

Engineering Culture by InfoQ
InfoQ
Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to build better, high performing teams by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 500,000 downloads in the last 3 years.
Episodes
Mentioned books

May 28, 2018 • 28min
Chris Manuel on Continuous Testing and Culture Change
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Chris Manuel who heads the global test engineering service for Mindtree about continuous testing, cultural change and creating a culture of quality in organisations
Why listen to this podcast:
• The application portfolio of every organisation has become much more complex and this needs different ways of approaching the testing challenges that just having legions of people banging away at keyboards
• The value of moving away from testing at the end to injecting quality throughout the lifecycle
• This needs to extend beyond just testing functionality in the product, it needs rethinking about testing at the different levels and different targets in parallel
• The value of bringing analytics into the right-hand side of the software development lifecycle and feeding that information into the ongoing development activities
• There are lots of things that prevent the effective collaboration and mitigate against developer-tester collaboration in many organisations
• Even in organisations that have adopted agile approaches, most haven’t truly addressed the cultural changes needed to have a one-team, quality first mindset
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2IRCHHR
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May 21, 2018 • 26min
Dominica DeGrandis on Her Book Making Work Visible
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dominica DeGrandis about time thieves, making work visible, the important themes from the DevOps Enterprise Summit and ways to be more productive.
Why listen to this podcast:
• If we can understand the thieves of time better we can get some time back from our overburdened work-life
• Having too much work in progress is the mother of all the other thieves of time
• Much of our work is based on arbitrary rather than real due dates
• Most daily stand up events take too long because of the focus on status - Instead of talking about what people are doing rather talk about what’s blocking them
• Different type of works needs different time focus – managers vs makers
• The value of having a regular cadence for meetings and for “Do Not Disturb” time
• The danger, and harm, that comes about from believing there are “best” practices which can be applied in complex or complicated domains
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2x1ZVFJ
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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May 14, 2018 • 21min
Steve Holyer on Collaboration, Culture & Teams
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Holyer about collaboration, culture and teams, and the state of the Agile Fluency projects.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Diverse lived experiences make people better individuals and team members
• How important psychological safety is for teams
• We all have unconscious biases and our language reflects this
• The value in the Agile Fluency Model is the outcomes we can produce by using it
• The Agile Fluency Model helps teams and organisations figure out how to identify value and prioritize work
• The product owner as the facilitator of conversations so the shared understanding of value can emerge
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2jUipyu
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May 8, 2018 • 41min
CA agile leaders on the using data and creating a safe environment to drive strategy
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Shannon Mason, Laureen Knudsen and Steve Wolfe about a wide range of topics from agile marketing to using data effectively to drive strategy, to organisation incentives and neuroscience.
Why listen to this podcast:
• While there are differences in the application of agile ideas in different domains, the principles apply across the board
• An effective agile environment produces good data for executive decision making
• To be able to use the data effectively the culture needs to support psychological safety
• Agile adoption forces organisations to confront dysfunctional practices
• The shift from seeing oneself as the individual contributor to part of a collective group who achieve success together is very hard
• Define your ways of working so they work with how people’s brains work, and there is no single process which works for everyone or every area of the organisation
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2rtRc9m
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Apr 30, 2018 • 31min
Diana Larsen on Organisation Design for Team Effectiveness and Having the Best Possible Worklife
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Diana Larsen about organisational design for team effectiveness, having the best possible worklife and the evolution of the Agile Fluency Model
Why listen to this podcast:
• Organisation design is a distinct subset of organisation development
• For teams to be effective, every team needs a clear purpose – why are we doing this work
• Team effectiveness comes from every member of the team committing to working on the purpose together in collaboration and committing to making the best possible worklife for everybody else on the team
• Many organisation’s motivation systems mitigate against teamwork and care for each other’s wellbeing
• Deliberate practice is the investment you make in learning that gets you to a state of fluency which allows you to take on the next challenge
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2HC2seR
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Apr 23, 2018 • 39min
Chris Matts & Tony Grout on IT Risk Management Framework as a Catalyst for Change
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Tony Grout and Chris Matts about building an IT risk management framework at a large bank and using that as a catalyst for a digital transformation.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Just deploying another prescriptive method will not make an organisation agile and adaptive
• A risk management framework can be a catalyst for change
• The components of a simple framework which enables adaptation at the team level while ensuring alignment to organisational outcomes
• The importance of an organisational-level backlog which is transparently prioritised to ensure the teams who need to collaborate have clarity about cross-cutting priorities
• Ensuring that controls are as easy to evidence as possible and that there very low overhead in gathering the metrics
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Apr 16, 2018 • 27min
Riot Games on Moving Beyond Product Ownership
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Ahmed Sidky and Michael Robillard of Riot Games about their experiences in product management for a comprehensive gaming experience
Why listen to this podcast:
• The need for a framework to make really tough product decisions
• The importance of a clear strategy when faced with many good ideas - selecting which ones not to pursue
• In the Agile community most of the conversation is about being better product owners, not having better product strategy and this is a gap
• In the product space there are lots of loosely defined terms (outcome, impact, mission, vision, strategy…) so aligning on common terminology and meaning was an important early step
• There are models and frameworks for strategic product management which draw on multiple sources
• To have agility in the tactical space you need to have it in the strategic space
• Anybody in the product development lifecycle should be able to think strategically
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2vkr8mq
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Apr 13, 2018 • 12min
Troy Magennis on Using Data to Support Decision Making
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Troy Magennis about his talks at the conference on “I love the smell of data in the morning” and “10 ways to choose what to start next”
Why listen to this podcast:
• The absence of data means all you have is an opinion
• The simplest way to start gathering data in software development is to put the starting date/time on one corner, the ending date/time on another corner and use different colour post-its for different types of work
• It’s the trend that’s important, not any one week of data
• Your job is to make better decisions with the least amount of effort
• Context is hard to spot if you are in the middle of it – you need to be able to step away and see from a different perspective
• The job of a leader is to help the people who report to you understand the bigger picture and the impact of their decisions on the whole
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2HAIBcs
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Mar 26, 2018 • 37min
Katherine Kirk, Sally Freudenberg & Chris Corriere on Inclusive Collaboration
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Katherine Kirk, Sally Freudenberg & Chris Corriere on Inclusive Collaboration, Neurodiversity and Creating Safe Spaces
Why listen to this podcast:
• Neurodiversity is the idea that things like autism, bi-polar disorder, dyslexia and ADHD are not “disabilities”, rather they are normal variations in the human genome
• The tech industry is an industry of thinkers and we know that diverse teams are more effective, so embracing neurodiversity is a sensible approach
• Create environments that include collaborative space as well as spaces suited for quiet, isolated individual contemplation or work
• A robust system is absolutely vital in continuous environments – it enables continuous innovation and continuous delivery and supports a mindset of continuous learning
• Many of our agile practices are suited for extroverted, fast thinkers and this disadvantages the contemplators who need time to reflect before contributing their ideas
• Insight is the new market differentiator – insight comes from people and they need a creative environment in order to generate insights
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2GaLbEJ
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Mar 5, 2018 • 15min
Heidi Helfand On Dynamic Reteaming
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Heidi Helfand about Dynamic Reteaming
Why listen to this podcast:
• Team change is real – we might as well get good at it
• People come and go from teams all the time for many different reasons
• A missing level in Tuckman’s model of team formation – Stagnating, when you keep a team together for too long
• There are techniques to build social bonds beyond the single team level to prevent constant forming/storming when team composition changes
• The rate of reteaming is a business decision based on the context and needs of the organisation at the time
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2oPFG71
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
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Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2oPFG71