DDD North 2017

14th Oct 2017 | Univeristy of Bradford 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

The Power of Mentoring

Simone Cuomo

Mentor - an experienced and trusted advisor

• Book - “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcom Gladwell.
• Mentoring is a two way process. This requires trust and someone willing to learn.
• Multiple mentors can support different skills.
• Reverse mentoring is where the mentoree is higher up the hierarchical scale. For example a engineer teaching a director about development or deployments.

You can teach without wanting it, it’s called “by example”.

• Lead by example and inspire followers.
• Even great mentors have mentors themselves. Example - Mark Zuckerberg was mentored by Steve Jobs

Entrepreneurs with mentors show that they are willing to learn, open to different perspective and adaptable to change.

• Accepting weakness is a strength of it’s own.
• A cycle:
  • Identify weakness
  • Learn
  • Teach (Do you know something enough to actually teach others?)
  • Repeat

Imposter syndrome: Scared of not knowing enough and being found out as a fraud.

• 1/3 people suffer from imposter syndrome.
• More women affected than men.
• If you mentor someone you get a trusted a advisor.
• Juniors don’t know what they don’t know. Therefore the cannot know the boundaries of their knowledge.
• Rather than rating a skill from 1-10 try this scale
  1. Fix
  2. Create
  3. Improve
  4. Teach
• Just like Software Craftsmanship, we should usher in Mentor Craftsmanship by
  • Leading by example
  • Curing imposter syndrome
  • Accepting your weaknesses
  • Inspiring others
• Prepare for 1-2-1s.
• Try to create circumstance for others to showcase their strengths. Let them “be the hero”.

Spot the Different. Automating Visual Regression Testing

Viv Richards

• Only automate common things as it requires investment.
• Fail fast for quick feedback and then adapt to change.
• Appium works with selenium to drive iOS and Android, both simulator/emulator and real devices.
• Idea: limit WIP to less than the full team to force team members across different disciplines to work together.

Scaling Agile in your Organisation with the Spotify Model

Stephen Haunts

• Book- “A Gentle Introduction to Agile”
• Growing rapidly results in growing pains.
• Must manage this growth carefully.
• Problems:
  • Divided by discipline.
  • Seating plan by function.
  • These do not support growth.
• Video: “Spotify Engineering Culture”
• Make Agile things optional, but keep the spirit
  • Agile > Scrum
  • Servant > Master
• A Tribe is made of Squads
• Self organising, autonomous and empowered.
• Leaders decide the “Why”
• Squad decides the “What” and “How”
• Loosely coupled but tightly aligned squads.
• No competition between squads.
• Hire for cultural fit first, skills second.
• Keep the same line manager even if you move squad.
• Guilds for particular areas of interest. Slack channels for each.
• Encourage innovations with hackathons.
  • Centred on customers.
  • Cross functional.
  • Start from scratch.
  • Focused on the output.
  • Iterative and continuous.
• Community over formal structures.
• Embrace failure early, and learn from mistakes.
• “Launch Darkly” for feature flags.
• Spotify model does suit monolithic applications, so move away from this.
• Remember, this is not a silver bullet.
• Must have management buy in.
• Customers in insurance industry gave fixed dates and budgets. Agile team had to work backwards from this.
• Works well for start-ups and companies of less than 100 employees.
• You should adapt the Spotify model to your business.
• Needs wholesale adoption by the entire company.
• Encourage a learning culture.