Sunday, September 06, 2020

Good talks/podcasts (Sept 2020 I)

 

These are the best podcast/talks I've seen/listen to recently:

  • Agile as if you meant it (Maaret Pyhäjärvi) [Agile, Lean Product Management, Product, Product Strategy, Teams] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) A good example of what Modern Agile looks like. Customer-focused team, with direct contact with the customer and without a proxy. Very interesting. It reminds me a lot of the way I used to work at [@AleaSolucionesS](https://twitter.com/AleaSolucionesS) and at TheMotion ([@HoneyBadgersDev](https://twitter.com/HoneyBadgersDev)).
  • How to Write Acceptance Tests (Dave Farley) [Continuous Delivery, Technical Practices, testing] "How to write Acceptance Tests" describes the use of Automated Acceptance Tests, an important tool in evaluating our software. These tests are focussed on answering questions like "Does our software do what our users want and expect?". Software Development teams have been trying to achieve this insight for many years, with often poor results. Grounded in the ideas of TDD and BDD this Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) approach is based in the idea of creating a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for expressing test cases.
  • Lean starts with kanban (Michael Balle) [Lean] This presentation shows how lean is a people-first, value-based strategy. It also shows how kanban is the starting-point tool to learn and understand lean's upside-down thinking.
  • Product Management for Continuous Delivery (Elizabeth Ayer) [Continuous Delivery, Lean Product Management, Product] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) This presentation explains how Continuous Delivery is very beneficial for excellent product management and growing a customer-focus team. CD enables closing the loop for each product increment, getting feedback, making decisions, and punting the focus on the impact generated (and not creating more and more features).
  • Tidy First? (Kent Beck) [Agile, Design, Evolutionary Design, Technical Practices, XP] (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) Great talk about the human relationships generated during software development. Kent explains these relations and uses them to analyze the development flow, the need for small safe steps, and the tension generated between the people involved. For me, this talk is a must.
  • How Stripe Invests in Technical Infrastructure (Will Larson) [Infrastructure, Platform, Platform as a product, Product] Will shares Stripe's approaches to prioritizing infrastructure as your company scales, justifying—and maybe even expanding—your company's spend on technical infrastructure, exploring the whole range of possible areas to invest into infrastructure, adapting your approach between periods of firefighting and periods of innovation, and balancing investment in supporting existing products and enabling new product development.
  • The science of batch size (Donald G Reinerstsen) Don explains the impacts of reducing the batch size in the product development world (not only software). Dense but very interesting.
  • Working without a Product Owner (Maaret Pyhäjärvi) [Lean Product Management, Product, Teams] Maaret talk about the experiment they did for three months working with a Product Owner or Product Manager. They experienced the development team delivering multitudes of value and innovate customer-oriented solutions in direct collaboration with customers. Team satisfaction and happiness bloomed. The experiment turned into a continuous way of working.
Reminder, All these talks are interesting even just listening to them, without seeing them.

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