Craig is at YOW! Conference and spends some time with Emily Webber, Agile Coach and author of “Building Successful Communities of Practice” and “The Agile Team Onion” and they chat about:

• The UK Government Digital Service and gov.uk (and the United States Digital Service and Australian Digital Transformation Agency)
• Government needs to be fast and stable (but dealing with change every four years)
• YOW! 2016 talk “Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of your Agile Organisation“
• Communities of practice are about building knowledge, giving people support networks they need to give them the confidence to do their jobs well and making that practice better and as good as it can be
• Most communities of practice are organic but they tend to be closed and often lack direction
• Community of Practice Maturity Model
• Having an idea of who the community is for and…

Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are honoured to sit down with Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob), signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and author of numerous books including “Clean Code“, “The Clean Coder” and “Clean Architecture” and they discuss:

• YOW! 2016 keynote “The Scribe’s Oath” as well as “Effective Estimation (or: How not to Lie)“
• Software craftsmanship has always been the work of individuals – not sure we have really achieved collaboration in programming
• Pair programming – some surgeons like to wash their hands and some surgeons don’t!
• Woody Zuill’s talk “Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach“
• CODE – Uncle Bob’s “terrible” software development process before he stumbled across Extreme Programming and the wiki
• Kent Beck’s “Extreme Programming” article for the C++ Report
• The story behind the forming of “The…

Craig is at YOW! Conference in Sydney and talks science and psychology with Dr. Brian Little, author of “Me, Myself and Us” and professor at Cambridge University and Carleton University and they analyse:

• Keynote talk at YOW! 2016 “Personalities at Work“
• There are 5 dimensions of personality – OCEAN – openness, conscientiousness. extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism
• Biogenic features of personality – neurophysiology, sociogenic and idiogenic
• We can often act out of character, we are not bound by our biochemistry
• What are the core projects in your life that drive your behaviour
• Skeptical of personality tests at work such as Myers-Briggs because the results are not fixed, they are good for starting a conversation but deadly if they conclude a conversation
• Don’t just ask “How are you doing?” but ask “Really, how are you doing?” to show that you are taking an interest and care in…

Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and wander around the hallways talking to different speakers and some attendees and volunteers:

• Woody Zuill and Paul Rayner – Beer Driven Development (the other BDD), Woody’s talk “Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach” talk and Paul’s “EventStorming – Collaborative Learning for Complex Domains” talk, the reaction from the Australian audience and how Woody gets the audience to tell him why mob programming might be a good idea to change people’s thinking
• Tony enjoyed “Uncle” Bob Martins “The Scribe’s Oath” keynote and “Effective Estimation (or: How not to Lie)” talk as well as Woody’s talk
• Laura Bell – her “Simplicity, Complexity and Security” talk, and Agile Application Security at SafeStack
• John Lamping – his “The One Weird Trick for Analyzing Big Data … Eyeball it Early and Often!” talk…

Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and catch up with Rebecca Parsons, the Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks and the co-author of “Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change” and chat about the following:

• Rebecca’s keynote talk at YOW! “The Past and Future of Evolutionary Architecture“
• Evolutionary Architecture is the next stage on applying Agile practices to software development at the systems level and be able to respond to changes in the environment that affect the architecture
• Need to determine for your system what constitutes good, fitness functions are the documentation and tests to ensure your system meets those characteristics
• Need to move the needle on architecture, need to develop tools and techniques to decompose the role
• Agile Alliance is looking at what it means to truly be an international organisation (there are now affiliates in Brazil and New Zealand), expanding conferences from…