In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jeff Dalton about the challenges of agile adoption in large organizations and the need to teach agile leaders how to teach so they can lead the cultural shift that is needed Why listen to this podcast: • The marketing of agility is going far better than the actual on the ground adoption • When process-centric, low trust organisations adopt agile they bring that approach to their agile practices • The link between the soft ...
Jul 27, 2018•32 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Matt Abrahams of BoldEcho and Stanford Graduate School of Business on becoming effective communicators, especially around speaking in public. Why listen to this podcast: • Everyone has a story to tell • Make sure you understand who you are speaking to and what it is that you can do to help them • It’s important to structuring your message in such a way as to make it easy for your audience to understand • All communicatio...
Jul 02, 2018•15 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Pooja Brown, VP of Engineering at Docusign about building great engineering culture. Why listen to this podcast: • Great culture comes when people are aligned with the organisation’s mission • There are ways to bring the voice of the customer to the ears of the team and doing so creates empathy and results in better products • Transparency and openness around what matters to the company helps ensure people align with tho...
Jun 25, 2018•18 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Jarrod Overson of Shape Security about the reason for and the content in the Beyond Being an Individual Contributor track at QCon San Francisco, and he offers advice for current and aspirant technical leaders. Why listen to this podcast: • Many technologists get the opportunity to move into leadership roles but receive no training or guidance about what skills such a role needs • Solving other people’s problems as quickl...
Jun 18, 2018•24 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dominica DeGrandis about time thieves, making work visible, the important themes from the DevOps Enterprise Summit and ways to be more productive. Why listen to this podcast: • If we can understand the thieves of time better we can get some time back from our overburdened work-life • Having too much work in progress is the mother of all the other thieves of time • Much of our work is based on arbitrary rather than real due...
May 21, 2018•26 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Holyer about collaboration, culture and teams, and the state of the Agile Fluency projects. Why listen to this podcast: • Diverse lived experiences make people better individuals and team members • How important psychological safety is for teams • We all have unconscious biases and our language reflects this • The value in the Agile Fluency Model is the outcomes we can produce by using it • The Agile Fluency Model he...
May 14, 2018•21 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Tony Grout and Chris Matts about building an IT risk management framework at a large bank and using that as a catalyst for a digital transformation. Why listen to this podcast: • Just deploying another prescriptive method will not make an organisation agile and adaptive • A risk management framework can be a catalyst for change • The components of a simple framework which enables adaptation at the team level while ensuring...
Apr 23, 2018•39 min
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Troy Magennis about his talks at the conference on “I love the smell of data in the morning” and “10 ways to choose what to start next” Why listen to this podcast: • The absence of data means all you have is an opinion • The simplest way to start gathering data in software development is to put the starting date/time on one corner, the ending date/time on another corner and use different colour post-it...
Apr 13, 2018•12 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Heidi Helfand about Dynamic Reteaming Why listen to this podcast: • Team change is real – we might as well get good at it • People come and go from teams all the time for many different reasons • A missing level in Tuckman’s model of team formation – Stagnating, when you keep a team together for too l...
Mar 05, 2018•15 min
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 result...
Feb 05, 2018•15 min
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 “righ...
Jan 02, 2018•19 min
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 assu...
Dec 06, 2017•18 min
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 annoy...
Nov 22, 2017•23 min
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 l...
Oct 16, 2017•20 min
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 wha...
Sep 25, 2017•19 min
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 ...
Sep 18, 2017•24 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jez Humble about his Agile 2017 Keynote talk in which he refuted many of the common excuses why “continuous delivery won’t work here”. He also gave a scathing response to the “Manifestbro” controversy which recently unfolded at Google. Why listen to this podcast: Key takeaways about DevOps: - There are many reasons cited for not adopting DevOps – the real reasons are cultural and architectural issues - It takes commitment ...
Aug 14, 2017•28 min
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 Patrick Kua from ThoughtWorks on growing technical leadership and evolutionary architecture Why listen to this podcast: - There is a significant gap in technical leadership capability in teams and across the industry as a whole - Your experience as a developer doesn’t prepare you for a tech lead roleRecognize that the skills...
Aug 07, 2017•26 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Alex Qin following on from her QCon London talk “Shaving My Head Made Me A Better Programmer”. Why listen to this podcast: - Casual discrimination and unconscious bias is rife in society, and very prevalent in tech - The need to have many more people in the field who don’t fit the preconceived mould of a programmer - The complexity of the overall system means we need to tackle discrimination at many levels in many differen...
Jul 10, 2017•24 min
In this podcast recorded in London Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Colin Breck, an Egineer from Tesla about using quality views to expose and prioritize technical debt. Why listen to this podcast: • When systems are not customer facing, quality is not directly obvious and is frequently overlooked • Quality views provide a visual way of exposing quality in a system block diagram • Quality is a subjective – the value is in the conversations rather than the numbers • Qu...
Jun 20, 2017•13 min
Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to Alanna Brown Director of Technical Product Marketing at Puppet and Nicole Forsgren, PhD in Management Information Systems and CEO at DORA, on the State of DevOps Report 2017. Why listen to this podcast: - Three new areas of research in 2017: leadership, automation and organizational performance for non-financial organizations. - Transformational leaders have a clear business vision and communicate in an inspiring way, and provide intellectual s...
Jun 12, 2017•32 min
Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to Rosalind Radcliffe, Distinguished Engineer at IBM, about mainframe software delivery, from technical evolution to the mindset change required to adopt DevOps and modern development practices. Why listen to this podcast: - Large organizations have not evolved practices in mainframe systems due to cultural challenges, not technical. - Most mainframe applications still have high business value but don't take advantage of modern hardware. - Modern ...
May 29, 2017•30 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Adam Tornhill of Empear on combining psychology and software engineering, technical debt. Why listen to this podcast: - The problems in software engineering are not technical they are almost always people related - A lot of technical debt is not actually technical in nature – it is due to organisational and social factors...
May 15, 2017•25 min
Shane Hastie spoke to Chris Matts “The IT Risk Manager”, one of the original thinkers behind Real Options, Feature Injection and Behaviour Driven Development, about BDD, Real Options, Risk Management and the Impact of Culture for Effective Outcomes. Why listen to this podcast: - Real Options is about translating the ideas from financial risk management into IT projects - Understanding that things go wrong and that what is thought of as the last responsible moment is often actually too late and i...
Apr 24, 2017•29 min
In this podcast, recorded at the Agile New Zealand conference, Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Kaila Colbin from the Ministry of Awesome and Singularity University about the Nature of Technological Innovation and the Implications for Society Why listen to this podcast: - The nature of technological innovation and the implications for society - The doubling curve which shows how innovations advance (eg Moore’s Law) - The doubling in price-performance trend applies ...
Mar 27, 2017•28 min
In our podcast this week Shane Hastie speaks to Michael Lopp, VP of Engineering at Slack, about intentional culture and continuous delivery. Why listen to this podcast: - Leadership is a craft that needs to be learned - Characteristics and common challenges of high-growth startups - Aspects of culture include how do we get things done, how do we treat each other, how do we make decisions, who has power and influence, what are the things that we value? - The importance of making values explicit a...
Mar 06, 2017•12 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Ted DesMaisons and Lisa Rowland who spoke at QCon San Francisco on The Improvisor's Code: Engineering Your Best Self Why listen to this podcast: - The skills of improve are applicable outside a theatrical setting - You don’t have to be an extrovert to use these ideas - These are intra-personal skills as well as inter-personal – they help develop mindfulness and awareness at the individual level - The study of improvi...
Feb 27, 2017•19 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Matt Sakaguchi about his talk at QCon San Francisco 2016 and the research Google has done on what makes effective teams. Why listen to this podcast: - Psychological safety – people feel comfortable taking a risk or asking a question and know they will be supported by their team mates, they feel safe to share personal and “crazy” ideas - Dependability – the knowledge that team mates will deliver quality outputs and me...
Jan 30, 2017•19 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Alexandre Freire Kawakami, a Director at Industrial Logic about his talk Enabling Awesome Engineering Teams, the ideas behind Modern Agile and the importance of feedback loops and real usage data for product development. Why listen to this podcast: - Overview of his talk on enabling awesome engineering teamsThe contradiction between values-driven and process-driven change - Modern Agile is designed to help people and...
Jan 16, 2017•19 min
In this podcast recorded at QCon San Francisco 2016, Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Mitch Shepard founder of WiRL about her talk at QCon and the challenges around gender diversity in the tech workforce. Why listen to this podcast: - Gender diversity and women leaving tech roles is a real and serious problem - There are compelling reasons to have a more diverse workplace – both ethical and bottom line results - “It’s nobody’s fault, but it is everybody’s problem” ...
Jan 09, 2017•23 min
