Engineering Culture by InfoQ

Ramon Harrington, an engineer at Vistaprint with a decade of experience, dives into innovative strategies from Vistaprint's Hatchery lab. He emphasizes the power of engaging customers early in product development for better empathy and understanding of their needs. Harrington advocates for launching with minimal features to gauge real interest, arguing that sometimes what you don't build is crucial. With a focus on iterative development, he showcases how collecting direct user feedback can lead to more successful and responsive products.

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 Conal Scanlon about his talk at QCon New York on Monte Carlo Simulation for forecasting feature development Why listen to this podcast: • Knowledge work is inherently variable, and estimates are inevitably incorrect • Monte Carlo simulation projects likely completion based on past history rather than future guesses • A small set of real data points is extrapolated to 1000 samples and that is used to produce a probability curve • A forecast is a point in time situation – as teams get better at delivery their predictability should improve • Everything in the delivery process should be subject to change as it is continuously improved More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2kneWJM 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/2kneWJM

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO and chief product owner at Scrum.org, about the state of Scrum in 2017 and the future of agile. Why listen to this podcast: • Agile adoption is now in the late-majority phase of the adoption curve; large organisations who are risk averse have seen the ideas proven elsewhere and they are adopting them • The underlying issues are not that complicated – we’ve got customers who have needs that they can’t explain and are rapidly changing, so we need ways to deliver products and experiment rapidly to enable us to learn and adapt to the emergent needs • The unicorn organisations are not successful because of their technology; it’s because they have served their customers better than the traditional businesses did • The primary customers of scrum.org are professional product developers, and helping them become more professional helps ensure the products are built better • Young enquiring minds “get” why an agile approach is the obvious way of working in today’s world • The future of agile is about communicating in different ways to make it relevant to different people to solve their evolving and emerging problems More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2ygEufI 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/2ygEufI

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Kent McDonald and Heather Mylan-Mains on their talk at Agile 2017 about Socratic Questioning Why listen to this podcast: - Socratic questioning n approach to learning which is based on getting to answers through a question-based dialogue - Frequently what is presented at the beginning of a product investigation is a proposed solution rather than exploring the real need - There are six categories of questions to expose assumptions, change perspectives and delve into an issue or opportunity - There are other techniques which are needed when there is uncertainty about the existence of a problem or opportunity - This approach is not just restricted to elicitation – it can be used very effectively in a team situation when exploring options and identifying challenges More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2AX6pX8 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/2AX6pX8

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud about the adoption of DevOps, containers and microservices and the dangers of vanity metrics. Why listen to this podcast: - Adoption of containers is increasing – one survey indicated 42% of organizations surveyed are using them for something - Container orchestration platforms are good at managing the challenges around scaling and resilience - Architecture is a significant challenge for agility and DevOps – the need to move away from monoliths towards microservices requires a fundamental rethink of our products - Software organisations who are still building monolithic applications do so at their own peril - These ideas are not new, and we have known about them for decades – it’s not the quality of the daily work that matters, it’s the improvement in the quality of the daily work - Focus on actionable metrics – don’t show me a metric unless there is something I can do about it or it is something I should take action about More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2BiDXvm 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/2BiDXvm

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jason Yip about removing friction in the developer experience and DevOps at Spotify Why listen to this podcast: • Friction is the feeling that your environment is fighting you – examples include poorly named variables in code, editors configured incorrectly, access to environments etc • These things often seem small individually, but together they significantly and slow down development activities • Cultivate refined annoyance; not tolerating these issues but actively resolving them • Challenges often come mainly from rapid growth – every design will fail if you just try to scale it larger and larger, you need to redesign for larger contexts, what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow and needs to be adapted • Be careful not to locally optimize one part of the system at the expense of the overall throughput More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2hVBH9A 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

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Josh Evans, former engineering manager at Netflix on how Netflix does DevOps and the freedom and responsibility culture that undermines their way of working. Why listen to this podcast: • There are many interpretations of the term DevOps, it is a useful shorthand for a wide variety of technologies and approaches • “You build it, you run it” is the concrete application of the freedom and responsibility culture • When building a platform tool make it so easy to use that the product teams are not tempted to try and build something for themselves • Product teams are free to experiment and learn, which can feel chaotic and is a valuable part of the freedom and responsibility culture • The value of blameless and safe incident reviews – the goal is to learn and find patterns and use that information to present whole classes of failure from happening in the future • Don’t view the value stream in a fragmented way – see the whole end to end system with all its interactions and dependencies and optimize the system as a cohesive whole rather than different tools and domains More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2mtCIr1 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/2mtCIr1

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sean Dunn and Chris Edwards about professionalism, licensing and ethics in software engineering Why listen to this podcast: • Situations where software development intersects with the public interest are widening and software can impact the health and wellbeing of society • The distinguishing characteristic of a profession is holding paramount the public interest • Unlike the failure of a bridge unethical results from software will be less visible and more insidious • What steps can we take within our organisations to instil a sense of responsibility that is beyond getting the product out the door quickly • A core tenant of professionalism is we cannot detach our actions from the outcomes – ignorance is not an excuse More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2hheRZO 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/2hheRZO

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Don Denoncourt about remaining an engineer as one ages. Why listen to this podcast: • Looking back over history and programming language changes since the early 1980’s • The importance of lifelong learning and putting your personal time into remaining relevant and up to date with new development platforms • New graduates get to work on new things because they have just learned about them and they are prepared to take the lower paid roles than “experienced” people • If ongoing learning is not fun, then maybe you are in the wrong profession • The unconscious bias against older workers in a few teams and how they miss out on great insights • Some advice for oldies and youngies working together More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2ltre65 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/2ltre65

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Andrea Goulet & M. Scott Ford about their journey working together as a married couple and business partners, learning to collaborate and communicate despite having vastly different communication styles and viewpoints. Why listen to this podcast: - Effective communication is a competitive advantage - The system that you produce will only be as good as the communication structure you have in place while you build it - The importance of learning to speak each other’s language – the terminology of development and business is different and it is necessary to take the time and effort to learn the different language - The concept of “inception layers” relating to how intensively someone is concentrating on an activity and their level of openness to interruption - The value of writing a daily journal in a wiki to share what’s been happening and make progress and learning visible More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2zwXlnO 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/2zwXlnO