Links:

• My Pairing column from October at The Register — The comments section is especially good for common sentiment about pair programming.
• Charles Lowell — We used to do a podcast.
• Gartner survey on pair programming adoption — I got the number wrong: it's actually around 20%, not just 10%.
• Mark Ardito goes over HCSC’s astonishing success with pair programming — They thought it'd take 12-15 weeks to get their MVP done, but it actually took 5.5 to 6 weeks we finish.
• Selecting people for pair programming and their enthusiastic response — More from Mark Ardito on HCSC's adoption of pair programming.
• Phil Horowitz talks about how exhausting pairing is at first — At Perforce: "This makes pair programming intense, especially at the beginning. At the end of the first day, I couldn't go home. Before I could face humans again, I put my phone on airplane mode, ignored my usual online accounts, and went to the gym for two hours of self-imposed isolation."

In addition to some other random digital transformation topics, we also discuss how HR policies are struggling to change with things like pair programming and DevOps.

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Show-notes and Links

• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 643

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Show Notes and Links

• Matt's CF Summit talk, "Building a Brand Around a Technology and Cultural Transformation". If you want to go, use the code CF16COTE to get 20% off CF Summit registration.
• Brian Gregory with Express Scripts - check out Brian in Twitter (@MrBrianGregory) or LinkedIn.
• Express Scripts - 30,000+ employees, $100bn in revenue, 20th largest company in the US,
• Starting with a large, mature IT portfolio including lots of assets from M&A.
• Winning over the various stakeholders and groups, including developers and enterprise architecture council.
• Working with legacy services.
• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.io
• See my promos and discount page for conference discount codes and other stuff

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 529.

Special Guest: Brian Gregory.

Matt and I talk about lessons learned from almost a year of helping transform IT at Allstate. When it comes to scaling up agile and cloud-think the real challenges are in functions other than development, like budgeting, planning, training, hiring, and how the overall IT department is organized. We discuss those topics - esp. budgeting! - and also how to set one's personal expectations about going on the transformation journey. Then we discuss an upcoming column on mine in The Register on the benefits of small batches thinking.

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Show Notes and Links

• After a year, the question becomes "can it scale?"
• How do we do: Budgeting, training, hiring, how do we organize teams
• We only plan with good information, not bad information.
• You need to establish an overall vision, but avoid being too specific on tactics. For example, with a claim application, we know the general product, the vertical, the line of business we have roughly an idea of what claims are, who the customer is, and what that experience is like. Delivering a better experience for claims, what that feels like, and how do we measure it - these things we don't know perfectly up-front, so we have lots of discipline around iterating and experimenting to deliver good product.
• How budgeting changes in this small batches approach.
• With a lot of this, you can't talk someone into doing these things up-front. They have to experience it first hand: you have to walk them through it.
• "Sometimes 'nothing' is a big win."
• Coté's DevOps columns at The Register.
• Not mentioned, but good thinking to be had in Larman's Law
• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.ios of small batches thinking.

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 477.

Download directly, listen above, or subscribe to the feed: iTunes, RSS Feed.

Show-notes and Links

• If we automate, we'll loose our close touch of the systems.
• Being on call, globally, back when there were actual pagers.
• Persuading people to change with tyranny, demo's, trust, and any other tactics you can get your introverted mind around.
• Recording Ernest's talk on all this, from DOES 2015: DevOps Transformations At National Instruments and Bazaarvoice (And Infosec!)
• From DevOpsDays Austin 2012, here's a panel discussion of DevOps at NI.
• Slides for DevOps Transformations at National Instruments and BazaarVoice, his presentation on DevOps at NI and BazaarVoice.
• One of the most comprehensive presentation on DevOps from Ernest and the other DevOps Austin crew.
• Ernest Mueller: @ernestmueller, The Agile Admin blog.
• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 655.

Special Guest: Ernest Mueller.

You don't hear too many stories about microservices in "normal" companies. In this episode, I talk with Nate Foreman about microservices-driven work he's been doing with a large enterprise recently. We discuss the goods and the bads of this approach and, overall, how it's working out. It's a good discussion of how all the usual "cloud native" concept actually play out in the real world.

(As you can guess, it's not actually an "action figure" company, we just used that example to mask the actual company.)

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Show Notes and Links

• DevOpsDays Detroit
• Nate in LinkedIn.
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 529.

What organization could be larger than the US Federal government? Not only that, the chance to transform how software is done in the government has perhaps one of the largest possible impacts of transforming any "IT department." In this episode, Matt and Coté talk with Diego Lapiduz who works in the GSA's 18F organization helping government agencies develop their software in new, more agile and cloud-driven ways. We discuss the background of 18F and the broader government initiatives to transform how software is done and also walk through some of the learnings 18F has had in trying to make such a huge transformation.

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Show-notes and Links

• Hiring is the biggest problem around government processes.
• To build empathy and different teams working together, try to tackle a common goal.
• Building credibly by demonstrating that your method works.
• The Ugly Baby Problem - winning over people who think they're already doing it right.
• Measuring success.
• 18F in github. github.com/18F and 18f.gsa.gov.
• Examples of project: NotAlone.gov, The College Score Card.
• Explaining "failing fast" in government. People start to understand it as they have more experience.
• How open source is helpful here, how non-government folks get involved and contribute to the open source projects.
• Diego's recent talk at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2014.
• As more background on IT change in the government, check out this overview from Mikey Dickerson at OSCON 2015.
• Diego Lapiduz: @dlapiduz
• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 458.