

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

Jun 20, 2017 • 13min
Colin Breck from Tesla on Quality Views to Expose Technical Debt
In this podcast recorded in London Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Colin Breck, an Egineer from Tesla about using quality views to expose and prioritize technical debt.
Why listen to this podcast:
• When systems are not customer facing, quality is not directly obvious and is frequently overlooked
• Quality views provide a visual way of exposing quality in a system block diagram
• Quality is a subjective – the value is in the conversations rather than the numbers
• Quality views can help plan and prioritise development of features in the product and paying down technical debt
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2sRcaS9
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Jun 12, 2017 • 32min
Alanna Brown and Nicole Forsgren on the State of DevOps Report 2017
Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to Alanna Brown Director of Technical Product Marketing at Puppet and Nicole Forsgren, PhD in Management Information Systems and CEO at DORA, on the State of DevOps Report 2017.
Why listen to this podcast:
- Three new areas of research in 2017: leadership, automation and organizational performance for non-financial organizations.
- Transformational leaders have a clear business vision and communicate in an inspiring way, and provide intellectual stimulation, care for their followers' needs, and praise accomplishments.
- High performing not-for-profit organizations (such as government) are twice as likely to achieve their goals, just like commercial organizations.
- Medium performers are in the middle of the J curve effect where performance initially improves (via quick wins) but then gets worse (as technical debt surfaces) until it definitely improves again (for those that resist reverting to old ways).
- Survey data analysis involves rigorous statistical integrity checks, followed by data correlation, prediction and inferencial tests to gather new insights.
- C-level executives have to chose between ignoring technological transformation or leveraging DevOps to keep their organization competitive via improved technical practices and a culture of continuous improvement.
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2ra4re9
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Jun 5, 2017 • 35min
John Willis on DevOps Evolution, Leadership and Burnout
Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to John Willis, Director of Ecosystem Development for Docker and co-author of the "DevOps Handbook", on DevOps evolution, leadership and burnout.
Why listen to this podcast:
- DevOps got watered down along the way, but its principles and practices will stay.
- People can learn the technical side of DevOps with training but they need to follow up on case studies from organizations that went through similar journeys.
- Still early days to be able to distill what are the good and bad DevOps leadership practices, but we at least know that blameless environments are much more productive.
- We are missing a burnout survey in DevOps, number of people affected probably staggering high but no one knows for sure, so the problem gets underrated.
- The new view on human error is that we need to look at the system that allowed people to make the mistakes in the first place.
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2rLIPrG
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May 29, 2017 • 30min
Rosalind Radcliffe on the Non-Challenges to Continuous Delivery on Mainframe
Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to Rosalind Radcliffe, Distinguished Engineer at IBM, about mainframe software delivery, from technical evolution to the mindset change required to adopt DevOps and modern development practices.
Why listen to this podcast:
- Large organizations have not evolved practices in mainframe systems due to cultural challenges, not technical.
- Most mainframe applications still have high business value but don't take advantage of modern hardware.
- Modern practices like TDD, code coverage, infrastructure-as-code and automated pipelines are possible today in mainframe.
- Biggest problem in DevOps transformations is to exclude mainframe. There's no need for bi-modal IT because there is no constraint that mainframe must be slow to change.
- Aging workforce is a particular issue around mainframe. Younger developers are not attracted by old school practices.
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2r3KHuY
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May 22, 2017 • 34min
Gene Kim on Scaling DevOps and Learning from Courageous "Horses" at the DevOps Enterprise Summit
In this podcast Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to Gene Kim, co-author of the "DevOps Handbook" and "The Phoenix Project" books, on how to scale DevOps in large organizations ("horses") and the need for continuous learning and adaptation.
Why listen to this podcast:
- DevOps Enterprise Summit focuses on continuously learning from leaders elevating technical practices and cultural norms at large, complex organizations.
- Remaining challenges in large organizations include largely outsourced IT workforces, rigid change management processes, and powerful regulatory offices.
- Effective DevOps transformations require a certain political savvyness to protect teams and prevent initiatives getting killed too early.
- It's not the org chart that dictates outcomes, it's how people act and react. Reorganization is far less important than setting cultural norms and expectations.
- Metrics that matter in high performing organizations are code deployment lead time, deployment frequency, change success rate, or mean time to repair.
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2q9VRKQ
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May 15, 2017 • 25min
Adam Tornhill on Good Engineering Culture, Technical Debt and Ways to Reduce Inter-Team Conflict
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Adam Tornhill of Empear on combining psychology and software engineering, technical debt.
Why listen to this podcast:
- The problems in software engineering are not technical they are almost always people related
- A lot of technical debt is not actually technical in nature – it is due to organisational and social factors
- Research that shows that the number of developers who work on a block of code is a predictor of the number of quality issues that code will have
- There is a cuttoff point above which adding more people to work on a codebase becomes a negative return is fairly low
- Safety to be able to admit to not knowing, collaboration and constant learning are key to a healthy engineering culture
- Complex areas of a codebase which change frequently are the best targets for technical debt reduction - hotspotsInter-team conflict is inevitable unless you have an engineering culture where there is a clear and compelling common goal
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2qkQtsj
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 8, 2017 • 26min
Jason Hand on DevOps Culture and Powerful Post-Mortems
In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jason Hand of VictorOps about the DevOps culture, what ChatOps is and powerful post-mortems.
Why listen to this podcast:
- The misaligned incentives between development and operations in many organisations
- The need to instil a sense of ownership across the whole delivery organisation where everyone takes responsibility for solving problems, rather than saying “that’s not my job”
- There is no roadmap to change the culture of a company, because every company is different
- In complex systems you can’t avoid failure, so make sure you can learn from it and respond rapidly
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2qKmrPe
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 1, 2017 • 24min
Portia Tung on the Critical Importance of Play in the Workplace
In this podcast, Shane Hastie speaks to Portia Tung, founder of the School of Play, author and executive coach, about the critical importance of play in the workplace.
Why listen to this podcast:
- Culture is defined by what people say and think, based on what’s expected of them and the environment they are in
- You don’t change culture – you grow it. Culture is emergent based on the ingredients you put into the mix for growing it
- The high rates of depression and burnout in high-tech organisations
- The opposite of depression is play
- Ways to incorporate play into work lives
- Work should give us a clear purpose, play unleashes creativity – surely the two belong together
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2pB6zO7
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Apr 24, 2017 • 29min
Chris Matts on BDD, Real Options, Risk Management and the Impact of Culture for Effective Outcomes
Shane Hastie spoke to Chris Matts “The IT Risk Manager”, one of the original thinkers behind Real Options, Feature Injection and Behaviour Driven Development, about BDD, Real Options, Risk Management and the Impact of Culture for Effective Outcomes.
Why listen to this podcast:
- Real Options is about translating the ideas from financial risk management into IT projects
- Understanding that things go wrong and that what is thought of as the last responsible moment is often actually too late and is in fact an irresponsible moment
- Most of the challenges to agile adoption are far above the level of the delivery team
- Introducing a simple governance framework which supports an agile culture
- The difference between the community of needs and the community of solutions, and the need for both
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2pes3jD
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 10, 2017 • 18min
Grandview Prep on Using Scrum in Schools
Shane Hastie, Lead Editor in the Culture & Methods area, spoke to Susan Rose and Aileen Palmer of Grandview Prep about their experiences using Scrum in their school environment.
Why listen to this podcast:
• Taking on Agile & Scrum as a way to get things happening more effectively in the school
• Agile/Scrum is a natural fit for the education environment
• These are skills which students will take with them and are crucial to success in the 21st century workplace
• Not imposed as a mandate, rather adoption has been a voluntary pull approach
• The importance of all stakeholders buying in to the change, and acknowledging the need for improvement
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