Over the past decade, innovative companies, software industry thought leaders and lean/agile pioneers have discovered simpler, sturdier, more streamlined ways to be agile. These modern approaches share a focus on producing exceptional outcomes and growing an outstanding culture. Today, it makes far more sense to bypass antiquated agility in favor of modern approaches. Modern agile methods are defined by four guiding principles: Make People Awesome; Make Safety a Prerequisite; Experiment and Learn Rapidly and Deliver Value Continuously. World famous organizations like Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Etsy and others are living proof of the power of these four principles. However, you don’t need to be a name brand company to leverage modern agile wisdom.
http://www.modernagile.org
Interview with Maaret Pyhäjärvi
Episode 43 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp), a Lead Quality Engineer at FSecure, an agile practitioner and the author of Strong Style Pair Programming, Mob Programming Guidebook and Exploratory Testing. Maaret describes the culture at FSecure and the benefits her team discovered when they experimented with removing the Product Owner from their team (though there is still a Product Management group in the company). Her team found that the benefits included far greater productivity, solving problems they hadn’t managed to solve in years and becoming far more data-driven. Maaret describes the “superpower” have having a “feature team” that works across three different technical stacks, and how #NoProductOwner, #NoEstimates and #NoJira are working nicely. She describes how her teams have shortened releases from every six months to every two weeks. Maaret’s team runs about 300,000 automated tests everyday on 14,000 virtual machines. Only a few of the FSecure developers use Test-Driven Development. The company also got rid of all Scrum Masters during a resizing. Coaching happens, yet it’s not an official title. Maaret is a fan of the Modern Agile principles and uses them in her work. You can learn more about Maaret and her work at https://maaretp.com/