Renee, Craig and Tony are together to chat with Serge Beaumont, Principal Agile Coach at Xebia, live from his man cave and despite showing their lack of mathematical skills in relation to dice they chat about:

• In relation to culture, if the human connections are there you can handle just about anything
• A foundational cultural aspect at Xebia is that they implemented Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE) – every second Tuesday the team has dinner and then has a mini-conference of about 20 streams
• Xebia were at the foundation of the ING Agile transformation
• Gloomhaven
• Rode PodMic
• You need leadership that truly believes in culture as a powerful thing
• Renee does story maps like trees and Serge prefers to ensure that he finds his epic on the horizontal slice rather than using the activities on the vertical backbone, building towards an MVP
• All backlogs should be tree structures
• An…

Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and they (finally) catch up with Martin Kearns, the Chief Digital Officer at Innodev and co-organiser of Scrum Australia, and they chat about:

• Alistair Cockburn gets mentioned at around the 2:30 minute mark, and Martin was responsible for first bringing him to Australia
• Being coached is being open to an experience you aren’t controlling
• Certified Agile Leadership
• Agile is always going to hurt, need to prepare for pain and enjoy it
• Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation – need to understand the environmental factors that are forcing Agility into organisations
• Knowledge of customers is more superior than ever before – due to education and social intelligence (Target inappropriate clothing for children)
• VUCA is here to stay – accept that you need to listen
• Australia Post is a good agile example organisation – reinvented themselves through identity services, travel…

Craig, Renee and Tony catch up with old friend and “irregular” guest Adam Weisbart about Agile Virtual Summit, Recess retrospectives, Build Your Own Scrum and making your own pizza.

• Renee realised Washington state is nowhere near Washington, DC
• Agile Virtual Summit 1-5 June 2020 – a collection of great speakers and registration is free!
• Distributed retrospectives – important that people give a voice-over to the items that they add
• Tips for Remote Agile ceremonies – recreate being in the same room with technology as much as possible, avoid the asynchronous Slack bots, actually standup,
• At Slack, you are not allowed to hold a meeting via Slack!
• Recess – retrospectives in a box!
• Making virtual retrospectives fun – change them up, craft retrospectives into a story (Recess does this), remember the future (where would you be if you had the most awesome sprint ever)
• The next thing in Agile just…

Craig and Tony are at YOW! conference in Brisbane and chat with Jutta Eckstein, author of “Agile Software Development in the Large“, “Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams“, “Retrospectives for Organisational Change” “Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in Your Project Portfolio” with Johanna Rothman and “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption” with John Buck

• Smalltalk and pattern languages was where a lot of the early work and a lot of the early players converged
• Scrum had great marketing and certification over Extreme Programming
• Agile Software Development in the Large came out in 2004 and was probably way before its time
• Craig Larman and Bas Vodde book “Scaling Lean & Agile Development“
• IBM book “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum“
• A framework is not…