Engineering Culture by InfoQ

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, talks to Kent McDonald, Steve Adolph and Ryland Leyton about the state of business analysis and product management in agile product development. They were participants in a weekend workshop where the Agile Alliance and the International Institute of Business Analysis were collaborating to produce a revised version of the Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge. Why listen to this podcast: - Analysis skills are necessary for successful product development - We don’t question and challenge the rationale and strategic alignment of projects enough, which results in lots of waste from doing the wrong projects or building the wrong features in a project - The best return on investment that you can get is to stop wasting your money - Value is hard to define but crucial to identify; the definition of value will be different in every context - Agile methods provide for learning and rapid feedback, which enables us to optimize value and ensure strategic alignment in product development - User stories are conversation placeholders, not orders to be fulfilled Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: bit.ly/2e32o5X - 6m 20s Analysis skills reside in many different roles and doing analysis in agile development is far less prescriptive that has been the case. - 6m 44s You need to have a very comprehensive toolkit and have the ability to relate the tool needed to the context of the work being done. - 9m 13s Advanced organisations are changing when they utilise analysis skills to determine which initiatives should be worked on and how they align with organisation strategy; being able to review these decisions even after an initiative has started, stopping development work when it is no longer valuable. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. bit.ly/2e32o5X You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/2cMnjfW

This is the first in a new series of podcasts from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences - the Engineering Culture Podcast. In this podcast, Wes Reisz, chair of the QCon conferences in San Francisco, London and New York talks to Phil Haack, an Engineering Director at GitHub focused on software pushed mostly to the desktop. He’s shipping software like GitHub Desktop, GitHub Extensions for Visual Studio and the Atom text editor. Haack joined GitHub in 2011 and is a prominent member of the .Net community. At Microsoft Phil was core to shipping NewGit and ASP.NET, MVC.NET. Why listen to this podcast: - There is often too much focus on the nitty-gritty details of software development practices but as you scale out to larger projects and teams the challenges are not technological- they are sociological. - Research shows that teams which are more diverse are more effective. - Engineers shifting to management should consider it a discipline like any other technical field; it’s not something that you should “just wing”. - Building an effective team requires trust and that allows candid discussions and healthy debates without disrupting the relationships. One-on-ones can be an effective way to do that. - To be an effective coach for engineers, a manager needs to be seen as a strong technical leader. Someone without technical credibility is generally not received well. Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3 5m 10s The big problems we have are sociological, and frequently companies and engineers don’t pay enough attention to these problems because they try to focus on the technical practices instead; but the root cause is how people interact with each other and how they are working together. 5m 40s The talk covers some personal lessons learned and the research that backs those personal lessons. There is validated research that shows certain things make for more effective teams. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3 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/2L7Irg3 Here is Phil Haack's talk on Social Coding for Effective Teams and Products recorded at QCon San Francisco 2016: https://bit.ly/2QPEU9D