Podcasts about tasktop

Are you fascinated by the ever-evolving world of agile methodologies and how technology shapes our approach to work? I sit down with Dave West, the esteemed CEO of Scrum.org, for an enlightening conversation on agile methodologies' past, present, and future. This episode promises a deep dive into the agile transformation journey, from the structured days of the Rational Unified Process to the flexible, principle-based frameworks that dominate today. Dave West, a key figure in the agile community and a pivotal force behind Scrum.org, shares his rich experience from leading the development of RUP at IBM/Rational to his influential role in shaping agile practices globally. With a career spanning key positions at Forrester Research and Tasktop, Dave brings a wealth of knowledge on scaling agile, the integration of emerging technologies, and the power of distributed teams. Listeners will be treated to an expert's view on how agile frameworks have transitioned from prescriptive methodologies to embrace a culture of empiricism, empowered teams, and continuous improvement. Dave will explore the significance of iterations, the pivotal role of empowered teams, and the constant alignment to outcomes that have stood the test of time in agile methodologies. Moreover, this episode will explore how emerging practices like design thinking, lean startup, and coaching reshape agile teams today. With the advent of AI technologies like ChatGPT, Dave discusses the potential for automating repetitive tasks, freeing up teams to focus on creative work that directly impacts customer needs and outcomes. As the conversation unfolds, discover how distributed teams can thrive with collaboration tools like Mural, Slack, and Zoom and how data analytics empowers teams like never before. Dave will also share critical insights on avoiding the pitfalls of "Water-Scrum-Fall," emphasizing the importance of genuinely empowering teams and measuring success based on outcomes rather than outputs. Dave offers timeless advice for aspiring leaders and agile practitioners: build relationships, be kind, continuously learn, and focus on helping others. This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of agile practices and lead their teams to more incredible innovation and efficiency. As we explore the agile landscape with Dave West, we're reminded of the importance of adaptability and the continuous pursuit of improvement. How are you navigating the agile evolution in your organization? Join the conversation and share your experiences with us.

In this episode of the OpsStars podcast, Rachel Squire, Marketing Operations Consultant at MOBI Solutions, joins Don Otvos to share thoughts on the future of marketing and revenue operations. They dive into the impact of AI on the industry, how RevOps is becoming a strategic partner in businesses, and the role of analytics in marketing and revenue operations.

Bio Dave West is the Product Owner and CEO at Scrum.org. In this capacity, he engages with partners, and the community to drive Scrum.org's strategy and the overall market position of Scrum. Prior to joining Ken Schwaber and the team at Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture. As a member of the company's executive management team was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC backed product business with a team of almost 100. As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including the Unified process and Agile methods. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports. He also is the co-author of two books, The Nexus Framework For Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then he served as vice president, research director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organisations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance Agile-based methodology and tool breakthroughs in the enterprise. Email –  Dave.west@scrum.org Twitter - @davidjwest LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjustinwest   Interview Highlights Growing up with dyslexia 03:10 & 10:20 Water-Scrum-Fall 07:40 Psychological safety 15:40 Lilian the rockstar - 'who have you helped today?' 18:55 Is 'project' a taboo word? 21:53 'Humble and Kind' - not just for country music 44:30 Books ·         Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design by Dave West, Brett McLaughlin and Gary Pollice https://www.amazon.co.uk/Head-First-Object-Oriented-Analysis-Design/dp/0596008678/ ·         The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum by Dave West, Kurt Bittner and Patricia Kong https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nexus-Framework-Scaling-Scrum-Continuously/dp/0134682661 ·         ARTICLE: Why Kindness Matters by Dave West https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-kindness-matters ·         Thank You for Being Late by Thomas L Friedman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thank-You-Being-Late-Accelerations/dp/0141985755 ·         Scrum: A Pocket Guide by Gunther Verheyen https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scrum-Pocket-Companion-Practice-Publishing/dp/9087537204 ·         The Professional Scrum Series by various authors https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=the+professional+scrum+series&crid=1WVNY1VHR0QAQ&sprefix=professional+scrum+series ·         Zombie Scrum by Christiaan Verijs, Johannes Schartau and Barry Overeem https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zombie-Scrum-Survival-Guide-Professional/dp/0136523269 ·         The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations (The Professional Scrum Series) by Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner, Laurens Bonnema, foreword by Dave West https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Agile-Leader-Growing-Organizations-dp-0137591519/dp/0137591519/ Episode Transcript Ula Ojiaku (Guest Intro): Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. It's my honour to introduce my guest for this episode. He is Dave West. Dave is the CEO of Scrum.org and prior to joining Scrum.org as CEO, he led the development of the Rational Unified Process, also known as RUP with IBM. He was also Chief Product Officer for Tasktop Technologies and Managing Director of the Americas at Ivar Jacobson Consulting. He is a widely published author of several articles and research reports, as well as the books The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. In this conversation, Dave talked about growing up in the council estates, being raised by his grandparents who were of great positive influence in his life, especially his grandmother. He also talked about navigating the challenges of being dyslexic, especially as a student in secondary school with the silver lining being that he got introduced to computers. Dave also gave his perspective on one of the ongoing “agile wars” quote unquote, on the concept of projects and whether they still have a place in agile or not. Without further ado ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Dave, I am sure you would find it very, very interesting, relevant and insightful. Thanks again for listening. Ula Ojiaku So we have on this episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast, Dave West, who is the CEO of Scrum.org. Dave, it's a pleasure to have you on this show, thank you for making the time. Dave West Oh, well, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad we've finally managed to make the time to do this. It's great to talk to you. Ula Ojiaku Yes, well, the honour is mine. Let's start by talking about, you know, getting to know about the man, Dave. Can you, you know, tell us a bit about that? Dave West Yeah, I'll try not to bore your audience. So I was brought up on a council estate in a little town called Market Harborough, just outside Leicester. I lived with my grandparents, and which has definitely, my grandmother's definitely shaped who I am, I think, which is fantastic. So I got into computers, sort of a little bit by accident. I'm dyslexic and I found school, particularly secondary school, very challenging. I don't know if any of your audiences had a similar experience, but, you know, I went from a very protected environment and secondary school is a, oh my gosh, it's like an experience that could scare any human being. And so my dyslexia really was a challenge there and there was a teacher at secondary school called Phil Smith. He drove a sports car, he was sort of like that young, you know those teachers that you remember from school that are the good looking young ones. And he ran a computer lab and it had, you know, RS236, it had these really old computers, well, now we would look at them, they were brand new at the time, computers and some BBC model As and some other things. And I helped him and he gave me a lot of time in the lab and it was my sort of like escape. So I got very into computing and helped him and helped other teachers who were rubbish, I'm not going to lie, with computing. So that allowed me then, you know, I went through, managed to survive school, went to a further education college called Charles Keene where I studied, well I did a computing course, so not traditional A'levels and all of that. And then got into Huddersfield that was a poly at the time, became a University whilst I was there. And I think that that gave me a great opportunity, it was a fantastic university, it was a very practical course. My dyslexia became less of an issue because of, you know, word processing and I'd be honest and, you know, the ability for it to read back, even though it was an awful read back, it was like listening to say, you know, to like an old fashioned Stephen Hawking, you know, sort of, and then got me a job at Commercial Union, which then led to me doing a Masters, which then led me to move to London, all this sort of stuff. The adventure was great. The thing about, I guess, my journey is that it, I was driven at a certain point, I became very driven by the need to improve the way in which we delivered software development at that time, and that led me through my Masters and, you know, Object-Oriented and then to a company called Rational Software where I became the Product Manager for RUP, the Rational Unified Process. Now for the agilists listening, they're probably like, oh, boo hiss, and that's totally legit. It was in fact, that's when I first met Ken Schwaber and he told me I was an idiot, which turns out he was right. Ken Schwaber the creator (of Scrum), who I work for now. Anyways. Ula Ojiaku I mean, who wouldn't know Ken Schwaber if you're a self-respecting agilist.  Sorry, go on please. Dave West Yeah, he's an interesting character for sure. Anyway, so I was the RUP Product Manager and I realised I went to this large insurance company in the Midwest and it's a huge organisation and I met this lady and she said, I'm a use case. I said, what do you do? She said, I'm a use case specifier, and meet my friend, she's a use case realiser and I'm like, oh, no, that's not the intent. And so I realised that there was this process that I loved, and I still definitely love elements of it, but was fundamentally flawed in terms of helping actually people to work together to work on complex problems and solve them. So that, you know, and I'd written a book and I'd done some other things on the way to this point, but this point really did make me realise that I was going wrong, which was a little scary because RUP was incredibly popular at that time, and so then that led me to work with Ivar Jacobson, tried to bring in Scrum to the unified process, spent more time with Ken Schwaber who'd finally realised I may still be an idiot, but I was an idiot that was willing to listen to him. Then I ended up at Forrester Research, running the application development practice, I became a research director there, which was super interesting, because I spent a lot of time looking at organisations, and I realised a really fundamental problem that I think probably will resonate with many that are listening to this podcast, that people were doing Scrum yeah, Scrum was incredibly popular and people were doing Scrum, but they were doing it in an industrial context. It was more like Water-Scrum-Fall. And I coined that term in a research document, which got picked up by the, InfoQ and all these magazines, it became this sort of ‘thing' – Water-Scrum-Fall. You know, they were doing Scrum, but they only liked to plan once a year, and there's a huge planning sort of routine that they did. They were doing Scrum, but they rarely released because the customers really don't want it - it's incredibly hard and dangerous and things can go horribly wrong. And so they were doing Scrum, but they weren't really doing Scrum, you know. And so that was super interesting. And I got an opportunity to do a number of workshops and presentations on the, sort of like the solution to this Water-Scrum-Fall problem with Ken, I invited him and we did this very entertaining roadshow, which I'm surprised we weren't arrested during it, but we were, it was a really interesting experience. I then decided like any good practitioner, I had to do a Startup. So I went to Tasktop working with Mik Kersten and the gang at Tasktop, and the great thing about Tasktop was it was a massive fire hose of doing Scrum, trying to make payroll, learning about everything around delivering a product in a market that wasn't really there and that we had to build. And it was just fantastic working with a lot of OEMs, a lot of partners and looking at, and then we got funding. We grew to five teams. I was running product and engineering. And Ken was continually talking to me through this time, and mentoring me, coaching me, but I realised he was also interviewing me. So he then said to me, one day, Dave, I don't want to be the CEO of Scrum.org anymore. I'd like you to be, when can you start? Ken doesn't take no for an answer, and I think that's part of the success of Scrum. I think that his persistence, his tenacity, his, you know, sort of energy around this, was the reason why Scrum, part of the reason him and Jeff, you know, had different skills, but definitely both had that in common, was successful. So I then came and joined about seven years ago Scrum.org, to run Scrum.org and it's an amazing organisation Ula Ojiaku And if I may just go back a bit to what you said about your time in secondary school, you said you were dyslexic and apart from the fact that you discovered computers, you had a horrible experience. What made it horrible for you? Dave West I think it was, you know, there's no support network, there's nobody checking in on you, particularly at secondary school. At primary school, you have a teacher that you're in the same room, you've sort of got that, you're with the same kids, but you go, you know, you, you go from one lesson to another lesson, to another lesson and if you're a little bit, well for me, you know, reading and writing was incredibly difficult. I could read and write at that point. I was about nine and a half, 10 when I finally broke through, thanks to an amazing teacher that worked with my primary school. And, but I was way, way behind. I was slower. I, you know, and teachers didn't really, it was almost as though, and I'm sure education's very different now, and both my children are dyslexic and they go to a special school that's designed around this, so I know that it's different for them, but the teaching was very much delivery without inspection and adaption of the outcome, you know, just to make it a bit agile for a second. So you go through all this stuff and I wasn't able to write all the stuff down fast enough. I certainly wasn't able to process it, so because of that, it was pretty awful. I always felt that I was stupid, I was, you know, and obviously I relied on humour and I was a big lad, so I didn't have any bullying issues, but it was very, very challenging. And I found that I could be good at something with computers. And I sort of got it, I understood how to write, you know, BASIC very quickly and maybe even a little Assembly. I knew how to configure machines, it just seemed natural, it certainly helped my confidence, which, you know, maybe I'm a little too confident now, but definitely had an impact on my future life. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome, and I'm sure there are people who would be encouraged by what you've just said, so I wanted to begin there. Thanks for sharing. Now, what about, what do you do when you're not working? Dave West What do I do when I'm not working? Well, I'm a, that's a hard question. Gosh. So I have a nine year old and a six year old, and two boys, so, you know, sometimes I'm refereeing wrestling matches, you know, I'm definitely dealing with having children, I was late to life having children. I'm 52 and I have a nine year old and a six year old. I thought that, you know, a single lifestyle, a bachelor lifestyle in Boston and, you know, loving my work, writing books, you know, doing this traveling the world was going to be survive, and then I met the most amazing girl and, who persuaded me that I needed to have children, and I thought, well, I really like you, so I'd better. And it's been an incredible adventure with these children. They've taught me so much, the most important thing I think they've taught me is patience. And it's making me a better human being, and many of those traits, just to bring it back to Agile for a second, are things that we need to build better into the way that we turn up at work because you know, the project, I think it was called Aristotle, the Google big project where they looked at the successful teams, they found a number of traits, but one of those traits that was so important was psychological safety, right? And that requires you to attend every interaction with a mindfulness, not of doing things that you want to do to yourself, which is that sort of golden rule, but that platinum rule, do unto others as they want be done unto. And, and I think that is so, so important and crucial, and it's something that I aspire to, I don't always succeed every day as a human being, you know, whether it's at the checkout at the supermarket or whether it's waiting in line, particularly at the moment in an airport, and it's just, you know, something that I think in an agile team is so important because that safety is so, so required to create that environment where transparency happens, to create that environment where you can have those honest conversations about what's happening next, or what's happened previously where you're running those retrospectives, where you're trying to really plan when there is not enough knowledge to plan. You know, those sort of things require that kind of environment to be successful. So, you know, though, yes, I spend my life either working or really spending it with my children at the moment because of the age they're at, I think it's helping me, the time I'm spending with my children is helping me be a better human being and be a better Agilist.  Ula Ojiaku There's something you said, you know, about psychological safety and being kind, it just reminded me that, you know, of that, the need for also to be respectful of people, because when you are kind and you're showing people respect, they would, that brings down the barriers and makes them, you know, more inclined to be open and to participate. What do you think about that? Would you say there's a link between respect and kindness, I know we're being philosophical right now… Dave West Well actually, yes, but no, it's incredibly practical as well. I think that kindness, so I've written quite a lot about kindness, because it's a trait that we, as a community, our professional Scrum trainer community, manifests and lives. It's something that we actually interview for when you join our community, and the reason why we do that, isn't because we're a bunch of hippies that just like kumbaya, want everybody to hold hands and be nice to each other, I mean, that would be great as well and who doesn't like a good rendition of kumbaya, it's a great song, but it's because we believe that kindness, ultimately, is beneficial to both parties, particularly the person that's being kind, because it creates, not only does it create levels of karma, but it creates that transparency, it creates that opportunity to learn that you may not get, if you go in in a very confrontational way and people don't intentionally be confrontational, but it's so easy for it to happen. You know, it's so easy for you to question, because, you know, somebody says something you're like, well, I don't agree with that, and that instantly creates an environment or a connection that is, you know, confrontational, you're in this position, it spirals, blah, blah, blah. So, but you can, instead of saying, I don't agree with that say, hey, well, that's interesting, let me have a look into that, and you're inquisitive. And if you try to approach everything with that sort of like kindness model, and I don't mean always being nice. Nice is different to kind, nice is like faking, I think, sometimes, you know, it's funny, you don't have to be kind to be nice, but you have to be nice to be kind if you understand what I mean. So you can fake niceness, niceness is part of being kind. So, you know, if you approach it in the right way, where you care about people and you care about what they're bringing to the table and you care about the environment that they're in, whether it's just simple things like checking in more frequently, you know, whether it's actually making time in this very scheduled life that we live now with zoom call after zoom call, to check in with the team, or the person that you're talking to, to see how are they turning up today? How has their day been? And I think that's, you know, super, super important. The other important element of kindness that comes out is this helping others element, you know, my gran, God rest her soul, Lilian, she was a rockstar on so many levels. And she used to say to me, when I came home from school, particularly from elementary school or primary school, I think we call it in England, right? She'd say things like, not what have you done today, I mean, sometimes she said that, but she'd say, who have you helped? Who have you helped? I'd be like uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and she said it enough that I realised it's important, you know, it's important that you spend time with others, help them in their tasks, you know, because I think you can learn so much and build those relationships, build that safety that is so, so important to really develop. We work in complex environments, right, that's the whole point of agility. Complex environments require people to collaborate, they require people to look at things in different ways. They really benefit from diversity, diversity of mind, diversity of experience, diversity of skill. And you bring that together, but you can only bring all these different parts together when you have an environment that allows for it, and traditional project management techniques, fabulous as they were for building bridges and tunnels and everything like that, didn't allow that, they don't encourage that. They encourage people to be focused, to be efficient, to be managing to that model. And I think we have to step away from that and work in a slightly different way where kindness, psychological safety, trust, respect, use the word respect. And I think it's, you know, obviously it's a Scrum value, but it's crucial to effectively allowing independent people with diverse perspectives to work together in an effective way. And to be honest society doesn't have enough of that in general. I think we've definitely moved away from respect and trust. We don't trust in our governments, we don't trust in our institutions, we don't trust in our fellow human beings and we've become very much focused on ourselves and our individual needs. And the reality is there's no such thing as a self-made person, you're only there because of the success of previous generations. As you drive to work on a car, on a road that has been built by others, that's been funded by others, you know, so this idea that you are in it alone, you know, is completely wrong, and I think sometimes we bring that to the work and it creates an environment that is not as successful. Ula Ojiaku True, true. No, thanks for that, Dave. I completely agree. Now there are people back to this project program that feel like, you know, the word project in agile is a taboo, almost a swear word. What's your perspective on this? Dave West I don't think it's a swear word, I don't think it's taboo. I think, you know, Mik's book is a fabulous book and he's a fabulous person, but he was using it to emphasise the fact that, you know, that we have become too focused on this, you know, investment paradigm, this organisation paradigm, this structural paradigm of the project and that, ultimately, the idea of a product, this idea of a cohesive set of capabilities that's packaged in some way that has a clear boundary, that has a clear set of customers, that has some clear value, is a much better way of aligning your people and your investments. And so he was emphasising that, and obviously he emphasised the idea of value streams being the mechanism that we deliver value in this construct to these people in this packaging of products, and it's a great book and I recommend everybody should read it. Ula Ojiaku I have mine here. Dave West No, that's good. Yeah. I was fortunate enough to be involved in the development of the book a little, working with Mik, providing a lot of feedback and I think it's a great book. However, the idea of a project doesn't go away and all of that work that we did, that organisations that I respect deeply like the PMI and, you know, that even, dare I say, things like Prince2, all of that work, isn't wrong. It's just, we need to look at it from a different lens. The idea that complex work is there changes certain things, the fact that requirements and understandings and appreciation of what we're doing emerges over time, that is just a truth, and that was true of projects as well. We just need to build in the mechanisms to be better able to deal with that. The fact that we would invest hundreds, if not thousands of hours planning things that ultimately fell apart when some underlying assumption changed and then we'd create a change order to deal with the chaos that that created need to be, we need to step away from those ideas. Do we still have projects? I think yes, sometimes you will have something that has a, you know, put a man on, or hopefully it's not a man, hopefully it's a woman, but a woman on Mars. I don't trust men on, I think it'd be much more successful if it was a woman, but, anyway, or person. Men get old, they don't grow up, right? Isn't that the saying, but anyway, so putting that person on Mars is a project, right? It has a definitive, you know, plan, it has an end goal that's very clearly underside. It's very likely that we're going to build a series of products to support that, you know, there is, I don't think we need to get tied up so much on the words, project and product. However, we really need to step back a little bit and look at, okay, you know, like treating people as resources, breaking up teams and reforming teams continuously, treating people as fungible or whatever that is, they're just unrealistic. It's not nothing to do with project or product, they're just silly, you just can't deal with this. The fact that teams take time to form, you know, the fact that, you know, the most successful agile teams I've ever seen are teams that have a clear line of sight to the customer, clear understanding of what they're trying to do for that customer, have guardrails, have an enabling management structure that provides support to deliver that value to that customer. As long as you think about those things and you don't get so tied up with the dance or the routine of project management that you forget that, then I'm not concerned. You know, there's this big thing about, oh, should project managers be Scrum masters? I don't know, it depends on the project manager. Sometimes project managers make very good product owners because they take real clear ownership of the outcomes and the value that's trying to be delivered. Sometimes, you know, they make great Scrum masters because they care very much about the flow of work, the team dynamics, the service to the organisation, the service to the business, and they want to act in that way. And sometimes you just want to get stuff done and work in a team, as a developer on that increment. You know, I don't know, you know, people are like, oh, because, and I think this is the fundamental problem, and you've got me onto my soapbox here and I apologise, but the thing that I see over and over again is the use of agile in an industrial, mass production oil and mass production way of thinking about the world. So what they do is that it isn't agile or project management that's at fault. It's the paradigm that's driving the use of agile or the use of project management. You can do agile in a very waterfall way, don't get me wrong or a very industrial way, I almost don't want to use the word waterfall, but this idea of, you know, maximizing efficiency. I mean, gosh, the word velocity has been as synonymous of agile forever when ultimately it's got nothing to do with agility, you know, it's a useful mechanism for a team to help them run a retrospective sometimes. But it isn't a mechanism that you use to plan, you know, the capacity of your organisation and all this sort of idea,  what they're trying to do always is use an industrial, you know, sort of mindset in an agile context, in a context that doesn't support an industrial mindset or a traditional mindset. And that drives me mad because I see agility being used to deliver work rather than value, I see agility basically being missed, sort of like, almost jimmied in with a crowbar into these massive projects and programs where you've got fixed scope, fixed budgets at the start. They don't actually know what they're trying to achieve, but you've got all these contracts in place that describe all this stuff, very detailed up front. And then they say, we're going to use agile to do it, and you're like, okay, what are we, you know, what happens if the first sprint uncovers the fact that the product goal was fundamentally flawed? Oh well, we can't change that because the contract says, well, hang on a minute, what are we in this business for? Are we actually trying to deliver value to customers and help them solve a particular problem to deliver? Or are we trying to do something else? And they're like, no, we're trying to deliver on the contract. Oh, but isn't the contract a mechanism that describes that? Maybe, but that's not why we're here. And that's when it starts getting, going wrong, I think,  that industrial mindset that I just want, tell me what to do, give me a job, let me sit down, just give me that change order and I will start work. It's just wrong. And for certain types of project, and certain types of product and certain types of problem, you know, it probably works really well if we're building the 17th bridge or we're, you know, doing those sort of things. But the reality is in the digital age, that most knowledge workers, who are the people that really benefit from agile the most, that aren't working in that way, they're working with very changeable environments, very changeable customer understanding very, you know, it's a little bit more complex. Ula Ojiaku True, true. And what you're saying reminds me of my conversation with Dave Snowden, he's known for his work on complexity theory, Cynefin, and if it's in a complex adaptive environment, you know, you need to be agile, but if it's a complicated problem or a simple problem, so complicated is really about, you know, breaking it down into a series of simple problems but it's still sequential and predictable, you could use, you know, the traditional waterfall method, because nothing is going to change, it's really putting all those pieces together to get to a known end state, and so I am of the same mindset as you, in terms of it's all about the context and understanding what exactly are you trying to achieve, what's of value to the customer and how much of it do we know and how much learning do we have to do as we get there. Dave West Exactly. I'm obviously not anywhere near as smart as somebody like a Dave Snowden who just, I think he has forgotten more things than I've ever understood, but yeah, I mean he's an amazing thought leader in this space, but the challenge and he talks a little bit about this sometimes, or I think he does, is that we don't always know what's complicated or complex or the amount of unknown. And this is, you know, this is the classic sort of entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs aren't necessarily working in complexity, they're working in unknown. But the nature of complex unknown is really tricky because you may discover that something that you thought was known is not known, and then you then have to change how you approach it. So the reason in Scrum, what we do is we deliver frequently and that, ultimately, and we deliver the most valuable things or the things that will give us the most value, thus that uncovers those misunderstandings early in the process. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, completely true. And just to build on what you said in terms of understanding or realising that your product goal was wrong, you're working on the wrong thing. Sometimes you might have to also kind of say goodbye to the project or pull the plug. It depends. Dave West Yeah. And that's incredibly hard, sorry, just to lean into that. It's very hard because you've got people that are there and you've invested time, you know, there's the sort of classic fallacy of sunk costs, all that stuff, but the reality is it's not a fallacy of psychological sort of like sunk energy. You've invested all this time and money and effort and motion to get where you're at and then you're realising it's wrong. It's incredibly hard to step away from that. And so what you do, and you see this with startups all the time is, you know, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, but you don't really pivot, what you're doing actually is trying to find a way to get all that investment that you've spent to be useful to deliver some value, you know, and whether it's repackaging or whatever, so that you can say, oh, that's okay when actually, and you can spend as much time doing that as you did the original thing, and now you are even worse, in a worse situation and it's hard. Ula Ojiaku Yes. Completely agree. So there's something you said about, you know, you gave an example of people doing, if I will use your term, Water-Scrum-Fall, in their delivery. And sometimes, you know, they go into detailed requirements, you know, specification, and this is, and they write an iron-clad contract that would, you know, kind of specify all these requirements have to be met, and whilst from the delivery perspective, in terms of the teams who actually do the work, it's they are, they get it, they want to be agile, but it's always these constraints. And whenever we, as an agile coach, you know, you go into the root of the matter. It's the typical root causes of why there is this inflexibility it's either, you know, the leadership and/or, you know, the business or their clients not wanting, you know, having that traditional expectations, any advice on how to effectively deal with this sort of blocker? Dave West I think it's very difficult, particularly when it's like outsourced or you've got, you know, that sort of it's contract-based as opposed to internal in terms of commitments. So it's not budgeted it's actually contracted. And when, when that happens it's very difficult, because you know, you've got the deal because you know how to do stuff and you've done it before, and you've got all that experience with the customer of course, so it's well, because you've done it before and you've invested all this experience, you must tell us exactly what it is that we are going to do. And the reality is the customer themselves doesn't know what they want, really. And until you actually get into the process, it's very difficult. I think one of the big things that's going to happen over the next few years, and we're starting to see some of this with things like Beyond Budgeting, the new procurement contract models that the US is, is perpetuating with 18F and the work of the central government. It would sort of stop during the previous administration, but it's now back, you know, how do you do agile contract management, what does it mean? Speaking from personal use, you know, of external companies to do work for Scrum.org, we pay for sprints. We define a clear product goal that we evaluate continuously, that's measurable. We, you know, we have a product owner from Scrum.org embedded in the Scrum team, even if the Scrum team or in the Scrum team, so of course, if the product owner, they are part of the Scrum team, but even if the Scrum team is predominantly a third party. So we do things like that to, and because you can't just fund one sprint at a time. It's very, you know, these people have got to pay mortgages and you know, they've got payroll to hit, so you have to negotiate a number of sprints that you would do it that allows them the flexibility to manage those constraints whilst being realistic, that at the end of a sprint review, you may discover so much stuff, or even during a sprint, that questions everything, and requires a fundamentally, you know, shifting of the backlog, maybe a change to the backlog, assuming that the objective and the product goal is still valid. You know, so putting those things in place, having those honest conversations and partnership conversations with the client is crucial. And the, you know, service companies that serve Scrum.org are a little bit luckier because we actually come at that from a, we know that we don't know what we want, whereas most clients, it's a lot harder to get them to say that. We know what we'd like to achieve, so the other thing that's important and I think that OKRs are maybe part of this, we have a thing called EBM, Evidence Based Management, which is a sort of like an agile version of OKRs. The OKRs and if defining the outcomes that you're trying to achieve and how you're going to measure them up front, validating them continuously, because it's possible you're wrong, but it's a much less of a scary prospect than not describing anything at all, or just having some very highfaluting goal. So getting very clear and precise in what you're trying to achieve and actually investing the time up front to work out what that means, and getting everybody on the same page around that can really help solve those problems long term, because you build to that, and that ultimately becomes the true north that everybody's working to. So when you have those moments of oh, that's not what we thought then, you know, that's okay, because you are validating against at least something, you have some level of structure in all of this. Ula Ojiaku So let's get to some other questions. What books have you, you know, read that you would say have kind of impacted the way your outlook on, or view on the subject of agile agility or anything else, what would you recommend to the audience? Dave West So the books that really changed my life around thinking about this in a different way, there was a few. The one that actually has nothing to do with agile that made me step back from the way I was looking at the world was Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman. That book really sort of like reinforced the fact that the world is incredibly complex and is, you know, he's famous for The World is Flat, you know, the sort of like global supply chain thing, which we are all very aware of and it's fundamentally having a huge impact now on prices and inflation and the like because of, you know, it's been such a mess over the last two and a half years. So that changed my outlook with respect to the world that I'm living in, which I thought was quite interesting. In terms of straight agility, you know, I'll be honest, there's Scrum – A Pocket Guide that taught me professional Scrum, that's Gunther Verheyen's book that I'd never really thought about Scrum in that way. And then I have to plug the series, The Professional Scrum Series from Addison, well, it's Pearson now, sorry. There are some great books in there, Zombie Scrum is absolutely fabulous. And actually, coming out on the 17th of June is a new book about leadership, The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations. I just read that, so I did not remember it, but it's by three people I adore, Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner and Laurens Bonnema. They're awesome, you know, had lots of leadership positions, written a great book. I wrote an inspired forward just in case anybody's checking that, you know, that confidence thing certainly came back after middle school, right. But that's a really interesting book that talks about the issue that you highlighted earlier, that leadership needs, we've spent a lot, we've spent 25 years teaching Scrum to teams. We need to spend the next, probably 60 years, teaching Scrum to leaders and trying to help, and it's not just Scrum, it's agile, hence the reason why this isn't just about Scrum, you know, whether it's Kanban, whether it's Flow, whether it's Spotify Model, whether it's whatever, but the essence of that, you know, empiricism, self-management, you know, the continuous improvement, the importance of discipline, the importance of being customer centric, the value of outcomes and measures against outcomes, the value of community and support networks, you know, all of this stuff is crucial and we need to start putting that thing, you know, whether it's business agility, whether you call it business agility, you know, all organisations, I think the pandemic proved this, need to be more agile in responding to their market, to their customers, to their employers and to the society that they contribute to. We get that. Leadership needs to change, and that's not a, you're wrong and awful, now sort of old leadership bad. No, it's just the reality is the world has changed and the more mindful leaders step back and say, oh, what do I have to do differently? Now, my entire team is remote, my, you know, my work is hard to plan, the fact that we, you know, our funding cycles have changed, our investment models have changed, you know, stepping back a little bit. So this professional, agile leader book I do recommend. Obviously I had the benefit of reading it before it became a book and it's very, very good and fun to read. Ula Ojiaku Awesome, we will put the list of books and links to them in the show notes, so thank you for that. Now, is there anything you'd like to ask you know, of the audience? Dave West Oh gosh, I don't know. I mean, my only sort of like, if it's sort of closing, if we've unfortunately come to the end of our time together and I, you know, I did waffle on, so I apologise for using far too much of it. But I guess the question I, and we talked a little bit about this, but you know, this sort of, there is a propensity in our industry, like every industry, and every moment, and every movement to become very inward looking, to become very like my way is better than every other way, you know. And obviously I'm very into Scrum and I apologise, I accept that I am. But I'm not arrogant enough to believe that it is the only way of solving complex problems. I'm also not arrogant to believe that it is sufficient. You know, I love the work of the Lean UX, Agile UX, we loved it so much we worked with Jeff and Josh to build a class together. I love the work of Daniel Vacanti and in professional Kanban and the Kanban community in general, I love, you know, I love the work of the professional coaching organisations and what they're really doing to help me be a better human being dare I say. You know, the point is, as you sit at this moment in time, you as an agile practitioner, have the opportunity to draw on many different disciplines and many different experts to really help to create that environment. That can allow agility to thrive and value to be delivered. And I think the only thing that's getting in the way of you doing that, or the only thing that was getting in the way of me doing that, and it still does sometimes is uberous arrogance and just a lack of, I don't know, not willing, not being willing to step out of my comfort zone and accept that my predefined ideas and my experience, my diversity that I bring isn't necessarily always right and to be more humble and to be more kind. I know it's a country song, you know, humble and kind, right, which I'm, you know, obviously I live in America, so I have to like country music, it's mandatory, but if you can be a little bit kinder and to do what my gran asks, right? Not what did you do today, but who did you help? What did you learn? How are you going to be better tomorrow? If we can do all of those things, then not only are our projects and teams and products better, but our lives better, and maybe society could be a little bit better. Ula Ojiaku Those are great words, Dave, thank you so much for those. One last thing, are you on social media? How can people get in touch with you? Dave West Well you could always dave.west@scrum.org if you want to ping me on this thing called email. If you are under 30, it's this thing that old people like, it's called email. If you're younger and cooler, I do not have a TikTok account, I don't totally know what it is. My son says we need it. I'm not a totally sure that we do, but it's not about clocks as well, who knew that, what was all that about? Ula Ojiaku Well, just like Apple isn't the fruit… Dave West Isn't about fruit, how annoying is that as well? Anyway, and so many misconceptions in the world, right. Anyway, but, and M&Ms aren't Smarties, I know I get it. But anyway, sorry, David J. West is my Twitter handle, you know, but, you know, whatever, LinkedIn, you can always find me on LinkedIn, just do Dave West Scrum.org and you will find me on LinkedIn. Love connecting, love talking about this stuff, maybe a little too much. You know another saying that my gran used to say, “you've got two ears and one mouth, shame you never used it like that, David”. I was like, yes, gran, I know, yeah. She also didn't by the way, just for the record anyway. Ula Ojiaku Oh gosh, your grandma Lilian sounds like she was one awesome woman. Dave West Rockstar, rockstar. Ula Ojiaku Well, thank you so much, Dave. It's been a pleasure and I thoroughly enjoyed having this conversation with you, actually more learning from you and I hope sometime you'll be back again for another conversation. Dave West I would love that. Thank you for your audience. Thank you for taking the time today. I appreciate it. Let's stay in touch and I hope that we'll see maybe in person again soon. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, that will be wonderful.

Erica and Brian explore how OpenSpace and Guru delivered great engagement programs. Community Industry News: Valentina Ruffoni joined Disciple Media as Community Experience Lead Caroline Park joined Atlassian as Senior Manager, Community Engagement Kristie Presten joined Tasktop as Community Manager Carla Doty was promoted to Community Director at Yelp Celina Zamora joined ServiceNow as Community Engagement Manager & Strategist Shane Whaley joined FareHarbor as Head of Community Ben Garrison joined Zscaler as Technical Moderator and Knowledge Manager Katie Ray joined metadata.io as Head of Community Kimberly Ndola joined Wonder as Community & Content Strategist Cat Martinez joined Twilio as Principal Developer Community Engagement Manager, Developer Programs Donna Nicholson was promoted to Community Engagement Manager at Reddit Melodie Malfa was promoted to Senior Community Manager at Yelp Erin H was promoted to Community Engagement Manager at Reddit Clare Stager joined Seed Health as Employee Experience and Internal Community Manager Nicola Lyons was promoted to Head of Community at Andela Engagement Programs: OpenSpace Easter Egg Hunt The 12 Days of Guru

It's Thursday May 19 and here's what happening this week in Canadian Tech: Tasktop gets purchased to consolidate the digital transformation industry Accessibility pays off for Fable Forma AI proves that AI can help incentivize sales people Quicker takes: Round13 launches Digital Asset Market fund ChargeLab raised $15m USD due to a pivot they made a while ago.

Today, Sumeru Managing Director Jason Babcoke, explains the art and science of product marketing, the value of brand advocates, and why a founder-friendly investor is more than just a passive investor. Jason is a Managing Director focused on the firm's software investments and sits on the investment committee. Prior to co-founding Sumeru Equity Partners, he was a principal at Silver Lake Sumeru, the middle market investment strategy of Silver Lake and predecessor fund of Sumeru Equity Partners. Jason has more than 15 years of technology investing and operating experience. As an operator, Jason was the Director of Engineering for Angstron Systems, a venture-backed startup he helped lead to a successful acquisition and he holds six issued patents. As an investor, Jason focuses on business-oriented software with investments including Talend (IPO – NASDAQ:TLND), Blackline (IPO – NASDAQ:BL), Buildium (Acquired), Snow Software, Criteria, Tasktop, and Loopio. -- Our host Mark Healy is a writer, creator, and podcast producer. He is the VP of Content at Ceros, a software platform for interactive design, and one of Sumeru's portfolio partners.

Dominica DeGrandis is the author of *Making Work Visible*, and Principal Flow Officer at Tasktop. She joined us to talk about how important it is for teams to ensure that all of their work is accounted for in planning.

Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org, is on a mission to enable professionals to apply scrum through training courses, certifications, and ongoing learning all based on a common competency model. Prior to joining the team at Scrum.org, Dave was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering, and architecture. As a member of the company's executive management team, he was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC-backed product business. Dave is one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment.On this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, Dave defines a growth mindset as the ability to look at things and problems differently. He also shares his inspirational journey of how being dyslexic didn't stop him from achieving his goals.Episode Highlights:Constructive ways in which leaders can handle criticismThe key tenet at Scrum is transparency. With a transparent culture, you have to be open with your team and stakeholders. Not only that, but you have to sit and listen to what they have to say. When you explain your reasoning behind things and what your mission is, people will understand your decisions.Role of CEOs in envisioning and implementing well-being initiativesOne of the problems Dave has seen with these initiatives is that organizations think everyone is the same. The truth is that people benefit from different things. Scrum.org focuses on trying to empower people to make their own choices regarding their well-being. They encourage people to seek their answers and provide the funding and support to do that. How to deal with failed well-being initiatives?Eventually, it's the relationship between employees and their bosses. If the team members know that their boss cares about them, the initiatives will be successful. It's the responsibility of line managers and bosses to ensure that their team members feel that they care. Follow Dave on LinkedInProduced by: Priya BhattPodcast host: Abijith Kanthadai Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organization that is building tools and products to simplify recruitment, on-boarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:SpringVerify — B2B verification platformEngageWith — employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company cultureTrivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-buildingSpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, andSpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking systemSpringworks prides itself on being an organization focused on employee well-being and workplace culture leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.

Dave, Mark and Mike discuss their best bits from the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2021 with IT Revolution. They also review their talk on the Serverless Value Flywheel.  The DOES 2021 talks are practical with participants describing their digital transformation journeys in an open way, revealing the lessons they have learned.   Here are quick links to themes, tools and techniques that the guys covered in their talk on the Value Flywheel and picked up in other talks and discussions: https://learnwardleymapping.com https://doctrine.wardleymaps.com https://medium.com/wardleymaps https://list.wardleymaps.com https://github.com/ddd-crew/ddd-starter-modelling-process… https://amplitude.com/north-star Our Talk: 'The Serverless Edge, Using Wardley Mapping with the Value Flywheel from combined Business and Technology Evolution'  Transcript: https://www.theserverlessedge.com/wardley-mapping-with-the-value-flywheel/ Slides: (including ours under Dave Anderson): https://github.com/devopsenterprise/2021-virtual-us Slack: https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/ New Book announcement https://itrevolution.com/announcing-new-book-from-david-anderson/ The conference was virtual but there were still many opportunities to interact through the Slack Channel and Lean Coffees with leaders and architects from leading edge organisations.  Dave and Mark also give a behind the scenes view of their talk: The Serverless Edge, Using Wardley Mapping with the value Flywheel from combined Business and Technology Evolution which previewed their book due to publish next year with IT Revolution: https://itrevolution.com/announcing-new-book-from-david-anderson/ In their talk they explained what a 'value flywheel' is and they did a live demo of a Wardley Map to show the technique in action. There are 4 stages of the 'value flywheel': 1. Clarity of Purpose 2. Challenge 3. Next Best Action 4. Long Term Value The transcript for talk is available on: https://www.theserverlessedge.com/wardley-mapping-with-the-value-flywheel/ Dave and Mark hosted a Lean Coffee on 'Building internal capability, not consultancy dependency', which prompted a good debate. Mike also picked up on themes around value streams and flow efficiency with Mik Kersten from Tasktop - tasktop.com,  and similarly with Bank of New Zealand - bnz.co.nz.  The guys felt that Wardley Mapping is very complimentary to those themes and is rising in popularity.  Mark picked up on an increasing evolution towards product centricity, meaningful work and socio technical practice. Mike attended a session looking at ubiquitous language tying in with the need for visibility/observability to make decisions in DevOps organisations which Mark also picked up on in the talk on 'shifting left with product excellence' with Liz Fong-Jones with metrics being used in right way being key.   Mike also picked up a lot of SRE themed talks including one by Michael Winslow from Comcast.  Courtney Nash from Verica and Troy Koss from Capital One did a 'Chaos and Reliability: A Surprising Friendship in the Enterprise' talk that Mark enjoyed. And Dave picked up on a talk by Dr. Ron Westrum. Mike felt that Team Topologies concepts were permeating the talks and thinking at the conference.  Dave enjoyed the talk with Admiral John Richardson and the ultimate distributed organisation, leadership and autonomous themes.  Security was covered by John Wallace looking at how that area has changed.  The guys picked up on the lack of serverless talks, although that could be about the organisational journey.  Also the conference wasn't really about specific technologies. Tune in next time for more conversation on all things Serverless Craic. Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge theserverlessedge.com @ServerlessEdge  

When Rachel joined us to record this MOOPs episode she was still in the role of Marketing Operations Manager. Her story is not uncommon, but her learning and approach to managing marketing technology (Marketo) is of course unique. Tune in to find out why she had to watch emails go out all day long before she could resolve anything. Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations ProfessionalsSponsored by Stack Moxie Avoid your next MOOPs with automated monitoring across your entire marketing and sales tech stack.

In this episode, Matt and Moshe discuss, again, the tool Pendo with Trevor Bruner, Product Lead at Tasktop, and the author of “Quick Start Guide to Product Management: What I Wish I Knew When Starting in Product Management”. Last time we explored Pendo in the Product Analytics series (Episode 2). This time, learn how Pendo is used for in-app messaging, from tooltips to on-boarding flows, NPS and a central resource center, and other use cases.Trevor can be reach on Linked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorbruner/ To purchase Trevor's book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3tDwa7U To learn more on Pendo, check out https://www.pendo.io/ Connect with us on LinkedIn:*Matt - www.linkedin.com/in/mattgreenanalytics*Moshe - www.linkedin.com/in/mikanovsky*Note: any views mentioned in the podcast are the sole views of our hosts and guests, and do not represent the products mentioned in any way.Please leave us a review and feedback ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In this newest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Gail Murphy, Professor of Computer Science and Vice President of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is also the co-founder, board member, and former Chief Scientist at Tasktop. Dr. Murphy's research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage, and coordinate the information that matters most for their work.   During the episode, Kim and Dr. Murphy explore the properties of modularity and information hiding, and how one designs architectures that create them. They also discuss how open source libraries create the incredible software supply chains that developers benefit from everyday, and the surprising new risks they can create.   They discuss the ramifications of system design considerations and decisions made by software developers and why defining software developers' productivity remains elusive. They further consider open-source software as a triumph of information hiding and how it has created a massively interdependent set of libraries while also enabling incredible co-evolution, which is only made possible by modularity. Listen as Kim and Dr. Murphy discuss how technologists have both succeeded and fallen short on the dream of software being like building blocks, how software development is a subset of knowledge work, and the implications of that insight.   ABOUT THE GUEST   Gail C. Murphy is a Professor of Computer Science and Vice President of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), as well as co-founder, board member, and former Chief Scientist at Tasktop.   After completing her BS at the University of Alberta in 1987, she worked for five years as a software engineer in the Lower Mainland. She later pursued graduate studies in computer science at the University of Washington, earning first a MS (1994) and then a PhD (1996) before joining University of British Columbia.   Dr. Murphy's research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage, and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. She also maintains an active research group with post-doctoral and graduate students. YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT Why defining software developers' productivity remains elusive and how developers talk about what factors make them feel productive. The value of modularity and how one can achieve it. Ways to decompose software that can have surprising outcomes for even small systems. How open-source software is a triumph of information hiding, creating a massively interdependent set of libraries that also enable incredible co-evolution, which is only made possible by modularity. How we have exceeded and fallen short of the 1980s dream of software being like building blocks, where we can quickly create software by assembling modules, and what we have learned from the infamous leftpad and mime-magic incidents in the last two years. Why and how, in very specific areas, the entire software industry has standardized on a set of modules versus in other areas, where we continue to seemingly go in the opposite direction. A summary of some of the relevant work of Dr. Carliss Baldwin, the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Dr. Baldwin studies the process of design and its impact of design architecture on firm strategy, platforms, and business ecosystems. How software development is a subset of knowledge work and the implications of that insight. RESOURCES Dr. Mik Kersten on The Idealcast Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten Tasktop The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim Fred Brooks The Mythical Man-Month On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules by Dr. D.L. Parnas Comparison of embedded computer systems on board the Mars rovers Joshua Bloch How to design a good API and why it matters by Joshua Bloch Tricking Sand into Thinking: Deep Learning in Clojure by Dave Liepmann Gene Kim's reaction on Twitter Gource Gource in Bloom 800+ days of Minecraft in 8 minutes History of Bitcoin History of Python Eclipse Mylyn by Dr. Mik Kersten How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript Laurie Voss' tweet Rails 5.2.5, 6.0.3.6 and 6.1.3.1 have been released Have there been any lawsuits involving breach of open source licences? GNU General Public License SemanticConflict Fostering Software Developer Productivity through Awareness Increase and Goal-Setting by André Meyer Gail Murphy on Mik + One Podcast On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules Thoughts on Functional Programming Podcast by Eric Normand Alistair Cockburn's programming challenge on Twitter Gene Kim's tweet about BLAS: Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms Gene Kim's tweet about the Gource visualization on the scores of people making commits to the Python ecosystem repo Gene Kim's Twitter thread about Dr. Carliss Baldwin's talk: Part 1, Part 2 Academy of Management 2015 TIM Distinguished Scholar Prof Carliss Baldwin Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark Robert C. Merton Black–Scholes model Product Design and Development by Karl Ulrich Design structure matrix Three design structure matrices Real Option TIMESTAMPS [00:27] Intro [03:52] Meet Dr. Murphy [04:32] Determining where design occurs in software development [10:30] Refactoring [16:08] Defining developer productivity and why it defies explanation [20:26] What is modularity, architecture and why they're important [28:52] An extreme example [30:51] Information hiding [36:06] The leftpad and mime-magic incidents and SemanticConflict [44:13] The work of André Meyer [47:23] Open source is a triumph of information hiding [52:56] Architectures give different trade offs to different problems [57:25] Relationships between a leader's roles and responsibilities [1:05:10] BLAS: Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms [1:09:20] Communication paths within an organization [1:16:58] The Mylyn project [1:20:11] Analysis of Dr. David Parnas' 1972 paper [1:26:23] Falcon missile program and socio-technical congruence [1:31:10] The work of Dr. Carliss Baldwin [1:40:01] How Dr. Baldwin defines modularity [1:47:26] Modularity and open source software [1:51:31] Defining real options [1:53:17] 1 billion dollar rearchitecture project [1:55:29] This work is primarily about making decisions [2:01:58] Open source systems are Darwinian systems [2:06:33] Dr. Murphy's ideal of software developer's daily work [2:09:53] How to contact Dr. Murphy [2:11:01] Outro

Dr. Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop and best-selling author of Project To Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. Mik started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he built the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development environments with Agile and DevOps tools while working on his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open-source code that are still in use today and has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market. Mik's experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical gap between business leaders and technologists, resulting in his creation of the Flow Framework® to connect strategy to delivery.

Joining Mik in this episode of Mik + One is Carmen DeArdo, Principal Flow Advisor and VSM Practice Lead at Tasktop, and co-author of the award winning book, Standing on Shoulders: A Leader's Guide to Digital Transformation. This episode covers: - Insight into Carmen's early experience at Nationwide and Bell Labs, and how he has applied his experience and learnings to help other organizations today - Carmen's expertise with local optimization of the value stream and how he works with organizations to take those first steps in making the switch from vertical thinking to horizontal thinking - The origins of The Flow Framework and how it has helped shift the way that organizations look at the entire value stream - The key lessons Carmen has learned from helping larger organizations fulfill large deployments of The Flow Framework, and some of the biggest surprises and learnings from the past couple of years Subscribe to the Mik + One podcast today so you never miss an episode and don't forget to leave your review. Follow Mik on Twitter: @mik_kersten #MikPlusOne www.tasktop.com For more information about Carmen DeArdo and to view the full list of additional resources, visit: https://projecttoproduct.org/podcast/carmen-deardo/

In this special release episode, Women in Agile Org is thrilled to feature our new sponsor for the Women in Agile Podcast, Scrum.org.  Listen in as Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org and Patricia Kong, Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions at Scrum.org, join our host Leslie Morse for a conversation on diversity, complexity, and social responsibility. They touch on some of the origins of Scrum, what complexity means, and how team and organizational diversity are key for solving complex problems.  About the Featured Guests Dave West is the CEO at Scrum.org. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports, along with his acclaimed book: Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, that helped define new software modeling and application development processes. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then as VP, research director Forrester research where he ran the software development and delivery practice. Prior to joining Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture Follow Dave on LinkedIn Follow Dave on Twitter @DavidJWest Patricia Kong is the Product Owner of the Scrum.org enterprise solutions program which includes the Nexus Framework, Evidence-Based Management, Scrum Studio and Scrum Development Kit. She also created and launched the Scrum.org Partners in Principle Program. Patricia is a people advocate and fascinated by organizational behavior and misbehaviors. She emerged through the financial services industry and has led product development, product management and marketing for several early stage companies in the US and Europe. At Forrester Research, Patricia worked with their largest clients focusing on business development and delivery engagements. Patricia lived in France and now lives in her hometown of Boston. Patricia is fluent in 4 languages. Follow Patricia on LinkedIn  Follow Patricia on Twitter @pmoonk88 The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile. This will get you entered to a monthly drawing for a goodie bag of Women In Agile Org swag! About our Host Leslie Morse is an agilist at heart. She was leveraging agile practices and appreciating agile principles long before she even knew what they were. Her agile journey officially started in 2010 and she never looked back. Her career has taken many twists and turns. She led a digital marketing start-up in college, was involved with replatforming Lowes.com while they adopted agile practices, provided training and coaching for agile transformation across a wide array of industries, and now serves as the Product Owner of Professional Development Solutions for Scrum.org. She is a trained and certified in Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) and has been involved in the Women in Agile movement since its original inception at Scrum Gathering 2013 in Las Vegas. You can connect with Leslie on LinkedIn). About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

Tasktop's CEO, Mik Kersten, joins Coruzant Technologies for the Digital Executive podcast. He shares that his passion and inspired for his success has been learning from people. Having the servitude mentality to learn from customers and be inspired by his staff.  People are what makes the world go 'round.

I am Tasktop.

Tasktop’s Mission: We are driving toward an inclusive company culture. We are building a come-as-you-are community of mutual respect and trust. We believe that diverse teams perform better and foster an environment of belonging and inclusion. We aim to continually learn, evolve and be better versions of ourselves.

Are You Done Yet?  Episode 7: A Chat with Tasktop’s Carmen DeArdo Innovative-e ‘Are you done yet?’ podcast edisode 7 with special guest Carmen DeArdo from Tasktop. Carmen is the co-author of the book ‘ Standing on Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Transformation’. Several... The post Episode 7 – A Chat with Tasktop’s Carmen DeArdo appeared first on Innovative-e.

Mik Kersten, author of “Projects to Products” and CEO of Tasktop, has seen a reoccurring theme. We go to conferences; we hear about all these fantastic things that can happen when we incorporate lean practices, continuous flow, and feedback. We come back pumped to start changing the way we work because we know it will improve our lives for the better. Then suddenly, the motivation gets drained out of us by all the internal systems in place that effectively prohibit change. Mik has boiled the reasons we face in these situations down to three things: Language differences between business and technology groups Change metrics are non-existent, broken or not relevant between groups Projects are considered cost centers Mik also takes a closer look at the concepts behind his book, including the value of product value streams, persistent teams, and organizing with the intention of reducing the number of dependencies. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Mirco Hering hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

In this age of faster, and leaner software delivery, managing teams and more importantly managing tasks and workflows, both within teams and across teams, is more relevant than ever.  Time waste, too much work in progress and an overhead of technical debt are just a few of the problems that enterprises and other large organizations are faced with.  What are the root causes of work overload and how can it be mitigated so that cloud native adoption is a reality without your organization having to compromise on quality?  Cornelia Davis, CTO Weaveworks and Dominica DeGrandis, director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop offers some practical advice on evaluating IT workflows in the enterprise and how to manage technical debt and other invisible work.   

In partnership with the DevOps Enterprise Summit, we spoke with Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, about how organizations can diagnose the health of their value stream. This has become an especially important subject now as the pandemic has emphasized the need for quick and effective value stream management.Kersten will be a keynote speaker on October 14th at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Be sure to sign up for the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas between October 13th -15th for expert talks and three full days of immersive learning!

Burnout can cripple any organization and for many technology firms, it’s the standard by which business is conducted. Dr. Mik Kersten believes that the key to happy software engineers (and the executives that manage them) is to create flow using a framework.Mik joins Patrick and Shelli for a discussion on flow diagnostics, how teams respond to being measured, and why it’s important to understand people’s energies. Listen for his thoughts on flow framework and pick up his book Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework, to learn more.(01:47) - Tasktop in a nutshell(04:00) - Measuring the flow of value(09:10) - Team measurement(16:29) - Elastic capacity of human ability(22:59) - Happiness and trust metrics(25:32) - Hand-offs and dependencies(28:10) - Making the case with data(31:40) - Heightened uncertainty(35:51) - Project to ProductDr. Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop Technologies, creator and leader of the Eclipse Mylyn open source project, and inventor of the task-focused interface. As a research scientist at Xerox PARC, Mik implemented the first aspect-oriented programming tools for AspectJ. In 2018, Mik launched his book, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework, with concepts to help drive software at the pace of an organization's business.Mik has been an Eclipse committer since 2002, is an elected member of the Eclipse Board of Directors and serves on the Eclipse Architecture and Planning councils. Mik's thought leadership on task-focused collaboration makes him a popular speaker at software conferences, and he was voted a JavaOne Rock Star speaker in 2008 and 2009. Mik enjoys building tools that offload our brains and make it easier to get creative work done.If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to Innovation and the Digital Enterprise in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.Podcast episode production by Dante32.

Dave West is the CEO at Scrum.org. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports, along with his acclaimed book: Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, that helped define new software modeling and application development processes. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then as VP, research director Forrester research where he ran the software development and delivery practice. Prior to joining Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture. 

In this episode of Mik + One, the official Project to Product podcast, Mik is joined by Dominica DeGrandis, Principal Flow Advisor at Tasktop and Author of “Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow.” In this episode, Mik and Dominica cover a variety of topics, including: - Reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic, its impact on organizations, and advice for leaders, teams and individuals to get through this time and find their own flow - Exploration into how Dominica's work in ‘Making Work Visible' applies at the individual, team and organization levels - Leadership's role in acknowledging employee burnout and working to improve it in order to increase employee confidence, innovation and engagement during the Turning Point - Getting Work in Progress (WIP) under control in order to improve flow - The concept of Flow Safety, and why it is critical in making structural changes and seeing successful results - The importance of experimentation when removing bottlenecks, and how it can help to increase team happiness and productivity - Why exposing dependencies is critical in order to make fast decisions that produce results, reduce wait times, and reduce WIP Subscribe to the Mik + One podcast today so you never miss an episode and don't forget to leave your review. Follow Mik on Twitter: @mik_kersten #MikPlusOne www.tasktop.com For more information about Dominica DeGrandis, visit: https://projecttoproduct.org/podcast/dominica-degrandis/

As mentioned in Episode 1 of The Idealcast, this is Dr. Mik Kersten’s talk from DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 with exclusive commentary from Gene. , In his presentation, Mik dives into the Flow Framework featured in his work, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework.  Get Mik’s insights on building a foundation for innovation in the software field. Follow along as he breaks down the lessons learned as a leader in tech working with brands like Microsoft and BMW. Find out what they got right and what he says anyone looking to innovate in tech should start doing immediately. This is a perfect followup to Episode 1.  Episode Timeline: [00:03] Intro  [00:52] Meet Mik Kersten  [02:35] The Flow Framework  [03:24] Working at Xerox PARC  [05:29] Epiphany #1: Software architecture and the value stream [06:15] Epiphany #2: How Nokia lost the market it created [08:57] Epiphany #3: Software innovation and tools for transformation [12:33] Carlota Perez and tech revolutions [14:39] BMW, Lean principles  [18:30] Optimizing business value flow in IT [22:24] How Microsoft excelled where Nokia couldn't [25:10] Flow efficiency and moving towards a connected value network [27:42] How they're applying flow framework at Tasktop [29:49] Business advice for developers [31:22] Finding Dr. Mik Kersten  [32:02] Outro    ABOUT THE GUESTS Dr. Mik Kersten started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he created the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development tools with Agile and DevOps as part of his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open-source code that is still in use today, and he has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market.   Mik’s experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists. Since that time, Mik has been working on creating new tools and a new framework for connecting software value stream networks and enabling the shift from project to product.   Mik is the author of the book Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. Mik lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada, and travels globally, sharing his vision for transforming how software is built.     Visit Mik’s Website   YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Ways to optimize business value flow for IT How fragmented value streams kill productivity. The role proxy metrics and silos play in derailing software transformations. Why project management and cost centered is the wrong model for transforming a business. RESOURCES Slides to Mik Kersten’s Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption by Geoffrey A. Moore Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez “Project To Product: Beyond the Turning Point,” presentation by Mik Kersten at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, 2019 “How Value Stream Networks Will Transform IT and Business,” presentation by Mik Kersten at DevOps Enterprise Summit London, 2018 “How Value Stream Networks Will Transform IT and Business,” presentation by Mik Kersten at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, 2018 Bill Gates: Trustworthy Computing, Wired

In honor of International Women's Day 2020, Mik is joined by three incredible women within the industry: Gail Murphy, Tasktop Co-Founder, and Professor of Computer Science and VP of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia, Nicole Bryan, Vice President of Product Development at Tasktop; and Naomi Lurie, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Tasktop. Gail, Nicole and Naomi had an open, inspirational and thought-provoking conversation with Mik about: - Why technology companies should not only focus on code and algorithms, but should welcome a diversity of viewpoints to create products that people want to use - Creating a work environment where women feel they can openly communicate their passion and show their emotion without feeling weak or judged - Leadership's responsibility to facilitate meetings appropriately, and ensure women feel that their voices are being heard - Creating role model ladders and how women can support, educate and inform each other to foster gender equality in the workplace - How we can inspire more women at an individual, organization and industry level New episode every two weeks. Subscribe to the Mik + One podcast today so you never miss an episode and don't forget to leave your review. Follow Mik on Twitter: @mik_kersten #MikPlusOne www.tasktop.com New episode every two weeks. Subscribe to the Mik + One podcast today so you never miss an episode and don't forget to leave your review. Follow Mik on Twitter: @mik_kersten #MikPlusOne www.projecttoproduct.org www.tasktop.com For more information about Dr. Gail Murphy, Nicole Bryan and Naomi Lurie, visit: www.projecttoproduct.org/podcast/international-womens-day

Mik Kersten, author of “Projects to Products” and CEO of Tasktop, has seen a reoccurring theme. We go to conferences; we hear about all these fantastic things that can happen when we incorporate lean practices, continuous flow, and feedback. We come back pumped to start changing the way we work because we know it will improve our lives for the better. Then suddenly, the motivation gets drained out of us by all the internal systems in place that effectively prohibit change. Mik has boiled the reasons we face in these situations down to three things: Language differences between business and technology groups Change metrics are non-existent, broken or not relevant between groups Projects are considered cost centers Mik also takes a closer look at the concepts behind his book, including the value of product value streams, persistent teams, and organizing with the intention of reducing the number of dependencies. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Mirco Hering at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Learn from an experienced Director of Revenue Operations to become successful in a sales ops role with our special guest, Zoe Jong of Tasktop...

Dr. Mik Kersten spent a decade creating open-source developer tools before realizing that programming was not the bottleneck of large-scale software delivery. Since that time, he has been working on creating a model and tools for connecting the end-to-end software value stream. He has been named a JavaOne Rock Star speaker and one of the IBM developerWorks Java top 10 writers of the decade. He was selected as one of the 2012 Business in Vancouver 40 under 40 and has been a World Technology Awards finalist in the IT Software category. Kersten is the editor of the new IEEE Software Department on DevOps. Prior to founding Tasktop, Mik created the Eclipse Mylyn open source project as part of his Ph.D. in Computer Science, pioneering the integration of development tools with the delivery pipeline. What you will learn from this episode: How Mik recognized that the way business software is designed often doesn’t meet the real needs of its users, and why he founded Tasktop to solve problems How Mik’s background as a developer gives him an informed foundation to understand customer pain points and problems and insights into how software can address them Why maintaining a focus on solving the problems found in business software and customer needs helped Mik pivot Tasktop more effectively Why Mik was inspired to move into the realm of thought leadership and write his book Project to Product How listening to his customers and understanding their stories was a transformative experience that helped shape Mik’s thought leadership and reframe his beliefs How thought leadership has helped to elevate Mik’s message and helped him better align with his customers’ needs and future proof his business against economic recession Why the overwhelmingly positive reception to Project to Product was in direct response to Mik’s effort to serve and help his readers Mik shares key points and information from Project to Product about his Flow Framework methods and how businesses and software can be better aligned with each other How key lessons learned from his mentor helped Mik learn to focus on both long term success and near term profitability Resources: Website: http://projecttoproduct.org/ Twitter: @mik_kersten Project to Product by Mik Kersten: https://amzn.to/2XKSAEx

Dominica DeGrandis, Author of Making Work Visible and Principal Flow Advisor at Tasktop, discusses the human factor of DevOps as well as the new mindset people must have when they shift to managing work in a product-centric model.

What's it like to work at Tasktop? Well we sat down with Ryan Nosworthy, a senior software developer here, and discussed Tasktop, software development, curling, and Kirk Cousins.

CEO and Co-Founder of Tasktop and author of the best selling book Project to Product, Mik Kersten explains what it takes for organizations to shift the way they manage software delivery. Find out how to survive and thrive in the age of digital disruption and what it means to work in flow. For more information, visit www.management30.com.  

Dr Mik Kersten always brings a fresh perspective on what is happening in the world of DevOps and value stream management. He is beyond bright, but explains things in a way that everyone can understand. I had a chance to catch up with Mik and find out what was the latest with Tasktop. Have a listen to this great interview

Dominica DeGrandis is Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop, where she helps customers improve the flow of work across value streams. Responsible for introducing customers to flow-based aspects of digital transformation, she guides IT teams and business teams to learn and adopt new ways of working to improve performance. Dominica is the author of “Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow.” She is a huge fan of using visual cues to reveal mutually critical information across organizations to inspire change and spur alignment. Dominica lives in Seattle, WA with her husband and extended family. Dominica DeGrandis Here we talk about metrics, work flow, and the great benefits of minimizing WIP – work in progress. We also talked about engaging managers in the discussion of work flow and metrics. DeGrandis is excellent at seeing how processes work and finding ways to help participants literally see how work flows through the system. She advocates using Kanban boards to create a view of what’s going on at various levels in an organization. This can also help individuals see how their specific metrics affect the larger business goals. We also discussed the topic of “Priority vs. Calendar.” DeGrandis has a talk on this subject. She talks about The 30 Minute Jam, the All Day Cram, and the Triple-Book Wham. Many people – especially creative people – need large blocks of time on the calendar in order to reach and maintain “flow” and get quality work done. I love her assertion that most people have more control over their calendar than they believe. Lots of good stuff here. Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk_9ZRIGQP8

Imagine a world where the same approaches that successful startups follow also worked for Fortune 500 companies. With the right organizational structures, it can be a dream come true. However, IT organizations tend to think that innovation is one install away and the path is littered with failed agile transformations. Changing from a project- to a product-centric approach may address some the major obstacles preventing the nimble startup-like success larger enterprises crave. Join us as we speak with Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and author of “Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework”, as he talks with us about a critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists and how enabling a shift from project to product can make all the difference. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Skip Angel Hosts Find Skip’s infograph on Twitter. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Connect with us on social media!  Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped  Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped  Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Mik Kersten of Tasktop about his new book, Project to Product and how the Flow Framework can be applied to changing the way of working in organisations. Why listen to this podcast: • The project model of software development is fundamentally broken • The management techniques which were invented in and needed for managing in the era of industrial revolution are not applicable or useful in the era of software development • Most organisations’ rate of change in improving how they build software is so slow that they are unable to compete against any of the tech giants who choose to adopt a new market • The shift from projects to products enables organisations to realise more value and respond top market changes quicker • The flow framework is a tool to help identify where to make changes based on finding the bottlenecks and releasing value in the system More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2VxhVj7 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2VxhVj7

Steve is joined by an amazing guest today. He's brilliant, he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop and he drives the strategic direction of the company and promotes a culture of customer-centric innovation. Before Tasktop, Dr. Kersten launched a series of open source projects that changed how software developers collaborate and as a research scientist at Xerox PARC, he created the first aspect-oriented development environment. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dr. Mik Kersten   Dr. Mik Kersten spent a decade creating open source developer tools before realizing that programing was not the bottleneck of large-scale software delivery. Since that time, he has been working on creating a model and tools for connecting the end-to-end software value stream.  He has been named a JavaOne Rock Star speaker and one of the IBM developerWorks Java top 10 writers of the decade. He was selected as one of the 2012 Business in Vancouver 40 under 40 and has been a World Technology Awards finalist in the IT Software category. Kersten is the editor of the new IEEE Software Department on DevOps. Prior to founding Tasktop, Mik created the Eclipse Mylyn open source project as part of his PhD in Computer Science, pioneering the integration of development tools with the delivery pipeline.  In 2018, Mik launched his book, Project to Product, introducing the Flow Framework™, with concepts to help drive software at the pace of organization's business. Listen to another #12minconvo

Dr. Mik Kersten spent a decade creating open source developer tools before realizing that programing was not the bottleneck of large-scale software delivery. Since that time, he has been working on creating a model and tools for connecting the end-to-end software value stream. He has been named a JavaOne Rock Star speaker and one of the IBM developerWorks Java top 10 writers of the decade. He was selected as one of the 2012 Business in Vancouver 40 under 40 and has been a World Technology Awards finalist in the IT Software category. Kersten is the editor of the new IEEE Software Department on DevOps. Prior to founding Tasktop, Mik created the Eclipse Mylyn open source project as part of his PhD in Computer Science, pioneering the integration of development tools with the delivery pipeline. In 2018, Mik launched his book, Project to Product, introducing the Flow Framework™, with concepts to help drive software at the pace of organization's business.

Kevin Fisher, Nationwide Insurance Associate Vice President, Lean Process Management (Lean, Agile, DevOps) sat down with Bob at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018. Connect with Bob on Twitter. Transcript Bob Payne:  "The Agile Toolkit." [music] Bob:  Hi. I'm your host, Bob Payne. I'm here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 and I'm here with Kevin Fisher from Nationwide. Kevin, we worked together an awfully long time, back from the early days of Agile, at Nationwide. I remember, actually I Tweeted, because it was in the talk with a couple of gentlemen that were from Nationwide. They were talking about the DevOps roll out that they're doing and they had this sort of Sherpa chart. It's always great to see how far you guys have come from the early days. I was impressed by their talk. Unfortunately, I didn't get to your talk, but I hear you had some pretty interesting things in your talk around metrics, and measuring flow, and that sort of thing. Maybe we can chat about that? Kevin Fisher:  That's right, Bob. Bob and I worked together back in 2008 when we experimented with Scrum and XP. Bob and some other folks were our on‑site coaches. From those early days of having one Agile team, now we have 200 Agile teams. All of our work is done with those 200 teams. We think of our transformation in three distinct kind of bodies of work. The first one, obviously, is introducing Scrum and XP and then scaling that up. That took a long time, given our size of our organization. Now we're focusing on DevOps. You heard the talk from Jared and Jim. We're rolling out DevOps in a self‑service way. It's more carrot than stick. Bob:  It was great to hear, because all too often it is not implemented in a self‑service way. Kevin:  We want teams to figure out their local impediments and use these techniques to solve their local processing problems. We gamified the friendly competition between teams. We have a monthly DevOps challenge. All the teams can submit their progress against whatever that topic is of that particular month. We choose a winner, and they get custom stickers for their laptops. That's it. There's no monetary conversation. [laughter] Kevin:  When we were exploring and doing some experiments, we had two of our teams have a friendly competition against each other, and it was simple. We didn't give them extra time. They had to complete all their normal standard work. We said, "What can you do to go faster and get your work done faster? By the way, you have a colleague team over here that we asked the same challenge. We want you to attend each other's show‑and‑tells." It was fantastic to see the friendly competition in their eyes when they're attending their colleagues' show‑and‑tell and the colleagues talking about how they just pruned 2,000 automated tests that weren't delivering a whole lot of value to 700. Now they have it integrated into their build process. They feel real good about it. They have a big visible monitor that displays the health of the build on a real timestamp. Then you can see the other team thinking, "Wow! We could do that. We could beat that." It was very healthy, and that's how we came up with the idea. Then, when we heard about the Verizon cup...Verizon has a similar program, and we said, "That is a fantastic idea. We're going to leverage that idea from the Verizon cup. We're not going to make it quite as elaborate ‑‑ they actually give a trophy. We're going to scale it down and just give stickers," and it's been a great thing. Then the third avenue for us is this whole concept around changing the mentality of our senior executives in finance, from project to product. That's a difficult turn to make. Bob:  It's a huge turn. Yep. Kevin:  We've had many conversations over the years. We've made some changes in IT that are putting us in the right direction, but we can't go further without the business being side by side with us. Early on, attempts at forging that conversation with our business executives and the finance teams was not received well, because we kept talking in IT terms. We want to bring Agile, we want to infuse Agile methods into our planning. We want to talk about this. We want to talk about that. They rejected a lot of that conversation because it was viewed as very IT‑centric, and just not in terms they could understand. The progress we've made on two fronts over the last couple of months is number one, we now have a very rudimentary view of lead time and cycle time within the functions of IT. It's not perfect. It's certainly fraught...You could poke holes in it if you look real hard at it. But, when we boil it up at the macro level, the law of large numbers takes hold and we actually feel like yeah, this directionally correct enough. It shows what we knew all along and that's the development piece of hands on keyboard, writing code, is not the problem. That's actually the shortest piece of our value chain. Bob:  By a ridiculous amount. Kevin:  By a ridiculous amount. Two and a half percent of the time we spend on stuff is actually on hands‑on‑keyboard coding. Bob:  That must have been validating but also a head‑scratcher. I'm sure you took a look to make sure you've got the numbers right because that seems like something that's very... Kevin:  We have the numbers. It's very low. Bob:  People would want to poke a hole in. Kevin:  People want to poke a hole in it. It's a very large data set so, "All right. Let's say we're off by a 100 percent." It's still pretty low. Bob:  Five percent. [laughter] Kevin:  We still have a huge opportunity space after the development is complete and, obviously, well before the development happens. Now we're really focused. It gives us data to have ammunition with the people that are either dragging their feet on DevOps and CICD. We can say, "No, no, no. Here's the data. We need to improve this. You need to show measurable improvement." Then it also helps us in those conversations with our business partners to say, "Look. This business‑IT relationship is really super important and perhaps we need to start thinking about things differently." The second half of this conversation that's actually been new in the last several months is our CIOs ‑‑ we have a business unit CIO lined up with each unit business president ‑‑ have been successful talking with their business unit presidents and their cabinets, made up of SVPs and other senior leaders, and trying to get them to conceptualize a future state in small increments of time. Historically, our company has made very large multi‑year bets, and a handful of them. We're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next five years and all this wonderful stuff will come out of it that's extremely difficult to measure. That doesn't allow us to respond to market conditions at all. There was an impactful trip, probably similar to most companies. We've had good success getting our executives out of the building to visit with other companies. It doesn't even have to be a financial services company. It could be other industries. Talk with peers at their same level, and learn. We used it to get progress with our IT leadership on adopting lean management techniques across how we scale. Now we've used it with other business executives to get them to think about conceptualizing outcomes in smaller increments. I tell the story that we had a group of executives take a trip out West to visit the typical unicorns of the world, Facebook, Google, Amazon. When they were on their trip, they said, "We need to go figure out how these companies do a much better job at long‑term planning than we do." They came back... Kevin:  Yeah. They don't do long‑term planning. Bob:  They do strategic execution rather than strategic planning. [laughs] Kevin:  Correct. Yes, yes. Exactly. That's what they learned. They said, "We actually don't do that. We're just much better than you at sensing and responding to market conditions." What that trip allowed the CIOs to do is introduce ‑‑ I know it sounds simple ‑‑ language that the business leaders could rally around, that they didn't view as IT language. They didn't have an allergic reaction. When we say things like, "Small batches, iterative work," they have an allergic reaction. They're like, "You're talking IT speak. Agile, that's like an Italian term. Don't come to me with that." Bob:  [laughs] It's a major word. Kevin:  Yeah. [laughs] It's a major word. They don't know any of that stuff. "You're an IT folk. Don't tell me how to run my business." They have an allergic reaction to it. When we talk about sense and respond to market conditions, we actually introduced the term called "base camp." You saw it in our DevOps mountain journey. We have base camps and just tranches of work we want you to try to achieve. Those things that we listed don't have to be done in any particular order, but they needed to be done before you move on to the next base camp. That concept is now resonating with our senior business leaders like, "OK. You're saying that we can package up or at least conceptualize this body of work. You can get it done in a reasonable time frame, usually three, four months. We can deploy it to our end customer, whether that's the end‑customer, or a distribution partner, or what have you. They will get value. We'll get value. We'll measure that and then we will decide whether we want to continue or pivot. It's broad concepts that are outlined in books like "The Lean Startup," by Eric Ries and others. We are using language that our non‑tech‑savvy business leaders can rally behind and don't feel threatened by. It has been really impactful for us to get to that point. Bob:  I was speaking earlier with a gentleman from Microsoft and they did a sort of long‑term study over the features that they had added. They found that one‑third achieved some improvement in customer experience, a third were neutral, and a third were negative. When you that sort of data that says if we just produce the things that we will plan to do, we're at net zero impact unless we kill the losers and double down on the investment in those things that are moving the needle. There was a huge conceptual turnaround for Microsoft. They're huge. They have a huge legacy codebase. So big, he said they actually broke Git and they became one of the major contributors to the Git source code because it was taking 12 hours to clone the Windows repository onto your laptop to make changes. It was just so a lot bigger than the Linux kernel, a lot bigger than any other stuff that had been thrown at Git to date. They developed the new virtual file system that's used in Git and they are now down to like two to three minutes for that clone. This idea of reacting to an emerging situation, I think is one that can resonate. I'm really interested to get my hands on the "War and Peace and IT." Kevin:  Mark Schwartz? Bob:  The Mark Schwartz book. I loved his analogy with the battle with Napoleon and the slow decision loop actually not even neutralizing, but making the decisions actively bad. We have not done ourselves much good in the community to allow this idea that Agile, DevOps, the lean terms we've been using were fundamentally IT. It's good to hear that you guys are at least turning that around. Kevin:  It's the combination of those concepts that we feel are going to give us the advantage and the power. If we only focused on making our Agile machine more efficient and implementing DevOps everywhere... Bob:  10 or 15 percent, possibly. Kevin:  ...it would only take it so far. Now, I will say we have an example of where...We have a particular couple of teams that support our digital online experience where customers deal us over the Web. They are probably our most advanced example. They can deploy at will. They can do safe, reliable, zero‑downtime deployments whenever they need to, multiple times a day if necessary. They are our business partner and they have by the way done a great job forging a very strong relationship with their business partner. After they had done this only for two or three weeks, the business partner remarked, "Well, maybe I don't have to test everything now." Like, "Yes." Because now he has confidence that when things do arise, you can fix it right there, very quickly. Our mean time to repair is very short. That saves him time and energy, it saves us... All good things happen when that circle gets tighter. Being able to demonstrate, not just talk the talk, but demonstrate it, you're boots on the ground with this. When we actually can achieve this, it changes the whole culture around and how to thinking around it. Bob:  What has been an interesting thing that you've learned at the conference? Kevin:  Focus of my talk with Nicole from Tasktop, plus many of the other talks here where they were talking about CSG, Mark Swartz's talk in the morning yesterday all around the concept of project to product, and the difficulties with that. Not a one size fits all models, not a prescriptive model, a lot of people trying to solve the same problem. There seems to be wide agreement that whether you are approaching that from technology left or from the business process on down, you're going to uncover all sorts of complicating factors. I was talking with Verizon just a few minutes ago and as they tried to move along their project to product journey, they might have success with a business partner rethinking how they are going to conceptualize work in a product way. Even the roles that go along with supporting that work, thinking about the differences between what a product manager might do, and product owner, and should they be basically sourced from the same group. All those sorts of nuances of execution. Then when they get to the supporting IT components, they figure out well, the IT components were never architected to operate this way together. I heard similar stories from Discover Card where they've done a nice job with some of their executives on conceptualizing around products not projects, and they need to come to figure out, but even then within a product realm, they have miniature silos within IT where teams either have competing and not‑compatible technology. [crosstalk] Bob:  Business intelligence team. So many components. Kevin:  So there's a huge ripple effect of this. I think we're very early on in these conversations. Especially if you are not a traditional CPG company. Bob:  Yeah. That's what I was going to say. The future is already here, it's just badly distributed. [inaudible 17:02] . [laughter] Kevin:  That's a great way to say it, yes. Bob:  Yeah. Kevin:  Years ago, 2004‑ish, I was a senior product manager for AOL. We did have it figured out, business and IT together, had a PL. Everything we did on a weekly basis was outcome driven, and it made perfect sense at the time. A lot of companies were not there. Bob:  Were you out in the Virginia area? Kevin:  This was AOL Columbus. Remember they bought CompuServe a million years ago. Netscape ran out of Columbus. We spent two days a week in Dallas, but primarily it was Columbus. Bob:  OK, because we did a lot of the early work with Agile with AOL, but it was all near our scenic Herndon office. Kevin:  We were doing Bluegreen employments every Wednesday morning and we didn't even know that that was a thing back then. It was just how we deployed code, yeah. Bob:  That's great. Is there anything you're going to take back that you think will be impactful? Kevin:  I am. We're in the midst of modernizing our tools that support program and project management and Agile life cycle management. We've made significant progress in how we organized IT, how we execute Scrum and XP across IT. We have not modernized any of the tools that people use to actually do that. We're going to fix that in the next couple weeks. Good conversations with a lot of companies that are either a bit farther along than we are or recently made a change. It's been great learnings for us and that team that's here to do that. Bob:  Great. Thank you so much for the chat. It's always been a pleasure working with you. Kevin:  Bob, it's always a pleasure. Bob:  [laughs] Good. Kevin:  Thank you. Bob:  Bye. Photographer:  Can we do a picture? Bob:  Sure. Kevin:  Because no one will believe that I was on a podcast. Bob:  Well, they will. Kevin:  Was that OK? Bob:  Yeah. It was perfect. Kevin:  You do this all the time. I'm new at it, so... Bob:  Well, yeah. They're all this sort of conversational... [laughs] Kevin:  Did it take? Bob:  Yeah. Photographer:  Yep. Kevin:  Cool. All right. Thank you very much. Bob:  Great. If you're going to tweet it out, I'm @agiletoolkit. Kevin:  Cool. [pause] Bob:  The Agile Toolkit Podcast is brought to you by LitheSpeed. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today's show. If you'd like to give feedback or be on the show, you can ping me on Twitter. I am @agiletoolkit. You can also reach me at bob.payne@lithespeed.com. For more free resources, transcripts of the show, and information about our services, head over to lithespeed.com. Thanks for listening. [music]  

Dr Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop, creator of the Eclipse Mylyn open source project and inventor of the task-focused interface. Mik's thought leadership on software delivery makes him a sought after international speaker. He has also contributed to the success of some of the world's largest digital transformations. “work hard and make your own luck and focus on your own growth, happiness and productivity. And do the same thing for your teams. And think about that every day when you wake up”…[Listen for More] Click Here for Show Notes To Listen or to Get the Show Notes go to https://wp.me/p6Tf4b-6K3

CEO of Tasktop Technologies Mik Kersten discusses his session "Project to Product: How Value Stream Networks Will Transform IT and Business" at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018. Connect with Mik and Bob on Twitter.   Learn more about AgileToolkit Sponsor LitheSpeed at lithespeed.com.   Transcript:  Mik Kersten ‑ DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018   Bob Payne:  "The Agile Toolkit." [music] Bob:  Hi, I'm your host, Bob Payne, here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 with Mik Kersten. Mik, you gave a really great talk, one of the keynotes, and I really love the message that you were pulling in, bringing some of the Lean Manufacturing ideas. I know you've been working with BMW, so it's a pretty close call. This idea of looking at data visualization, flow metrics versus compartmentalized, "We've gotten 20 tickets done, but what sort of value have you captured?" I love the fact that you were mixing four different types of work so that you can visualize ‑‑ How are your investment strategies paying off? Are you investing in paying down debt? How does that, in the future, affect your ability to deliver feature flow? I just want to talk a little bit about your flow framework and some of the work that you've been doing. Mik Kersten:  Excellent. Thanks, Bob. Yeah, I think that's a great summary. Bob:  Great. [laughter] Bob:  Why don't you just give a little recap of the things that you were saying and some of the clients you're at? Mik:  I realized, like you, like a lot of us, having to live now through basically, a decade of large organizations trying to go Agile and seeing some repeated failures, knowing that the core practices make sense, yet these transformations tend to go sideways. I just kept asking myself, "Why do they go sideways?" I've witnessed some of the longest running ones, as closely...It's one of the things that I relayed in the book that we launched here, "Project to Product," which will actually be available on November 20th. That's still on pre‑order. Bob:  I don't yet have a copy of that. I went out to dinner at Lotus of Siam. [laughs] I didn't make the sign‑in. [laughter] Bob:  I wish I had. Mik:  There's a story in there of Nokia, who were a poster child of Agile transformation. They were, at a business level, incredibly motivated by this thing called the iPhone to succeed in that Agile transformation, and, yet, something failed. Stephen Elop, in, I think, 2013, sent that burning platform memo when he was CEO of Nokia, realizing they had not done the right things to allow them to become a software innovator, which when, screens get that large, you'd better be if you're going to compete with Apple. Somehow the business, the leadership at Nokia at that time, was doing the wrong things. I was speaking to technologists there who actually knew what the problem was. They knew that the Symbian Operating System ‑‑ they were in transition, going from Series 40 to Series 60 ‑‑ it was not going to be able to support the kind of features that you needed, things like building on an App Store, on top of the platform that was there. Yet those investments were not being made in replatforming. They were being pushed to go Agile and they were being tested, basically. The measurement for the transformation was the Nokia test, how agile these teams were. Whether they were trained on Scrum, that had nothing to do with how much more quickly, if you look at the end‑to‑end value stream of what Nokia was doing of delivering software, how they were actually optimizing or improving their ability to deliver the kind of platform features that you needed to survive and be a phone. Bob:  A local optimization problem rather than a system's. Mik:  I got this term from Carmen DeArdo. I think of it as 100 percent as a local optimization of the value stream. They were completely doing a local optimization of the value stream. Then you have to ask yourself, "Well, was it really the architecture that was a problem? Were their deployments that's still there?" She had some impressive security checking deployment automation. They had some reasonable automation in place. I actually thought they were doing quite well for a company at that time on their delivery pipeline. The bottom line is the business was not giving the technologists the chance to replatform and give them a shot of surviving. Of course, then they end up switching operating systems and the whole mess happened. They lost the market as a result. You look at all these other companies who have done that. Amazon completely replatformed. Probably spent over a billion dollars doing that. Bezos realized that they could not scale on the old platform. We've seen LinkedIn do this. Many of the tech giants know, at a business level, when to shift and, rather than incrementally building features, recreate a platform so that you can get through the next generation of technological change. Those companies who have replatformed, they tend to have CEOs who came from software development, who actually were programmers at one time. I realized that we need a new language to help these Agile, these DevOps transformations succeed so that business leaders and technologists can work together to determine they need to do something like a feature stand down, when they need to do something like a replatforming. When security risks or other kinds of risks, like the privacy risks, need to become a focus, and what that means across the different product value streams. In doing that and trying to create this framework, I realized that the main thing getting in the way of people having the right conversations ‑‑ leaders on the business side and finance side with the people on the technology side ‑‑ was that there was this completely messed up layer separating the two. That layer was project management. [laughter] Mik:  The fact that rather than measuring ‑‑ and this is where the car man and production line, manufacturing line analogies do help. There are places where they don't help, but [laughs] one of the places that they do help... Bob:  Time and motion set us free example. [laughs] Mik:  One of the places where they do help is that there is no separation between the business and production at a company like BMW. Everyone knows how much is flowing through those value streams. When they need to increase production of a car, like in '93, they increase production and there's more market demand. The concept of pull goes all the way through production, right to the business. The business understands the concept of pull and of product value streams. I realized we need to replace that product management layer that manages things to costs, budgets, and timeframes, and assumes time frames are certain. Which, of course, goes completely against agilities to bake in two years of uncertainty into a software project. It sounds as crazy as it is, right? Yet, everyone is saying... Bob:  Also, you were unable to exploit opportunities that come because your plan doesn't include those opportunity. Mik:  Exactly. The only thing is to get away from what Mary [indecipherable 7:12] had called the cost in a trap in this great blog post that she wrote. Which is, again, if you're measuring to cost, chances are you're going to succeed at reducing costs. There's an even better chance you're going to succeed at reducing how much value you deliver in the process. Whereas cost reductions can be very important, but you need to focus on value delivery. We need to measure value delivery in software. I realized, for me, as someone who has come out of...worked a lot in Agile, who spent basically two decades doing Agile development, or overseeing Agile development, that the way that I was communicating about it was not working for people on the finance side. When I first told my CFO about story points, he looked at me like I had a unicorn horn on my head or something of that sort. That we needed a language that was higher‑level and more compatible with the way that business leaders think to allow them to basically participate in understanding what flows through software delivery and have these teams work together. That's really the goal of the flow framework. Bob:  Great. I know that the flow framework, it looks at feature flow, which is a proxy for value. It's not a direct measure of value. You certainly have quality metrics built in. I notice that you also looked at team engagement as part of that part of the Tasktop tool. Are you also doing anything integrating ‑‑ and I'm sure you probably are with some of the tools that you're able to integrate ‑‑ pulling in customer MPS, referrals, or any other pirate metrics or other indicators of possible...that are a little closer to real value? As Microsoft showed, one third of their things added value, one third were neutral, and one third were negative. You could run like hell and stay exactly where you were, producing equal numbers of negative drivers and positive drivers. I'm just curious because I haven't drilled down enough on that. Mik:  No, I think that's a really important question. The flow framework at the highest level has two components. It has these flow items, like features. Let's just talk about features. There are features, defects, risks, and debts are the four flow items. It has those, and so you basically measure the flow of those. At that point, all you're really doing, as you're saying, Bob, is focusing on the efficiency of flow, the productivity flow and so on. That's not telling you at all whether you've done something useful to a customer Bob:  There is a huge advantage because you're tracking across business, IT, and operations, which is different than tracking work inside of an Agile team. Mik:  Yes, there is. It's different, yeah. What you're doing ‑‑ and we can do the car analogy at this point, the plant analogy ‑‑ is you're seeing if value can flow without interruptions through this value stream or where the long waits are. It's because there's a dependency on another product value stream who's not made that API for you that there were supposed to, and so on. All you're getting there is making sure that things flow. You're not necessarily delivering any value. The flow is based on pull. What you do is you correlate the four flow metrics. In the flow framework, you have this section of business results. Those do define value, cost, and so on. You basically are looking at a dynamic system. The business results, the whole goal of the framework, both the flows and the business results need to be defined for each product value stream whether that's an external product, whether that's an internal billing system, whether that's a developer API that you're building or a piece of the developer platform. When I'm looking at the full framework internally at Tasktop, what I see is, "OK, we've delivered all these features. We increased our feature velocity. Did that produce more value?" For me, as a software vendor, the value is going to be revenue. Bob:  Revenue, retention, referral. Mik:  Exactly. Retention rate, upsell rate, so on. That's the value component. The key thing is the flow framework forces, A, the measurement of flow across the entire organization, and, B, specifying value, cost, quality, and happiness for each value stream. Now, for an internal product, you might just specify value as adoption. The key thing is you're specifying it. Otherwise, you have no business investing in it if you don't know what the value is. It's a correlation. We don't see exactly how this feature...It's not taking the approach of putting a business case in every single feature and measuring the outcome of that business case. It's actually allowing you see this much...You can do that if you're that sophisticated, but you're seeing this much higher correlation then. "OK, we invested a lot in feature delivery. Did that produce a business result?" The other key thing is to measure cost. You measure cost per product value stream. Keep in mind that the whole point of making these product value streams first class is because I notice that Agile teams or feature teams, they're great, but they're not coarse enough, they're not big enough. One product can involve up to, I think 10 is probably the most reasonable number. When I see project investments go over 10, things start getting worrying. Having a couple hundred people contributing to one thing gets tricky. It's the false Scrum of Scrum size that you can go. You're measuring cost and employee engagement through something like the NPS across the product value stream. As an example, in the case of Nokia that we talked about, you would have seen a horrendously bad employee NPS on the product value stream of the people who were working on the core platform because they could not do enough features. They had this technical depth. I've seen this at Tasktop as well, where, if you put too much flow load, Web work in progress on a team, and through giving them too big of a backlog of features that they can't complete, I have seen repeatedly that team's employment or promo score go down because everyone's miserable. We hire people who want to deliver value, and when we get in their way of doing that, they're not happy. [laughs] Bob:  That's back to classic work that Deming did. He looked at upscaling employees. The assumption that he went in with is everyone is trying to do their best. If you want different results, you've got to change the system. What you're talking about from pull rate or the backlog, the focus between features and not paying down technical debt, all of those are part of what he would consider the system ‑‑ How is demand flowing into the team? The same way that Toyota never takes more orders than they can fulfill. They never do. They do lots and lots of work to even the flow. It has turned them into an amazing industrial giant, but they don't have the "Glengarry Glen Ross" salespeople out there selling things they can't deliver. They know exactly what that'll do in the long term. Mik:  Exactly. One thing I want to build on with your point around Deming is that my approach with the full framework assumes ‑‑ I've seen the opposite be assumed too frequently ‑‑ is that the business people are also doing their best. Given their understanding and their frame of reference, which might be a financial background, might be a sales, go‑to‑market background... Bob:  Might be a traditional project control background. Mik:  Absolutely. They are doing their best. They have these extremely large budgets. They want this transformation to succeed, but, because the languages are different...Again, talking in terms of releases and deploys per day, those are not value metrics for someone on the business side who's trying to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars. Bob:  When somebody across the table is speaking a language you don't speak, you see risk. Mik:  Absolutely. You assume the worst and you see risk. For someone who's responsible for financial controls, that's your job. That's really my hope here, is that by creating this higher level, this less granular language, on top of what we've learned with Agile and with DevOps because, of course, those metrics down below are very important if that's where your bottleneck is. At least it allows people to spot the bottleneck from this higher level to figure out how to invest, and to move the conversation away from projects, timeframes, and budgets, to project value streams. Bob:  I don't know whether you happened to see Mark Schwartz's talk. He talked about three possible models that you can use when you move away from a classic project. One is the product that you talked about. These are obviously hybridizable. I'm not even sure if that's a reasonable... [crosstalk] Mik:  It sounds like a word to me. [laughter] Bob:  It does sound like a word, we we'll give it that. These are concepts that could work together. He says there's a product view. There's a product model that can work. There's a budget and investment model that can work. Then there's also the outcome model that can work. When he was at Citizenship and Immigration Service, he said, "Look, we need to reduce the wait times for people applying for benefits, the backlog that's holding up adjudicators. We need to improve the adjudicator's ability to do their work," and some other objectives, depending on which portion of the business or the mission that he was looking at. He just simply laid out objectives. He says, "If you do it with adding IT features, great. If you do it with eliminating IT features, great. If you do it changing a business process and not doing anything with IT, great." I'm curious. My gut reaction is I can see how we might be able to instrument that flow framework to look at those outcomes. What is your thought on those three models that he posited in his book? It was released at the same time yours was. [laughs] Mik:  Yep, Mark's doing some great work. Just because I've seen too much, I would just call it flailing between different terminologies and so on, I've just decided to try to create again a common and as simple language as possible. I did iterate a lot with a lot of very smart people on what those words should be. You can do everything in terms of customer experience. In the end, this is all about having a customer‑centered perspective. That's why it's easy and good to go back to those Lean principles from Lomack, from Lean thinking ‑‑ product value streams, customer pull. It's very compatible. The approach that I've taken is that everything's a product. The reason I've done that is because I've seen that work. I've seen some very forward‑thinking companies like the BMWs, the Nationwides, the Targets of the world who, when they start thinking of everything as a product ‑‑ because if you think of things as a product, you have to specify the customer ‑‑ it's not a product if you haven't specified the customer. It forces people, especially on the business side, to think in terms of the customer ‑‑ internal customer or external customer, technical customer or paying customer. There is this discipline that we can now just continue evolving. We've got product owners. We've got product managers. Product management is a discipline that's actually getting established. We can apply those things. Once that's in place, wherever the organization ends up in terms of the hybrids that they would take from Mark Schwartz's models, in my view, they're on the right track. Maybe they will call it the customer experiences or engagements, whatever it is. In the end, to me, consumers love products. They love consuming products. You might call them services sometimes. You might get with their online and so on, but, in the end, we want those products to work better for us. We want more features sooner and so on. I've tried to distill it to give people a very concrete starting point. If they want to evolve the terminology, they certainly can. Bob:  Is there something that you've learned or are going to take away from this particular conference? Mik:  Yeah, there have been some fascinating learnings. The program's been just amazing. The amount of work that Gene puts into the program, it blows my mind every year, and seems to get better every year. Interestingly, not only because of his effort, but because of this collective scenius, basically, where you've got people working together, starting to use similar terms, evolve those terms, have these great conversations. I've been amazed at how much actual consistency of message there's been at this conference as everyone...The different angles that the different speakers and other contributors are looking at, taking a great set of practices from DevOps. I really think DevOps had a, by virtue of being so focused on automation, flow, and feedback, it really has accelerated some of the things that I do think stalled out in Agile. Bob:  The one thing that I fear is that we may stall out. Certainly, the folks here get it, but we may stall out when those mainline organizations think, "Oh, DevOps, that's an IT thing." Mik:  Oh, yeah. That's happening. That is the way everything will get derailed and DevOps in these organizations will fail in similar ways to how we've seen that in transformation failures. If you push it off to IT, that then...That is one of the stories that I recount in the book, which is, you think it's that part of the transformation's IT. You're wrong. That was really my goal. The biggest goal of the flow framework is to say you have to do this and then you have to do this at an organizational level. If you just allow our teachers to transform on their own, you will fail. In the end, it's about creating, again, these product value streams. The really interesting thing in the program now is actually that, which is taking something that's a good set of technical practices and tools that we've learned out of DevOps, the components of Lean that have gone into this community, making them bigger, and bringing them to the rest of the organization, bringing them to the business. The fact that there was a talk with...Who was it? From Nike. I believe her name was Anna. She's a lawyer. She's one of their top lawyers. The fact that she's on stage with Courtney Kissler, that's pretty amazing that the learnings from this community are actually reaching to that part of the business. I would personally love more conversations with people like CFOs who care profoundly what's happening with value and spend. [laughs] Bob:  Oh my God. [laughter] Bob:  Yeah, especially as they look at the disruption and the people falling off S&P 500 or whatever index of being a great company you look at. CFOs have to be keenly interested in, I believe, survival. You can't grow unless you survive. Mik:  Exactly, and in this, because one of the things I point out is that we are at this turning point, this point where the rate of disruption then creative destruction will probably accelerate, I don't think you can survive if you don't grow, and you can't grow without mastering software. Bob:  I often use the other Deming quote, which he was talking about, continuous improvement, "Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival." [laughs] Mik:  Yeah, exactly. Back to Deming, everyone has the best of intentions. The budgets are there. It's just a question of having the right model and framework to make sure that things are tracking the way that you expect them to rather than to be disappointed two years down the road, that you've saved some costs, but now things are moving even slower than when you started. Bob:  Yep. Excellent. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. I hope your book is a smash success. We're looking forward to working with customers that are using Tasktop. I don't usually do any tool plugs, [laughs] but yours looks very interesting because it focuses on an area that we think is crucial in the work that we do. We're mostly tool agnostic. We often joke that our biggest tools are your executives. [laughter] Bob:  We do a lot of work with executive teams and organizational transformation. I never actually make that joke. [laughter] [crosstalk] Mik:  Yeah, exactly. There's rooms where that joke'll fall flat. Bob:  Yeah, that might fall flat. Mik:  [laughs] That's great. Thank you, Bob. It's been a great conversation. Thank you. Bob:  Great. Thank you. The Agile Toolkit Podcast is brought to you by LitheSpeed. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today's show. If you'd like to give feedback or be on the show, you can ping me on Twitter. I am @agiletoolkit. You can also reach me bob.payne@lithespeed.com. For more free resources, transcripts of the show, and information about our services, head over to lithespeed.com. Thanks for listening. [music] Transcription by CastingWords

"If you look inside a large enterprise IT organization, they have this very bizarre and broken layer that's completely separating the way that business thinks in terms of products, budgets and costs, and the way IT people know the way they need to innovate, which is delivering products faster." -- Mik Kersten I sat down with Mik Kersten, CEO of TaskTop, and John Willis after Mik's presentation at DOES2018. His new book, Projects to Products, is an attempt to help the industry move from using success metrics more appropriate for the industrial age, to a new type of measurement where value is measured as part of the overall business goal through Value Stream Mapping. About Mik Kersten Dr. Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop Technologies, creator and leader of the Eclipse Mylyn open source project and inventor of the task-focused interface. As a research scientist at Xerox PARC, Mik implemented the first aspect-oriented programming tools for AspectJ. He created Mylyn and the task-focused interface during his PhD in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Mik has been an Eclipse committer since 2002, is an elected member of the Eclipse Board of Directors and serves on the Eclipse Architecture and Planning councils. Mik's thought leadership on task-focused collaboration makes him a popular speaker at software conferences, and he was voted a JavaOne Rock Star speaker in 2008 and 2009. Mik enjoys building tools that offload our brains and make it easier to get creative work done. Specialties: Software Development Tools, Productivity tools, Task-Focused Interfaces, Application Lifecycle Management, Agile, Management, Aspect-Oriented Programming, Eclipse, Java

After dealing with an overwhelming amount of stress as a developer, Dr. Mik Kirsten took matters into his own hands and went back to school for a PHD to understand and create a better system for software companies.   In addition, check Mik's book: "Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework"!

Do software delivery teams overstress speed and discount value? Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, which produces value stream tools, shares his thoughts in this Test and Release episode.

Do software delivery teams overstress speed and discount value? Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, which produces value stream tools, shares his thoughts in this Test and Release episode.

Dave West (@davidjwest) joined Ryan Ripley (@ryanripley) to discuss scrum.org’s new offering:  PSM-II – An Advanced Scrum Master Course. [featured-image single_newwindow=”false”]Dave West CEO of Scrum.org[/featured-image] Dave is the CEO/product owner at Scrum.org. He is a frequent speaker and widely published author of articles and his acclaimed book, Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and worked with Ivar Jacobson to run the North American business for IJI. Dave managed the software delivery practice at Forrester research where he was VP and research director. Prior to joining Scrum.org, Dave was chief product officer at Tasktop, where he was responsible for product management, engineering, and architecture. Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II) is an advanced course helping students to understand the stances that characterize an effective Scrum Master and servant-leader while diving deep into how they serve the Scrum Team, Product Owner, and organization. The class then teaches students about related practices and skills to enable them to have the right types of conversations and how to apply them to become better Scrum Masters. I’m personally excited about this course. PSM-II is a mind changer and is what's needed for the world to get to the next level. I am excited for how much I will learn by teaching this course and for the immense impact it will have on improving the profession of software delivery. I (Ryan Ripley) am teaming up with fellow Professional Scrum Trainer, Todd Miller to teach the PSM-II this year: Indianapolis, IN on October 3-4 Denver, CO on October 17-18 Johannesburg, South Africa on November 15-16 Washington D.C. on December 6-7 Tampa, Fl on December 11-12 Find a location near you and join us. Whether you are a CSM or a PSM-I, this Advanced Scrum Master Course is the next step on the Scrum master journey, created and present by trainers from scrum.org – The Home of Scrum. In this episode you'll discover: How scrum.org’s Advanced Scrum Master Course was created Why scrum.org is focusing on ScrumAnd Insights into the scrum.org trainer community Links from the show: PSM II – An Advanced Scrum Master Course How to Support the Show: Thank you for your support. Here are some of the ways to contribute that were discussed during this episode: Share the show with friends, family, colleagues, and co-workers. Sharing helps get the word out about Agile for Humans Rate us on iTunes and leave an honest review Join the mailing list – Check out the form on the right side of the page Take the survey – totally anonymous and helps us get a better idea of who is listening and what they are interested in Techwell events – use the code AGILEDEV when you sign up for Agile Dev East in Orlando, FL November 5th – 10th. Leadership Gift Program Make a donation via Patreon [callout]This pocket guide is the one book to read for everyone who wants to learn about Scrum. The book covers all roles, rules and the main principles underpinning Scrum, and is based on the Scrum Guide Edition 2013. A broader context to this fundamental description of Scrum is given by describing the past and the future of Scrum. The author, Gunther Verheyen, has created a concise, yet complete and passionate reference about Scrum. The book demonstrates his core view that Scrum is about a journey, a journey of discovery and fun. He designed the book to be a helpful guide on that journey. Click here to purchase on Amazon.[/callout] [reminder]Which topic resonated with you? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.[/reminder] Want to hear another podcast about the life of an agile coach? — Listen to my conversation with Zach Bonaker, Diane Zajac-Woodie, and Amitai Schlair on episode 39. We discuss growing an agile practice and how coaches help create the environments where agile ideas can flourish. One tiny favor.  — Please take 30 seconds now and leave a review on iTunes. This helps others learn about the show and grows our audience. It will help the show tremendously, including my ability to bring on more great guests for all of us to learn from. Thanks! The post AFH 097: PSM II An Advanced Scrum Master Course appeared first on Ryan Ripley.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You wouldn't think the concept of done is a very controversial topic. If something is done, it's done, right? Not so fast. Across the set of teams in a typical software development lifecycle, done means different things to different teams. This then begs the question, "What does done mean?" Trevor Bruner, Sr. Product Manager at Tasktop joins the Nice Work! Podcast to help us answer this question. 

In this episode of Tasktalks, we discuss some of the main questions to ask yourself when deciding to automate as well as what engineers could automate, when to automate and how automation has evolved here at Tasktop.

Dave West (@davidjwest) joined Ryan Ripley (@ryanripley) to discuss the latest updates to the Scrum Guide. [featured-image single_newwindow=”false”]Dave West hosting the Scrum Guild Update with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland[/featured-image] Dave is the CEO/product owner at Scrum.org. He is a frequent speaker and widely published author of articles and his acclaimed book, Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and worked with Ivar Jacobson to run the North American business for IJI. Dave managed the software delivery practice at Forrester research where he was VP and research director. Prior to joining Scrum.org, Dave was chief product officer at Tasktop, where he was responsible for product management, engineering, and architecture. In this episode you'll discover: Insights into the recent updates to the Scrum Guide How the Scrum Guide is updated by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland All the many ways Scrum is used around the world. Links from the show: Scrum.org Scrumguides.org The Scrum Guide Update Webinar from Scrum.org The Scrum Guide Uservoice Site The Scrum Guide Revision History How to Support the Show: Thank you for your support. Here are some of the ways to contribute that were discussed during this episode: Share the show with friends, family, colleagues, and co-workers. Sharing helps get the word out about Agile for Humans Rate us on iTunes and leave an honest review Join the mailing list – Check out the form on the right side of the page Take the survey – totally anonymous and helps us get a better idea of who is listening and what they are interested in Techwell events – use the code AGILEDEV when you sign up for Agile Dev East in Orlando, FL November 5th – 10th. Leadership Gift Program Make a donation via Patreon [callout]Tired of reading Object Oriented Analysis and Design books that only makes sense after you’re an expert? You’ve heard OOA&D can help you write great software every time-software that makes your boss happy, your customers satisfied and gives you more time to do what makes you happy. But how? Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design shows you how to analyze, design, and write serious object-oriented software: software that’s easy to reuse, maintain, and extend; software that doesn’t hurt your head; software that lets you add new features without breaking the old ones. Click here to purchase on Amazon.[/callout] [reminder]Which topic resonated with you? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.[/reminder] Want to hear another podcast about the life of an agile coach? — Listen to my conversation with Zach Bonaker, Diane Zajac-Woodie, and Amitai Schlair on episode 39. We discuss growing an agile practice and how coaches help create the environments where agile ideas can flourish. One tiny favor.  — Please take 30 seconds now and leave a review on iTunes. This helps others learn about the show and grows our audience. It will help the show tremendously, including my ability to bring on more great guests for all of us to learn from. Thanks! Have you ever been stuck on a project with questions or concerns on how best to move forward? Most of us have had a question or need some tips at some point in your career. Agile software development professionals have a free place to go for answers to their questions. Check out AgileConnection, the free, online community for all things agile. There are tons of free articles to search, interviews with software industry experts, a Q&A forum where you can ask your question and get peer responses, as well as experts, checking in to help you out. Create a profile and network with other professionals, leave comments on articles, get the weekly newsletter for the latest articles released, access the searchable archive of hundreds of issues of Better Software magazine, and so much more. AgileConnection is a robust directory of information for anyone using, implementing up, or growing their agile practices. Discover more at https://well.tc/agilecommunity The post AFH 081: The Scrum Guide Gets an Update with Dave West appeared first on Ryan Ripley.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Tasktalks, we discuss the challenges software organizations can face when adopting a new tool into their process. Specifically we look at Tasktop's own use case when we made the decision to use Docker across multiple departments. We look at lessons learned and hope to provide insights on things to consider when you're evaluating software delivery tools.

The cat-nip of Mary Meeker's Internet Trends report is out this week so we discuss the highlights which leads to a sudden discussion of what an Amazon private cloud product would look like. Then, with a raft of new container related news we sort out what CoreOS is doing with their Tectonic managed service, what Heptio is (the Mirantis of Kubernetes?), and then a deep dive into the newly announced Istio which seems to be looking to create a yaml-based(!) standard for microservices configuration and policy and, then, the actual code for managing it all. Also, an extensive analysis of a hot-dog display, which is either basting itself or putting on some condiment-hair. Alternate Titles I've seen this hot-dog before. I’ve been doing this since dickity-4 I’m sticking with the Mary Meeker slides, you nerds go figure it out Mid-roll Pivotal Cloud-native workshop in DC, June 7th (http://connect.pivotal.io/Cloud-Native-Strategy-Workshop-DC.html). LOOK, MA! I PUT IN DATES! DevOpsDays Minneapolis, July 25 to 26th: get 20% off registration with the code SDT (https://devopsdays-minneapolis-2017.eventbrite.com?discount=SDT) (Thanks, Bridget!). Coté: CF Summit June 13 to 15, 2017 (https://www.cloudfoundry.org/event/summit-silicon-valley-2017/). 20% off registration code: cfsv17cote Coté: Want 2 days of Spring knowledge? Check out SpringDays (https://www.springdays.io/ehome/index.php?eventid=228094&) SpringDays.io Get half-off with the code SpringDays_HalfOff Chicago (May 30th to 31st) (https://www.springdays.io/ehome/spring-days/chicago) New York (June 20th to 21st) (https://www.springdays.io/ehome/spring-days/new-york) Atlanta (July 18th to 19th) (https://www.springdays.io/ehome/spring-days/atlanta) Hot-dog guy in Japan Zoom in on that little fellow (https://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/35012640896/). Internet Trends 2017 300 plus slides of charts (http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends) Computes! Coté’s notebook (https://content.pivotal.io/blog/analysis-of-mary-meeker-s-internet-trends), summary of summary: Google and Facebook make a lot of ad money. The Kids like using smart phones, the olds like using traditional telephones. One of them will die sooner. Voice, image recognition, etc. China is pretty much a mature market, and it’s huge. India has potential, but doing business there is hard and you need more Internet in a pocket rollout. The public/private cloud debate is still far from over. But, AWS, Microsoft, and Google have pretty much won. Bonus: there’s surprisingly little funding and exits this year. Would Amazon sell some private clouds? Isotoner and Hephaestus - All the new container orchestration poop Coté: Catching up on all this week's container poop & as always, my first reaction is “oh, I thought the existing stuff did all that already..so." Managed service for Tectonic as a Service (https://thenewstack.io/coreos-takes-cloud-portability-tectonic-release/) - so, keeping your Kubernates cluster software updated? Presumably enforcing config, etc? However, not all done, still working on the complete solution. But, there’s an etcd thing ‘As a first step, Tectonic 1.6.4 will offer the distributed etcd key-value data store as a fully managed cloud service. “It’s the logical one to offer first because it is everything else gets built on it,” Polvi explained. The data store “guarantees that data is in a consistent state for very specific operations,” he said, referring to how etcd can be essential for operations such as database migrations.’ Another etcd description (https://blog.heptio.com/core-kubernetes-jazz-improv-over-orchestration-a7903ea92ca): “etcd is a clustered database that prizes consistency above partition tolerance… Interestingly, at Google, chubby is most frequently accessed using an abstracted File interface that works across local files, object stores, etc. The highly consistent nature, however, provides for strict ordering of writes and allows clients to do atomic updates of a set of values. So, you need locks for - dun-dun-dun! - transactions! Queue JP lecturing me in 2002. Then there’s Istio (http://blog.kubernetes.io/2017/05/managing-microservices-with-istio-service-mesh.html): Istio (https://istio.io/)?! Whao! Check out the exec-pitch (https://istio.io/blog/istio-service-mesh-for-microservices.html): “ Istio gives CIOs a powerful tool to enforce security, policy and compliance requirements across the enterprise.” And Google (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/istio-modern-approach-to-developing-and.html): “Through the Open Service Broker model CIOs can define a catalog of services which may be used within their enterprise and auditing tools to enforce compliance.” I love their idea of what a CIO does. “An open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices“ SDN++ overlay for container orchestrators from Google, IBM & Lyft - once you control the network with the “data plane,” you add in the “control plane” (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is-istio/overview.html#architecture) which allows you to control the flow and shit of the actual microservices. Tackling the “new problems emerge due to the sheer number of services that exist in a larger system. Problems that had to be solved once for a monolith, like security, load balancing, monitoring, and rate limiting need to be handled for each service.” And, you know, all the agnostic, multi-cloud, open stuff. Thankfully, they didn’t use a bunch of garbage, nonsense names for things. Let’s look at the docs (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is-istio/overview.html) (BTW, can you kids start just putting out PDFs instead of only these auto-generated from markdown web pages?): First of all, these are good docs. Monkey-patching for the container era: “You add Istio support to services by deploying a special sidecar proxy throughout your environment that intercepts all network communication between microservices, configured and managed using Istio’s control plane functionality.” The future! Where we all shall live! “Istio currently only supports service deployment on Kubernetes, though other environments will be supported in future versions.” Problems being solved, aka, “ways you must be this tall to ride the microservices ride”: “Its requirements can include discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring, and often more complex operational requirements such as A/B testing, canary releases, rate limiting, access control, and end-to-end authentication.” Also: Traffic Management (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/traffic-management/overview.html), Observability, Policy Enforcement, Service Identity and Security. Does it have the part where it reboots/fixes failed services for you? So: you monkey-patch all this shit in (er, sorry, “sidecar”), which controls the network with SDN shit, Istio-Manager + Envoy (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/traffic-management/overview.html) does all your load-balancing/circuit breaker (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/traffic-management/handling-failures.html)/canary/AB shit, service discovery/registry, service versioning (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/traffic-management/request-routing.html#service-model-and-service-versions) (i.e., running n+1 different versions of code - always a pretty cool feature), configuring “routes,” what connects to what (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/traffic-management/rules-configuration.html), I don’t think it provides a service registry/discover service (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/traffic-management/load-balancing.html)? Maybe just a waffer thin API (“a platform-agnostic service discovery interface”)? Question: what does this look like in your code? The (https://istio.io/docs/concepts/policy-and-control/mixer.html) thing 12 factor-style passes a configuration into your actual code. Here, you’re adding a bunch of name/value pairs (which can be nested) and also translating them to the name/value pairs that your code is expecting...on an HTTP call? Executing a command in your container? As ENV vars? And then, I think you finally get ahold of the network to reply back with some HTML, JSON, or some sort of HTTP request by (https://istio.io/docs/tasks/ingress.html)., So, big questions, aka, Coté mental breakdown that only Matt Ray can cure: Er...so this all really is a replacement for the VMware stack, right? And OpenStack? Or do you still need those. What the fuck is all this stuff? It just installs the Docker image on a server? And then handles multi-zone replication, and making sure config drift is handles (bringing up failed nodes, too)? So, it’s just cheaper and more transparent than VMware? What’s the set of shit one needs? Ubuntu, Moby Engine (?), Moby command line tools, etcd? Actuality kubernetes code? What’s Swarm do? And then there’s monitoring, which according to Whiskey Charity, is all shit, right? Where’ my fucking chart on this shit? Please write two page memo for the BoD by 2pm today. Meanwhile: Oracle’s cool with it (https://thenewstack.io/oracle-joins-kubernetes-fray/), “WTF is a microservice” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414031), compared to SOA/ESB and RESTful (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1441150), and James Governor tries to explain it all (http://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2017/05/31/so-what-even-is-a-service-mesh-hot-take-on-istio-and-linkerd/). BONUS LINKS! Not covered in episode. Rackspace Buys Enterprise Apps Management TriCore Link (http://www.enterprisecloudnews.com/author.asp?doc_id=733171§ion_id=571) New CEO and biggest acquisition, I thought they were quieting down with the PE Red Hat buys Codenvy Codenvy sets up your developer environments (https://codenvy.com/developers/), and has team stuff. Red Hat is really after the developer market. TaskTop has a good chance of being acquired in this climate. Pour one out from BMC/StreamStep. Notes from Carl Lehmann report at 451 (https://451research.com/report-short?entityId=92575): In-browser IDE and devtool chain(?) for OpenShift.io, based on Eclipse Che “Founded in 2013, San Francisco-based Codenvy raised $10m in January of that year, and used a portion of its funds to buy its initial codebase from eXo Platform, which had developed the eXo Cloud IDE in-browser coding suite to support its social and collaboration applications.” “The company's suite works with developer tools like subversion and git, CloudBees, Jenkins, Docker, MongoDB, Cloud Foundry, Maven and ant, as well as PaaS and IaaS offerings such as Heroku, Google AppEngine, Red Hat OpenShift and AWS.” Check out the Dell Sputnik call-out: “Rivals to Codenvy include cloud-based development suites Eclipse Orion (open source), Cloud9 IDE and Nitrous.IO. There are other 'cloud IDEs,' including Codeanywhere, CodeRun Studio, Neutron Drive and ShiftEdit. On the developer environment configuration front, Pivotal created and open-sourced a developer and OS X laptop configuration tool called Workstation, and now Sprout. Dell's Project Sputnik is seeking to address similar build environment standup productivity challenges.” Uber back in Austin Is that a thing? (https://twitter.com/Uber_ATX/status/867781159178051584) Amazon Hiring Old Folks (Like Me) Anecdotes are the singular of data (https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2017/05/23/how-aws-cloud-is-demolishing-the-cult-of-youth/)? More Tech Against Texas’ Discriminatory Laws Lords of Tech sign a thing (https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas-legislature/2017/05/28/mark-zuckerberg-tim-cook-texas-gov-abbott-pass-discriminatory-laws) “In addition to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook, the letter was signed by Amazon CEO Jeff Wilke, IBM Chairman Ginni Rometty, Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The leaders of Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Silicon Labs, Celanese Corp., GSD&M, Salesforce and Gearbox Software also signed the letter.” “Peeing is not political” (https://www.texastribune.org/2017/05/28/bathroom-bill-showdown-has-been-building-years/) - recap of the history of the bathroom bill. Still doesn’t really address “is there actually a problem here, backed up with citations.” Without such coverage, it’s hard to understand (and therefore figure out and react to) the hillbilly’s side on this beyond: "It's just common sense and common decency — we don't want men in women's, ladies' rooms." It also highlights the huge, social divide between “city folk” and the hillbillies. A lot more from TheNewStack (https://thenewstack.io/tech-leaders-ask-texas-governor-halt-discriminatory-legislation/). ChefConf Retrospective ICYMI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtF3oScoYqk) Competing in Public Cloud is Crazy Expensive Link (http://www.platformonomics.com/2017/04/follow-the-capex-cloud-table-stakes/) Tracks the CAPEX spend over the years for MS, Google and Amazon A Year of Google & Apple Maps Link (https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps) Comprehensive drill-down into the mapping changes made by Google and the smaller moves by Apple. Probably not content for conversation, but whoa. FAA Flight Delay Tracking Check the map, fool (http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp) Recommendations Brandon: Beauty of A Bad Idea — with Walker & Company's Tristan (http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/masters-of-scale/e/beauty-of-a-bad-idea-with-walker-companys-tristan-walker-50186227) Matt: Arrested DevOps #84 (https://www.arresteddevops.com/yelling-at-cloud/) Old Geeks Yell At Cloud With Andrew Clay Shafer & Bryan Cantrill Epic rants. Also, Bryan Cantrill sounds like Bob Odenkirk Enjoying Westworld and everything Brandon recommended months ago Coté: Butternut-squash hash (http://www.paleorunningmomma.com/butternut-squash-hash-paleo-whole30/).

Mik Kersten, CEO and Founder of TaskTop, has an interesting story to tell. While most DevOps initiatives are built around the idea of toolchain automation and cultural transformation, Kersten wants you to think deeper than that. He wants you to be able to create a value stream, giving you the ability to determine the real business value of your DevOps initiatives. In this Innovator’s Journey to DevOps, we talk with Mik about his path to DevOps, his current projects and what he hopes to accomplish in the coming year.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Betty Zakheim, VP of Industrial Strategy for Tasktop and treating software development as a value stream which starts with an idea and goes through to getting feedback from real customers. Why listen to this podcast: - We often forget about the aspects of the requirements which are beyond the written word - Debunking the stereotypes of software developmentUsing the Definition of Done to encourage shifting responsibilities and agile practices left and right of the development team - The intent and promise of DevOps is to see the business of software development as a holistic business process from ideation through to production and feedback loops - The ideal stand-alone, cross-functional team is probably not possible in complex organizations - The currencies of communication – how we speak to each other across disciplines and how we convey information to each other across the value stream More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2ouUWIy You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2ouUWIy

To understand more about communication patterns in open source supply chains, Dr. Gail Murphy and Dr. Marc Palyart undertook a study of 1,227 public projects hosted on GitHub. I spoke with Dr. Murphy about the project and what it means for open source developers trying to generate visibility and community around their project. About Dr. Gail Murphy Dr. Murphy is a leading researcher on software evolution and tools. She brings to Tasktop extensive experience as a software developer and principal investigator of a large research group. In recognition of her research, Gail has been a keynote speaker at several software engineering conferences. She has received international awards, such as the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, a University of Washington College of Engineering Diamond Award, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist award. Her national awards include the NSERC Steacie fellowship. Most notably, Gail was elected to be a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. This fellowship is the highest academic accolade in the sciences, humanities and arts bestowed in Canada. At the University of British Columbia, Gail is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, where she works on human-oriented software development tools to make software developers more efficient and effective, and associate dean (Research & Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science. About Dr. Marc Palyert Marc Palyart is a researcher in Software Engineering from the Software Practices Lab at the University of British Columbia. He holds a PhD from the University of Toulouse and a BSc (Hons) from the Dundalk Institute of Technology. When not in the lab you can find him wandering around the coastal mountains of British Columbia.