Episode 46 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Stephen Parry (@LeanVoices), Managing Director of The Sense and Adapt Academy and author of the pivotal book, Sense and Respond (2005). Based out of the UK, Stephen has decades of experience helping organizations actually transform (go beyond an existing form) rather than just improve. He tells an amazing story about how he helped Fujitsu win a 10-year contract with a major airline, beating huge competitors, by focusing on business value rather than what the customer requested. Stephen describes how many organizations get stuck foc ..read more

Episode 45 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Esther Derby, CEO of Esther Derby Associates, and the author of Behind Closed Doors, Agile Retrospectives and 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change. Esther explains how well-intentioned management often achieves superficial change by rolling out packaged processes on top of existing organizational structures and management policies. She describes how micro changes offer a better starting point. Esther asks her clients questions that identify what exactly is contributing to negative patterns, and in turn exposes the system to the ..read more

Episode 44 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan, a veteran agilist, lean practitioner, DevOps leader and co-founder of Industrial Logic Canada. Jeff describes the fabulous Lean/DevOps transformation he’s led with teams in a conservative Canadian bank. The teams used to only do 4-5 deployments per year. They now do 4-5 deployments per day! The teams used Scrum and had many QA people to help test software. Through Cheezy’s work, they eliminated all QA staff, got rid of all ScrumMasters and switched to a lightweight, Kanban approach. Cheezy describes the agilit ..read more

Episode 43 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp), a Lead Quality Engineer at FSecure, an agile practitioner and the author of Strong Style Pair Programming, Mob Programming Guidebook and Exploratory Testing. Maaret describes the culture at FSecure and the benefits her team discovered when they experimented with removing the Product Owner from their team (though there is still a Product Management group in the company). Her team found that the benefits included far greater productivity, solving problems they hadn’t managed to solve in years and becoming ..read more

Episode 42 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Ellen Gottesdiener, CEO of EBG Consulting (ebgconsulting.com) and the author of Discover to Deliver and Requirements by Collaboration. Ellen, an expert in product management and agile development, begins by noting that many agile teams pay more attention to user stories than to product discovery. They become optimized to deliver the wrong things faster rather than learning to cycle efficiently between discovery and delivery. Ellen talks about the importance of being product-led (not project-led) and customer-focused. She discusses ..read more

Episode 41 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Rich Sheridan (@menloprez), president of Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the author of Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer. Rich describes some of the lessons he learned from the innovative entrepreneurs who run Zingermann’s Deli as well as the book, The Great Game Of Business. Such learnings include open book finance, great customer service, how to take care of people and how to collaborate with others in every aspect of a business. Rich describes his company’s mission, which is to end human suffering in the world as it r ..read more

Episode 40 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Elisabeth Hendrickson, a veteran tester, developer, agilist, trainer, author and former executive of Research and Development at Pivotal. We discuss how Elisabeth first got into agile development and what a paradigm shift Extreme Programming (XP) was for her. We discuss her definition of agile and how she has applied agile principles to her work. We discuss how the testing community first reacted to practices like Test-Driven Development. We also discuss Exploratory Testing, the impact it’s had on agile development and Elisabeth’s ..read more

#ModernAgile 39 of the Modern Agile Show features my interview with David Parker, an experienced lean/agile coach. This interview is largely about David's excellent work to thoroughly improve the talent acquisition process of a major brand-name company. David used #lean principles to visualize the work, focus on value, help people collaborate, remove bottlenecks, parallelize work and ultimately produce a far more efficient and effective hiring process ..read more

Episode 37 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Diana Larsen, co-founder and chief connector of the Agile Fluency project, co-author of the books, Agile Retrospectives, Liftoff and Five Rules for Accelerated Learning. Diana is an expert in helping people learn. She and Joshua discuss the story of the learning that resulted from a large team’s end-of-project retrospective, including how HR’s 42-page individual performance review had choked productivity in the team. Diana discusses the vital practice of Chartering, she explains her Five Rules for Accelerated Learning and discusses ..read more

Episode 38 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with David Bland, a veteran lean and agile coach and co-author of the book, Testing Business Ideas. The book features a catalog of 44 experiments that help people learn faster whether their ideas are desirable, viable and feasible. David shares stories about how a small San Francisco startup and a large insurance company both used experiments described in the book to de-risk their ideas and quickly learn from the market. David and Josh discuss how intuition, vision and ethics relate to testing business ideas, how important it is to crea ..read more