Agile
Modern Agile
We've all worked on projects that claim to be agile but are nothing more than the same old wasteful waterfall with daily standups. Move beyond Scrum and SAFe and learn how to be agile rather than merely do agile.
Description
It's been two decades since the Agile Manifesto, and its impact on software development has been so profound that every project claims to be agile. There's a backlog. The whole team mumbles its way through pointless meetings where no one sits because, hey, that's the price of innovation. You even do Fist of Five votes of confidence after long Sprint Planning meetings, but they're pure theater because your boss told you to keep bad news away from the client. In the end, you know full well there is nothing agile about your project. It's just rituals to market an agile facade when you're all really just papering over waterfall. Sound familiar?
Modern Agile teaches you how to move past performative ceremonies--to be agile not just do agile. To build products and not languish in projects. You will learn that what matters most of all is outcomes. How you get there day to day depends on your organizational culture, customer base, market environment, personnel. But you will learn about the keys to delivering the highest quality software in the least amount of time spending the least amount of money: open communications, psychological safety, automation, and continuous improvement thanks to relentless, actionable feedback.
What makes this course different
In software engineering, we often see valuable ideas become confusing if not controversial or meaningless buzzwords because coaches and consultants misrepresent these ideas to their customers to make money. There is no better example of this than "agile." No one has captured this sad reality better than Ron Jeffries, one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, whose disgust with the Agile Industrial Complex is so overwhelming that he has resigned himself to advise us Developers Should Abandon Agile. Not the principles but the machinery that has given us heavyweight derivatives like Scrum and SAFe, pointless certifications, and worst of all, unhappy engineers and bad software that continue to emerge from all that bad faith.
And now here we are asking you to pay us and to trust us to help you build better software faster, cheaper, and higher quality.
The difference is we aren't going to sell you any kind of one-size-fits-all approach because there isn't one. We honestly don't know what will work for you. What we do know is we build software ourselves. We will introduce you to many techniques you can apply to be truly agile and optimize for delivery, and we know what the highest performing organizations, in and out of tech, have in common. We will guide you towards deciding which of these technical practices make the most sense for you, so you can become a high performing organization in your own right doing it in a way uniquely yours.
Course Syllabus
Session 1: Leadership, Communication, Trust, and Psychological Safety
- Simple Rules
- A Helping Hand
- Don't be Square
- Guardrails
- Decentralized Decisions
- The Technological Maestro
- Listening
- Embracing Bad News
- No judgment. No Blame
Session 2: Relentless Feedback
- Smaller is Better
- Mistake Driven Development
- Building the Right Thing: The Minimum Viable Product
- Context and Core
- Building the Thing Right: Developing Fast
- Emerging Architecture and Software Design
- Eliminating Waste
- Testing Fast, Testing Right
- Deploying Fast with DevSecOps
- DevSecOps
- Mature Optimization
- Resisting Ceremony
Session 3: Metrics
- Measuring the Right Things
- Giving Developers SPACE
- Outcomes vs. Outputs
- Architecture Maintainability
- Code Maintainability
- Infrastructure Maintainability
- Testing and the Pitfalls of Code Coverage
- Security, Performance, and Accessibility
- Culture
- Continuous Improvement
I care as much about building software the right way as I do about software itself. It hasn't been easy, but I have helped commercial businesses and the least agile organization of all, government, become more agile. I'm certified in agile, which is...OK, but I am also a member of the Government Accountability Office Agile Expert Group and a regular contributor to numerous guides for making the government agile. I also worked with the Executive Office of the President of the United States to revolutionize federal government contracting to maximize value for American taxpayers through agile development and open source.