06. Myths, Norms, and Expired Options

Jorgen Hesselberg and Steven Wolff on Agile Amped, Melissa Perri on Agile Uprising, Eric Elliott on Simple Leadership, Liz Keogh on Being Human, and Alex Schladebeck on Test Talks.

I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected].

This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 4, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.

JORGEN HESSELBERG AND STEVEN WOLFF ON AGILE AMPED

The Agile Amped podcast featured Jorgen Hesselberg and Steven Wolff with host Howard Sublett. I liked what Steven had to say about how new norms can come into being simply through inaction and how we want to be more intentional about creating norms. This comment reminded me of the discussion of norms in the book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Grenny et al., a book I highly recommend. In my own work, I use working agreements with my team to intentionally develop team norms and hold each other accountable for them.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/change-the-norms-to-change-the-culture/id992128516?i=1000429382285&mt=2

Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/change-the-norms-to-change-the-culture/

MELISSA PERRI ON AGILE UPRISING

The Agile Uprising podcast featured Melissa Perri with hosts Colleen Johnson, Troy Lightfoot, and Chris Murman. This episode caught my attention because I enjoyed Melissa’s last appearance on Agile Uprising which motivated me to pre-order her book The Build Trap back in November last year. I learned a lot from the book and it introduced me to the book The Art Of Action by Stephen Bungay, which I talked about in the last podcast episode.

I liked Melissa’s description of product managers as bad idea terminators. I see this as more of a behavior during the convergent thinking phase of product design. Lack of focus is definitely a problem I see on product teams, so I can appreciate the idea of having someone to keep people focused on the most valuable problems to solve.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/escaping-the-build-trap-w-melissa-perri/id1163230424?i=1000429120613&mt=2

Website link: https://agileuprising.libsyn.com/podcast/escaping-the-build-trap-w-melissa-perri

ERIC ELLIOTT ON SIMPLE LEADERSHIP

The Simple Leadership podcast featured Eric Elliott with host Christian McCarrick. I appreciated Eric’s comment about the myth of the individual contributor engineer because I have seen developers being judged on simple, easy-to-measure metrics like closed ticket counts when a more appropriate metric would be one that takes into account their time spent mentoring and the benefits that such mentoring had on the team. Over the long term, I have seen the damage that judging engineers by closed ticket count does to a culture where everybody is incentivized to work in their individual silo and almost no mentoring takes place even from senior engineers for whom mentoring and coaching should be, in my opinion, a large part of their day.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-culture-can-help-your-teams-scale-with-eric-elliott/id1260241682?i=1000429163879&mt=2

Website link: http://simpleleadership.io/how-culture-can-help-you-scale-with-eric-elliott/

LIZ KEOGH ON BEING HUMAN

The Being Human podcast featured Liz Keogh with host Richard Atherton. Liz talked about the Cynefin framework, psychological safety, and real options. I particularly liked her story of a team that invested in making changes easily reversible by creating a rollback mechanism for when a production release goes awry. She remarked on how this technical safety net provided psychological safety as well.

I also liked her description of real options, which I have recently been reading about in the book Commitment by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts, and Chris Geary. Liz told a story about how conference organizers gave themselves options by over-ordering on the engraved trophies.

The very affecting second half of this podcast episode was focused on the #metoo movement. Liz shared her experiences of being harassed and Richard confessed to his own poor behavior.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/47-1-complexity-2-exploring-metoo-with-liz-keogh/id1369745673?i=1000429964823&mt=2

Website link: http://shoutengine.com/BeingHuman/47-1-complexity-2-exploring-metoo-with-liz-keogh-73971

ALEX SCHLADEBECK ON TEST TALKS

The Test Talks podcast featuring Alex Schladebeck with host Joe Colantonio. The title of the episode, “How to Listen to Your Tests”, immediately caught my attention since I have been encouraging co-workers to develop this skill ever since I read Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided By Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce, even going so far as to create a 10-minute YouTube video tutorial on how to Listen To The Tests last April.

Joe and Alex talked about how she applies her training in linguistics in her career in software testing. It turns out that such training was actually helpful as it taught her how to move back and forth between detailed and abstract ways of thinking. They got into a discussion of test data management, which Alex likened to continuous integration because it is something that starts out being painful when you don’t address it often enough or when you push it onto the testers and it becomes easier the more often you pay attention to it and when you make it everyone’s responsibility.

I also liked Alex’s story of a pelican encounter on an early-morning run coming to represent to her the unknown unknowns that exploratory testing helps you discover.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/240-how-to-listen-to-your-tests-with-alex-schladebeck/id826722706?i=1000429560907&mt=2

Website link: https://www.joecolantonio.com/testtalks/240-alex-schladebeck/

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Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus