Engineering Culture By Infoq

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Harsh Sinha, CTO of TransferWise about deliberately designing organisational culture. Why listen to this podcast: • The organisation is structured in lots of autonomous, independent teams each one of which is focused on meeting a specific customer need • For a startup the biggest competitive edge is speed, and this organisation structure supports and enables speed of decision making and responding to customer needs • Principles such as weak code ownership allow rapid changes within clearly defined constraints • While this may sound like a recipe for chaos it actually results in stronger ownership and better customer focus • Better decision making comes about because the people who make the decisions are the ones closest to the customer problems The difference between software development and product engineering. Engineers are expected to be proactive and go deeper into understanding the customer problem, not just working from More o

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Rich Mironov about the current trends in product development Why listen to this podcast: • There is nothing more wasteful in the world than beautifully building a product that no one wants to buy • Everywhere in the world engineering teams are similar to other engineering teams and sales teams are similar to other sales teams and the two groups are completely opposite to each other • Dropping time and funding allocated to the quality/infrastructure improvements is similar to joining a health club and never going – you won’t get better and fitter unless you go • If you can’t cope with the role which has lots of responsibility and little authority then maybe a product role isn’t right for you • Bringing the dev team into close contact with customers has been a goal and a topic of conversation for a long time, but very few organisations are actually doing this • Good product managers frame problems, they don’t demand features More on t

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Cahlan Sharp about the DevMountain schools that teach software development skills in intensive “bootcamp” programs. Why listen to this podcast: • A lot of formal education is very theory based rather than teaching hands-on development skills • A Stack-Overflow survey in which 60% of respondents describe themselves as self-taught developers • A high-pressure, high performance environment where students learn by doing results in faster learning and better retention • All of this information and teaching is available online, however when trying to teach yourself online you don’t know what you don’t know so it will probably take longer to find what you actually need to learn • Employers are struggling to find the talent they need to continue to grow their businesses • The higher education system is ill-equipped to supply the people needed for the jobs that are available • Challenging the “it takes four years to learn something” mentality

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Linda Rising about her talk at Agile 2017 in which she explores her own reaction to the politics in the USA and how it triggered her to research morality and values. Why listen to this podcast: • The inclusiveness, openness, learning and joy that characterises the agile community • Exploring her own reactions to people with different political viewpoints and finding research into morality which helps explain them • There are values which are commonly held, but different groups empathise some over others • Experiments that show that even when people understand the differences in viewpoint individuals are largely unable to argue from the “other” perspective • Seek to come to an understanding of other people’s values, even if you don’t share them More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2rvMGdR You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Wendy Closson about her journey of recovery from contracting a rare, deadly form of cancer to leading to the Optimize You track at QCon New York Why listen to this podcast: • The impact of contracting a rare form of cancer • The combination of things that together make a difference to survival rates • The five things that will impact your life for the better: Change the way you speak, think, feel, actions and attitude • The feedback loop – how you speak influences how you think which influences how you feel and nonviolent communication makes this a positive cycle • Different people have different needs and styles so find what works for you – use the tools that will help you fly. Consciousness is your awareness of yourself – your thoughts, your emotions, your actions, your attitude; how is the way you’re speaking planting seeds for tomorrow More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2B36e8Q You can also sub

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Ramon Harrington of Vistaprint about his QCon New York talk on Rapid Prototyping. Why listen to this podcast: • Putting engineers in front of customers and having conversations results in far better understanding and empathy for the customer’s needs • Be prepared to launch before you’ve built everything you think the product needs in order to avoid building features people don’t want • In engineering there is often a “right” answer, in product identification there isn’t – you don’t know until you try it out • Launching early with a reduced feature set can result in more engaged customers because their important problems are addressed first, and the product will be improved incrementally • Sometimes the software that you don’t write is more important than the software that you do write More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2qfuJQ7 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly update

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Conal Scanlon about his talk at QCon New York on Monte Carlo Simulation for forecasting feature development Why listen to this podcast: • Knowledge work is inherently variable, and estimates are inevitably incorrect • Monte Carlo simulation projects likely completion based on past history rather than future guesses • A small set of real data points is extrapolated to 1000 samples and that is used to produce a probability curve • A forecast is a point in time situation – as teams get better at delivery their predictability should improve • Everything in the delivery process should be subject to change as it is continuously improved More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2kneWJM You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software deve

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO and chief product owner at Scrum.org, about the state of Scrum in 2017 and the future of agile. Why listen to this podcast: • Agile adoption is now in the late-majority phase of the adoption curve; large organisations who are risk averse have seen the ideas proven elsewhere and they are adopting them • The underlying issues are not that complicated – we’ve got customers who have needs that they can’t explain and are rapidly changing, so we need ways to deliver products and experiment rapidly to enable us to learn and adapt to the emergent needs • The unicorn organisations are not successful because of their technology; it’s because they have served their customers better than the traditional businesses did • The primary customers of scrum.org are professional product developers, and helping them become more professional helps ensure the products are built better • Young enquiring minds “get” why an agile approach is th

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Kent McDonald and Heather Mylan-Mains on their talk at Agile 2017 about Socratic Questioning Why listen to this podcast: - Socratic questioning n approach to learning which is based on getting to answers through a question-based dialogue - Frequently what is presented at the beginning of a product investigation is a proposed solution rather than exploring the real need - There are six categories of questions to expose assumptions, change perspectives and delve into an issue or opportunity - There are other techniques which are needed when there is uncertainty about the existence of a problem or opportunity - This approach is not just restricted to elicitation – it can be used very effectively in a team situation when exploring options and identifying challenges More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2AX6pX8 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest to

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud about the adoption of DevOps, containers and microservices and the dangers of vanity metrics. Why listen to this podcast: - Adoption of containers is increasing – one survey indicated 42% of organizations surveyed are using them for something - Container orchestration platforms are good at managing the challenges around scaling and resilience - Architecture is a significant challenge for agility and DevOps – the need to move away from monoliths towards microservices requires a fundamental rethink of our products - Software organisations who are still building monolithic applications do so at their own peril - These ideas are not new, and we have known about them for decades – it’s not the quality of the daily work that matters, it’s the improvement in the quality of the daily work - Focus on actionable metrics – don’t show me a metric unless there is something I can do about it or it is something

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jason Yip about removing friction in the developer experience and DevOps at Spotify Why listen to this podcast: • Friction is the feeling that your environment is fighting you – examples include poorly named variables in code, editors configured incorrectly, access to environments etc • These things often seem small individually, but together they significantly and slow down development activities • Cultivate refined annoyance; not tolerating these issues but actively resolving them • Challenges often come mainly from rapid growth – every design will fail if you just try to scale it larger and larger, you need to redesign for larger contexts, what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow and needs to be adapted • Be careful not to locally optimize one part of the system at the expense of the overall throughput More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2hVBH9A You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Josh Evans, former engineering manager at Netflix on how Netflix does DevOps and the freedom and responsibility culture that undermines their way of working. Why listen to this podcast: • There are many interpretations of the term DevOps, it is a useful shorthand for a wide variety of technologies and approaches • “You build it, you run it” is the concrete application of the freedom and responsibility culture • When building a platform tool make it so easy to use that the product teams are not tempted to try and build something for themselves • Product teams are free to experiment and learn, which can feel chaotic and is a valuable part of the freedom and responsibility culture • The value of blameless and safe incident reviews – the goal is to learn and find patterns and use that information to present whole classes of failure from happening in the future • Don’t view the value stream in a fragmented way – see the whole end to end

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sean Dunn and Chris Edwards about professionalism, licensing and ethics in software engineering Why listen to this podcast: • Situations where software development intersects with the public interest are widening and software can impact the health and wellbeing of society • The distinguishing characteristic of a profession is holding paramount the public interest • Unlike the failure of a bridge unethical results from software will be less visible and more insidious • What steps can we take within our organisations to instil a sense of responsibility that is beyond getting the product out the door quickly • A core tenant of professionalism is we cannot detach our actions from the outcomes – ignorance is not an excuse More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2hheRZO You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Don Denoncourt about remaining an engineer as one ages. Why listen to this podcast: • Looking back over history and programming language changes since the early 1980’s • The importance of lifelong learning and putting your personal time into remaining relevant and up to date with new development platforms • New graduates get to work on new things because they have just learned about them and they are prepared to take the lower paid roles than “experienced” people • If ongoing learning is not fun, then maybe you are in the wrong profession • The unconscious bias against older workers in a few teams and how they miss out on great insights • Some advice for oldies and youngies working together More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2ltre65 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

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Andrea Goulet & M. Scott Ford about their journey working together as a married couple and business partners, learning to collaborate and communicate despite having vastly different communication styles and viewpoints. Why listen to this podcast: - Effective communication is a competitive advantage - The system that you produce will only be as good as the communication structure you have in place while you build it - The importance of learning to speak each other’s language – the terminology of development and business is different and it is necessary to take the time and effort to learn the different language - The concept of “inception layers” relating to how intensively someone is concentrating on an activity and their level of openness to interruption - The value of writing a daily journal in a wiki to share what’s been happening and make progress and learning visible More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, Pavneet Saund about his ideas on making empathy a superpower and effective team leadership Why listen to this podcast: - Showing and receiving empathy is truly life-changing - The need to assume good intent when communicating using chat and written words - Leadership is a different set of skills from technology and these need to be learned More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2ztpigM 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.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2ztpigM

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Lee Cunningham of VersionOne about the results from the State of Agile Survey Why listen to this podcast: • Agile is not just something that developers do – it’s an enabler of business outcomes • The emergence of multi-modal organisations where there are multiple different approaches being used simultaneously which holds them back from progressing effectively • Some organisations are adopting a Taylorism approach to agile adoption – get experts to tell us what to do and control the teams to abide by those rules • The emergence of business value as an important measure, over productivity (although productivity is a necessary precondition for business value) • Buying an expensive tool doesn’t make your agile adoption successful, in the same way that buying an expensive treadmill doesn’t make you fit – both need to be used effectively to deliver any value More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2y6NKnY You c

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman and Mike Grifiths about the joint PMI & Agile Alliance initiative to produce the Agile Practice Guide. Why listen to this podcast: - There is nothing in the PMBOK that says you have to use a waterfall project delivery model - If we want to influence the people who hold the hearts and minds of senior management, there is no better way than to collaborate with them - The guide reflects the State of the Practice when it was written - The prevalence of agile terms in projects, without actually using agile approaches – the veneer of agile without the substance - Defining agile as a mindset based on values and principles rather than any set of practices - There are many options for undertaking work; the key is to have an agile mindset about which practices are most appropriate in a particular context and be prepared to change if the chosen practices are not helpful More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on In

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks, about their recent report on the need for Courageous Leadership and her forthcoming book on Evolutionary Architecture. Why listen to this podcast: - Courageous leadership enables organisations to solve enterprise-scale problems while still allowing empowered development teams to produce software in an agile fashion - The importance of making the link between technology advances and what they could mean for a business organisation, rather than seeing them in isolation - If your metric is how many experiments succeed then you will not take enough risks – turn this around and celebrate the learning from failed experiments - The need to truly put the customer at the centre our focus, understand the kind of relationship we want with customers and how we want to interact with them - Create an environment where people are recognised and valued for their varied perspectives and recognise that good ideas ca

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Joshua Kerievsky CEO of Industrial Logic and Heidi Helfand Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies and author of the book Dynamic Reteaming about their talk High Performance via Psychological Safety Why listen to this podcast: • You cannot have a high performing team unless you have psychological safety • Creating a safe environment is hard, and it must go beyond just lip service • Take the time to have crucial conversations early rather than later • The quality of the products we produce is a direct reflection of the quality of the conversations we have in our teams