening of momentum towards holistic value stream management • Most organisations are adopting agile for the right reasons: they are trying to accelerate the ability to get software built with high quality and get it into the hands of their customers, managing changing priorities and improve alignment between IT and business groups • The factors that impact success for scaling agile adoption are having internal agile coaches, executive coaches, company-provided training, consistent practices and processes and implementation of a common tool • Adoption of value stream thinking and integrating end-to-end delivery is an important goal that advanced organisations are adopting, but it’s a significant change that is not easy Mor

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Nick White about his experiences as a medical patient under the care of a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary team and the lessons that we can take from that for software engineering Why listen to this podcast: • The collaborative approach to diagnosis by a multi-disciplinary team of specialists used by the Wellington Regional Hospital Cancer Care Unit • With a complex diagnosis like cancer the range of treatment options is wide and the multi-disciplinary approach enables the best possible combination of treatments and more successful patient outcomes • Setting a goal of coming back from the surgery to continue as a mountain runner • Running up Mt Fuji to raise funds and awareness for cancer research • As technologists we need to be open to learning from other disciplines in areas such as collaboration approaches, dealing with hand-offs and bottle-necks, and customer service More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Michael Bolton about the current and future state of testing. Why listen to this podcast: • Testing is about evaluating products by learning about them through exploration and experimentation • These is confusion about the difference between testing a small bit of functionality and the complexity that arises when many of these small bits of software are combined into systems • The common approach of using unit tests and checking the output of transactions they are not looking for trouble, they are looking to demonstrate that everything is OK, and this is a dangerous perspective • The need for testing of machine learning so that it reflects what we aspire to be, rather than what we are, which requires testers to become ethicists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and artists • The evolution of testing is not about changes in tools and technologies, it is about applying the tester mindset to the new types of systems being tested

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave Snowden at the Agile People conference in Stockholm, Sweden, about the addition of liminal spaces in the Cynefin framework, pre-scrum techniques and the future of agility Why listen to this podcast: • The Cynefin Framework provides a perspective on the world • The latest version of the Cynefin framework include two liminal domains • The strength of approaches like Scrum is holding things in a liminal state long enough to become right, before they move to complicated • In the complex domain the keys are identifying coherent hypotheses and running parallel safe-to-fail experiments • There is a whole body of techniques for addressing IT problems and there is no one right answer – use the techniques best suited to the nature of the problem More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Hh5qn0 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Fabiola Eyholze at the Agile People conference in Stockholm, Sweden, about the need to radically change HR thinking and practices in organisations to enable creativity and productivity. Why listen to this podcast: • The need to create great places of work where people enjoy going to work • It’s about having meaningful work; understanding why we do things and our contribution is to making a positive impact on other peoples’ lives • We want people to think outside the box and be creative at work and that means we need to create workplaces that support them to do so • We thrive when we bring diversity into teams – different personalities and approaches result in better outcomes • Most HR people do genuinely care about other people, about engagement and about creating healthy workspaces; yet HR is often so process-driven that they forget about the important people factors More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Doug Kirkpatrick at the Agile People conference in Stockholm, Sweden, about what self-management actually means for the people in an organisation. Why listen to this podcast: • Self-management enables everyone in the organisation to thrive and do their best work • It’s not about layers of control, rather it’s dense networks of committed self-managers guided by a clear set of principles • It’s the responsibility of each self-manager to guide their own career • Decision rights come down to who is the best person to make that particular decision • Great organisation culture is one where people are happy, free to do their best work, engaged in high levels of good, effective collaboration and are able to contribute to the world More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2DHpq0a You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at scrum.org about the current state of scrum and the latest initiatives by scrum.org Why listen to this podcast: • Scrum has been used for over 25 years and people are using it in different areas and the challenges are not around the rudimentary aspects of adoption rather it is about optimising the way of working in different contexts • The need to move beyond adherence to a single approach into a wider, pragmatic mesh of ideas from multiple sources • The fundamentals of Empiricism, self-organisation and continuous improvement need to be wrapped in discipline, customer-centricity and a value model that makes sense while we constantly improve our skills • The characteristics of the organic model are completely different to the factory model – thinking needs to shift from process adherence to values & behaviours, from specialists to generalists who are customer focused who can learn quickly, from hierarchies t

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Phil Abernathy about his work helping organisations focus on employee happiness to drive customer happiness and shareholder return and the Bureaucracy Mass Index as a tool to identify where companies are bloated and ineffective. He also spoke about what’s needed for real transformation. Why listen to this podcast: • Great companies are realising that in order to attract great talent you have to have a great place to work • If you have complex systems and complex processes, the root cause will be complex structures • The organisational BMI – the Bureaucracy Mass Index, the proportion of enablers to doers. A healthy BMI is around 10%, whereas in many organisations it gets to be as high as 40% • Having clear objectives that are visible to the while organisation enables good decision making; Objectives and Key Results are one tool to achieve this • Organization transformation must include mindset and culture as well as structure and roles More

Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Mik Kersten of Tasktop about his new book, Project to Product and how the Flow Framework can be applied to changing the way of working in organisations. Why listen to this podcast: • The project model of software development is fundamentally broken • The management techniques which were invented in and needed for managing in the era of industrial revolution are not applicable or useful in the era of software development • Most organisations’ rate of change in improving how they build software is so slow that they are unable to compete against any of the tech giants who choose to adopt a new market • The shift from projects to products enables organisations to realise more value and respond top market changes quicker • The flow framework is a tool to help identify where to make changes based on finding the bottlenecks and releasing value in the system More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2VxhVj7 You can also subsc

In this podcast recorded at the Agile India conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group about his experiences and the need to take back management as an important practice in today’s organisations Why listen to this podcast: • There is a science of invention – deliberately combining things that you might not have thought of combining before • What matters more than having an agile process is having a resilient organisation – bounce-back-ability • The four elements which need to be present for sustainable success are good management, resilience, creativity and agility • Management as a profession and practice has become tainted and unpopular, yet good management is critical to organisation success • The more organizations that can apply humanistic values, lean principles, value focus, flow of work and continuous improvement the stronger the economy will become More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ hhttps://bit.ly/2HQNoJ

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Flint Brenton, CEO of Collabnet/VersionOne on how the organisation is integrating post the merger and supporting customers as they adopt value stream thinking. Why listen to this podcast: • Reflecting on the way the two businesses have come together since the merger of Collabnet and VersionOne • The company is focusing on supporting value stream management in their customers development businesses • You can adopt value stream management without including DevOps, but it’s really hard and doesn’t deliver the expected benefits • Regardless of size, every enterprise is now a software company • The importance of educating customers on the cultures that are found in the best run development organisations and the benefits that are possible More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2HH6uSO You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hott

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Andrew King, Organisational Scientist at Ocado Technologies about the hiring practices they use and how to design the culture you want. Why listen to this podcast: • Context effect says that anything that happens in decision making that is altered by the context in which the decision is made • The compromise effect – when faced with a choice of options we try to avoid the extremes • These types of effects impact hiring processes and culture design and have to be actively mitigated against • Design your interviewing questions very carefully to explore the things that will actually help in the decision-making process • The content of an interview is the candidate’s responses, not the questions that are asked • To implement effective change, follow the principles rather than blindly following a process More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2FfKyuo You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receiv

In this podcast recorded at QCon London 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jason Box and Paul Johnston about the impact climate change is having, how information technology contributes to greenhouse gasses and what technologists can do to help combat it. Why listen to this podcast: • Climate change is the challenge of our time • Data centers are a real problem IRO global warming and greenhouse gas emissions • Data centers have the same emissions impact as the aviation industry • There is an initiative to have all data centres using sustainable power sources by 2024 • Data center demand is set to increase by 5 times by 2025 • The greenlandtrees.org initiative is planting trees to capture carbon More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Hi9jt8 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Kim Scott, author of the book Radical Candor about what radical candor is and how it can be applied in teams and relationships. Why listen to this podcast: • Radical candor is the behaviour which comes about when people both care personally and are able to challenge directly in a relationship • Telling each other about problems or praising each other in a way that is productive is difficult and seldom done well • Radical candor is first and foremost about soliciting feedback and criticism - ask the question “what can I do, or stop doing, that will make it easier to work with me?” • It is even more important to give public praise than it is to give private criticism – recognise and encourage positive behaviour • The best way to encourage radical candor is to be open to it yourself – demonstrate the behaviour you want to encourage in others More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on In

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Anna Obukhova about the neuroscience and biology of leadership and what it takes to coach and work with tired teams. Why listen to this podcast: • When we change a process we also impact and cause change to the body and brain of the people involved in the process • Behavioural ethology shows how the perception of being in a “caged environment” impacts hormone production and results in changed attitudes and approaches • Energy levels vary from person to person and over time; maintaining high energy is crucial to leading and adapting to change • Tired teams need different styles of coaching and support, using the same techniques as with energised teams can result in harm • Different agile approaches and frameworks are applicable with companies and teams who have different energy levels, trying to apply a high energy framework in low energy environment will fail and cause stress More on this: Quic

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Ash Coleman . Why listen to this podcast: • Testing is not a simplistic process that can be reduced to automation, although automation helps • Ethics matter in software development I we need to build products that the builders are proud of, that people will use in real life and that is safe for them to use • The lack of diversity in teams producing AI/ML based products results in very biased datasets • Ally-ship is an important role for people who have privilege to support and enable people from disadvantaged communities to overcome the biases in the system • It takes work, money and time to fix the imbalances in our workplaces – it doesn’t just happen because we would like it to More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2MZdZ7j You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Deema Dajani (Advisor Transformation Consulting) & Shannon Mason (VP Product Management, Agile Central) of CA Technologies about the Women in Agile organisation, their own experiences as women in the technology industry and ways to support and increase diversity in organisations. Why listen to this podcast: - Women in Agile is an incorporated not for profit focused on supporting, enabling an empowering women and allies in the agile community - The unconscious bias that comes in to so many aspects of work, particularly as it impacts recruitment - There is data which shows that the more diverse a team is, the better the solutions they come up with are - The need to coach and support women candidates for promotions and new roles to encourage them to overcome their own self-evaluation, which is often more judgemental than it should be - There are pools of qualified people with diverse backgr

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Chloë Bregman about high performance design. Why listen to this podcast: • High-performance design is design that fits with the customers needs and is successful • Design is worthless unless it is creating ROI in some way • Design is not “one thing” – there are many aspects which need to be addressed and these aspects have tension between them • All design is human experience design • We’re almost always wrong in what we think will be a good design, so a culture that is comfortable to be wrong and learn is critical for success • Ask “if we changed one thing, what possibilities could that open up for us” and make the change to see what the results are More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2UxxDdj You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.