After many failed attempts to get him on the podcast, Craig finally catches up with Dan North at YOW! Conference on his way out the door to the airport and in a quick chat they cover:

• BDD – developing an application by looking at its behaviour from the perspective of its stakeholders (people who’s live you touch)
• Given When Then – “given” is setting up the world in a well known way, “when” is me interacting with the application as a stakeholder and “then” is what I expect to happen
• BDD is not the same as writing automated tests, they are orthogonal – “Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing“
• Software, Faster – collection of patterns for people who have been around Agile and are asking “now what” – “Software, Faster” book in progress
• YOW! 2015 talk “Delivery Mapping: Turning the Lights On“

TheAgileRevolution-125 (12 minutes)

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 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 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 and Tony sit down for a conversation at YOW! Conference with Betty Enyonam Kumahor (stands for good for me, on the way there) who is a technology leader in Africa:

• Tony and Enyo are mutual members of the Alistair Cockburn fan club
• YOW! Conference talk “Frugal Innovation and Scaffolding Software“
• Software engineering uptake in Africa is very low, need more technologists because it is is not an industry it is an enabler
• Lots of diversity challenges in Africa – lees than 1% of the South African IT industry is women, but also diversity in languages, education and belief systems
• Diversity is a multi-pronged issue, need to be patient but not complacent to move the needle forward, give girls the confidence to be competent and to push the boundaries
• Frugal innovation in Africa – building technology in a space of constraints such as inadequate power, everything happens by mobile…