Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and have a rockstar moment and catchup with Kent Beck, the creator of Extreme Programming, the pioneer of xUnit and author of numerous books including “Extreme Programming Explained” and “Test Driven Development“:

• Extreme Programming (XP) was born at Chrysler by letting go of conventional wisdom and pushing practices to eleven
• Software development is a social process, not a sum of individuals process
• Nobody cares about certificates, we care about competence
• It’s time for a renaissance and reboot of XP – this time it needs to be inclusive and no barriers to entry
• We know how to make a difference – it starts with execution and continues to empathy
• Big tent agility can become an excuse not to tackle hard problems
• “Not thinking about all the legs on the stool leaves you sitting on the ground”…

Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and is sitting with Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group and the Australian “Godfather of Agile” and they reminisce about:

• Anita Sengupta’s YOW! Hong Kong keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration“
• Akin’s Rules of Spacecraft Design – “don’t mess it up, there are people involved”
• Nigel Dalton’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Agile is the Last Thing You Need“
• The two early experiments of Agile in Australia – Lonely Planet and Suncorp
• The success of the REA technology teams today was the move into multidisciplinary teams where the influence comes from product – it was a difficult decision and chaos at the time
• John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations“
• ANZ is disrupting the power base of senior management – Shayne Elliott video about their way of working and Bluenotes…

The Agile community recently lost its friend and one of its most inspirational members in David Hussman. Craig and Tony were privileged to speak to him in one of his last interviews at YOW! Conference in Brisbane.

• David Hussman’s YOW! 2017 talk “Learning in Product: How Wrong are You Ready to Be?”
• “Extreme Programming Explained” is Agile’s White Album, just don’t read it backwards!
• We make stuff up in software too much, rather than learning from the past and patterns
• You can’t look at code and tell it is going to be a good experience and we don’t know our ideas are going to be great until we interact with them
• The tenth principle – simplicity is essential
• A good developer needs confidence and war wounds, same for Product Managers – they have shipped something crappy and don’t want to do that again
• Cardboard User Story Mapping app