Craig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Anne-Marie Charrett who is well known in the testing community as a trainer, coach and consultant but also for her support of the community:

• Don Reinertsen talk “Thriving in a Stochastic World“
• Context-Driven Testing
• Testing is a verb – it’s a doing thing and not an output, but the challenge is you cannot see doing
• Anne-Marie’s class in Exploratory Testing
• Where there is risk and failure, there is a job for testing
• Exploratory testing – the key is feedback and using the learning to feedback into the next test
• Agile testing – don’t try and test everything and don’t try and automate everything either, rather adopt a risk based approach
• Unit testing – the usefulness depends on the programmer and the context and figuring out what you are trying to achieve
• Sydney Testers Meetup
• Speak Easy – Speak Easy…

Craig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Aino Vonge Corry who is one of our very few repeat guests on the Agile Revolution. She describes herself as someone who puts speakers on stage, makes developers communicate and messes with the heads of students!

• Part of the YOW! conference organising committee
• Important to find examples that relate to all of the students in the class (not just a subset)
• Microservice lectures – no more than 15 minutes lecture and then a learning activity
• If there is interactivity then there is a reason to turn up to a live lecture
• YOW! 2015 talk “A Comment on How We Learn“
• Need to respect and acknowledge that other people take in knowledge at different paces, this is important in activities that we give people time to think
• People need to relate ideas to the things they are doing now to take…

Craig is at YOW! Conference and has a conversation with James Lewis, best known for his work around microservices at ThoughtWorks. They discuss:

• “Microservices: a definition of this new architectural term” article with Martin Fowler
• Huge cycle of hype around the term “microservices”
• You have to run so fast to keep up with the great people at ThoughtWorks you end up accidentally doing interesting things
• Cruise Control became Cruise that became GoCD which was open source then went commercial and then went back open source
• Extreme Programming (XP) is complementarianism – the sum is greater than the parts
• YOW! 2015 talk “Microservices – Building Software that is #neverdone“
• Microservices – systems that are composed of parts that you can independently throw away – the analogy of “My Family’s Axe” (Terry Pratchett)
• Business and architecture isomorphism – if you look at your architecture you should be able…

Craig and Tony are once again roaming the lunch hall at YOW! 2015 in Brisbane, where they catch up with a number of people including:

• Dave Thomas – founder of YOW! Conference discusses the success of YOW! Conference in Australia and how he didn’t go to Snowbird for the signing of the Agile Manifesto
• Peter Sellars –  quality and DevOps dude shares what he learnt at DockerCon and his highlights at YOW! including “Building Microservice Architectures in Go” and “Designing for Failure: Scaling Uber’s Backend by Breaking Everything“
• Nardene Smith – from Interpro recruitment, talks about the Mars lander keynote “Engineering and Exploring the Red Planet” and she gives Tony some “stuck”
• Matt Callanan, Ben Spillane and Alex Spillane – Matt and Alex’s talk at YOW! “DevOps @ Wotif: Making Easy = Right” as well as discussing “Agile is Dead”
• Nigel Rausch

Renee and Craig are at the Agile Australia conference and talk to Anders Ivarsson, an organisational coach at Spotify, and learn some of approaches that make Spotify tick:

• Agile Australia talk “Autonomy and Leadership at Spotify” and workshop “Organisational Improvement: Design-inspired Problem Solving”
• Agile Coaches spend time with squads versus a new role of organisational coach that looks at the culture, ways of working, vision and systemic wastes
• Spotify is not a model
• Original Spotify scaling paper, never imagined the spread or the impact
• Spotify have shared a lot of the things that have worked well, but they do also have challenges as well – one is alignment across teams as the organisation gets bigger so they have been working on visualisation and prioritisation
• Spotify Culture videos (Part 1 and Part 2)
• use microservices to ensure that the organisation can work in the…