Craig is in Atlanta at Agile 2016 and catches up with Michael Feathers, author of “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” and they talk about the following:

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code originally started as a book about Test First Programming but morphed into a book about the techniques for refactoring code in legacy systems
• The Pinned Progress Curve – for many people there is no incentive to change so the mean gets larger between the status quo and good practices
• Agile Alliance Deliver:Agile conference
• Organisations that have technical founders have a very different character to their work internally, need to make knowledge of the quality of software more pervasive – the business need to understand more about the technical side, and the developers need to understand more about the business
• Code that has excessive error handling typically has other design problems – benefit in thinking about whether…

Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are privileged to spend some time with Don Reinertsen, who is considered one of the leading thinkers in the field of lean product development and author of numerous books including “Principles of Product Development Flow”

• “Principles of Product Development Flow” book and why there is a waterfall on the front
• Japanese Manufacturing Techniques was the name before it was rebranded as Lean Manufacturing
• Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, hated math and thus preferred to sit on the factory floor and tweak processes, hence it was not a theory driven approach but rather empirically driven
• Need to understand why things work so you can transfer it to other domains, a big shortcoming in lean manufacturing is that they don’t have much of a mathematical view on what they are doing
• You can use magic in manufacturing…

Craig and Tony are sipping a sarsaparilla or two on a balcony in Brisbane and start trying to dissect the state and heart of modern agility:

• You can trust the team if you listen to them
• Keys to transformation is LLL – leadership, leadership, leadership
• If you have Agile leaders maybe you don’t need Agile coaches
• Craig and Renee’s talk “Coaching Nightmares: Lessons We Can Learn From Gordon Ramsay“
• Heart of Agile by Alistair Cockburn – collaborate, deliver, reflect and improve
• Agile is Dead (Long Love Agility) by Dave Thomas and the related YOW! Conference talk
• Modern Agile by Joshua Kerievsky – also the original article and the keynote talk at Agile 2016 – make people awesome, deliver value continuously, make safety a prerequisite and experiment and learn rapidly
• Survey to rewrite the Agile Manifesto (again)
• Tony is a tenner – he believes in “simplicity is the art of…

Craig catches up with two luminaries in the Agile and Lean space, Mary and Tom Poppendieck at YOW! Conference to talk about agile, lean, rapid feedback, culture and leadership. The discussion points include:

• Making the link between lean and software development and discovering that waterfall makes no sense
• The origins of the first book: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
• Agile is not lean in software development, Agile is lean in a delivery organisation
• How long does it take you to put a single line of code into Production?
• The manifestation of lean really kicked off in 2010 with both the rise of DevOps and the Lean Startup
• Delivery organisations versus engineering organisations and the journey of Agile
• Agile has not well addressed delivering the right stuff, solving the right problem and the architecture of rapid deployment
• Only two goals at ING: Deliver every two weeks and don’t crash production, resulted…