Secrets from the Agile Manifesto Authors on Flow
I have been lucky enough to personally interview 14 of the agile manifesto authors, a project that has totally shifted my perspective on agility and working with teams. This project was the vision of my team – the Agile Uprising – and was conducted over 6 months and chronicled via a globally distributed podcast. During this time period, our podcast went from 0 listeners to an average of 8,000 per month. The initial inception of the project was to tell the story behind the manifesto and it’s authors. The trigger was some work we were doing with Ken Schwaber and it was cancelled due to his failing health. We realized there was a huge moment in software history that had not been told, and these men were not getting any younger. We intended to interview each to understand what they were doing before, during and shortly after the Manifesto event in 2001. As the interviews started adding up, we heard a story of what Agile was meant to be, versus what it has become. We learned that there were essentially 3 themes in all 14 interviews: 1. Focus on engineering culture 2. Build strong, empowered, teams 3. Establish mindfulness in delivery organizations These 3 simple bullets are generally missed in most agile adoptions and transformations. Perhaps parts or some aspects are met, but on-whole, they are lacking. We focus too much on agile as a topic of didactic learning, and not a mindset. And what you see really emerge as a thing of beauty, is the residual benefits where these themes intersect. When Mindfulness and Technical Practices overlap you form strong process and integrated DevOps. Where Strong Teams and Technical Practices overlap you find rapid delivery of high quality working software. And where you find the convergence of all three elements, you find true value delivery flow. This talk hones in on the re-centering of agile intent. It is agnostic of certification and scaling conversations, and builds a solid argument for the movements in Alistair Cockburn’s “Heart of Agile”, Joshua Kerievsky’s “Modern Agile” and Bob Martin’s “Clean Coder” movements. As the talk wraps, I provide hope for the future of agility and engineering. A direction for attendees to move and an attempt to challenge the larger agile anti-patterns that are very prevalent in practice today. You can find the recordings at podcast.agileuprising.com You can learn more about Contino at contino.io
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Secrets from the Agile Manifesto Authors on Flow
- 1. SecretsFrom The Agile Manifesto Authors on Flow Learnings from interviewing 14 of the 17 authors Ryan Lockard @AgilePHL
- 2. “Four measly bullets, and all this s#!t happened?!“ Jon Kern
- 3. The hit list ➔ What is Agile? What is the Agile Manifesto? ➔ What is Extreme Programming (XP)? ➔ What does this have to do with DevOps? ➔ How arrogant can Ryan possibly be?
- 4. Interview Project 4 Holy crap! They actually want to meet with us and share the story! Happy Accident 1 The history of the Agile Manifesto became the subtext to the project, the future of software engineering and teams emerged as the main topic Happy Accident 2 There was no prior work done to document and capture the larger story behind the Agile Manifesto There was no meaningful record The Agile Manifesto Authors were all aging and not as tightly connected as they were in 2001 We are losing our way https://goo.gl/CnVqpg
- 5. Participation 5 Took part in the project 14 of the 17 Kent Beck Ward Cunningham Dave Thomas
- 6. “We wrote the manifesto to avoid the codification of practices.“ Alistair Cockburn
- 8. 8Courtesy of Andy Hunt
- 9. 9 Courtesy of Jon Kern Full Notes: https://goo.gl/utr4vo
- 10. 10 Courtesy of Andy Hunt Full Notes: https://goo.gl/8wF63L
- 18. Participation 18 All Interviews are on podcast.agileuprising.com
- 19. Tech Practices
- 20. “The best way to teach a programmer is to put them in an apprentice to another programmer.“ Bob Martin
- 21. “Agile now means, we do half of scrum poorly and use Jira.“ Andy Hunt
- 22. “Hone your technical expertise so you can contribute, and hone your listening skills.“ Alistair Cockburn
- 23. “Be an engineer, and use that problem solving skillset when appropriate.“ James Grenning
- 24. “Thank god things in this world are not built the way we build software. Damned if I’m sitting in this building if it was built how we build software.“ Jon Kern
- 25. “I don't ask permission to write a test or refactor, any more than I ask for permission to write an if statement or a for loop.“ Ron Jeffries
- 26. Strong Teams
- 27. “We now have a problem with cargo cult agile.“ Martin Fowler
- 28. “We need for teams to decide deeply, we know we haven't broken the system.“ Ron Jeffries
- 29. “Find a place that is doing a really good job, and immerse yourself in that place.“ Martin Fowler
- 30. “One of the central concepts people lose, is the thought of adaptation.“ Andy Hunt
- 31. Mindfulness
- 32. “I don’t want to boil all of agile down to one word or phrase, but it does boil down to pride of workmanship.“ Bob Martin
- 33. “If you are in the mud, you aren't going to go anywhere.“ Martin Fowler
- 34. “I don't think I would add don't just do scrum damnit. Use your brain. Do the right thing and empower your teams.“ Jon Kern
- 35. The Secrets 35
- 36. Teams need to build a commitment to be the engineers they intended to be, every day. Strong Teams
- 37. Create a strong sense of empathy for the team and the users, it binds the approach and intent to desirable outcomes. Mindfulness
- 38. Build a deep respect for the craft of software engineering and learn from the thought leaders before you Tech Practices
- 39. The Secrets 39
- 40. The emergence of people, process, and technology becomes the lifeblood of organizations and transformation. People, process, technology
- 41. The cloud and orchestration are a means to create wild and reckless resource and financial waste for your company if you don’t know what you are doing. Tech Practices
- 42. The Secrets 42
- 43. The Secrets 43
- 44. The Secret is the DevOps Mindset 44 DevOps DevOps
- 45. 45 Thank you A link to all the podcasts and artifacts was recently tweeted by @AgilePHL Or you can find them here: goo.gl/k5VhXn devopsdebate.com