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In pursuing agile practice I follow a family tradition of care and craft.

My mother is an immigrant. College educated but she made her living crafting the valences on fine drapery and upholstering furniture. She took pride in matching a pattern at the seams no matter how intricate. Her hands are wrecked from handling heavy fabric. Now she paints.

2
My father is a retired engineer who hobbies with an engineer’s precision — calculating how much steel to mill from the inside of a casting reel or the optimal temperature to anneal tempered fly hooks.

There comes a point where people offer to pay him for his hobbies. He moves onto something else. He does these things for pleasure.

3
My tween-age daughter aspires to be an engineer or scientist. She’s been on a Lego FIRST Robotics team since she was seven.

Her coaches wrote about her:

“You were chosen based on your ability to cooperate with others, problem solve, your endurance, care for the pieces, and enthusiasm for the task at hand.”

4
My girl is a born agilist…

Ten years ago, Agile was a word chosen to rally a community.

Now it’s a brand promoted as a tool that solves problems when it’s more essentially a set of values that encourage us confront problems.

We value…

5

• Collaboration over negotiation
• Working software over specification
• People over process
• Responding to change over following a plan

Let me tell you about my early experiences with specifications and plans…

6
Important people who don’t know how to build software but earn much more than software developers think big thoughts.
They call in other people who also don’t know how to build software but earn much less than software developers to shatter those big thoughts into a myriad small, literal and strangely ambiguous fragments.

7
Then we plan…

Humans adore plans… we worship plans…

A driver put her faith in her GPS. It told her to turn onto a bridge. Problem was the bridge had been washed away. Her $160,000 Mercedes was swept away and she had to be rescued as it sank.

8
The truth is people are inherently flawed. People are irreducibly complex. So is the software that solves their interesting problems. So while big ideas are great. Attempts to specify are great. Attempts to plan are great.

They’re just a conversation. They are not in and of themselves valuable.

9
I want to engage with people to navigate the imperfect world we see in front of us

Focus on what I did, what I’m doing and what I want to do next. To arrive at a desired outcome together and to continually improve how we work and relate to each other.

Because reality is serendipity and opportunity…

10
But it’s also setbacks, disappointments, and failure.

Failure isn’t any less awful when we refuse to see it. Worse is for failure to become, “the way things work around here”.

I accept failure. If we call it out, applaud the attempt and make changes so that we don’t repeat that exact failure again.

11
This openness to risk results in an iterative, reflective way of working I love because I dearly want to spend each day doing a little less crap and a little more not crap than the day before.

I want to achieve this by reducing the net crap in the world, not simply delegating my crap to others.

12
People…

There’s a Gallup study that claims the best and worst teachers, nurses, and policemen have more in common with each other than those in the broad middle. While the best are energized by their caring and use that passion to drive to the best outcomes, the worst are burnt and ruined by it.

The indifferent middle, they just crank along.

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A practice that puts process over people constrains behavior to avoid failure without consideration for the individual. In a concern for consistency it prevents the best even as it attempts to avoid the worst.

The agile community is not immune. We’re so focused on scale and process recipes, artifacts and tools.

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As if people are tangential. Easier to master than the software we engage with them to create.

Agile adoption in these terms becomes a mechanism for iterative mediocrity — a safe place for the indifferent middle.

I reject this.

Improving the workplace, improving worker satisfaction, improving collaboration is not a side affect of my agile practice. It is my practice.

15
I acknowledge that successful products can emerge from horrible workplace. And that that good workplaces can create failed products.

But a way of working that tears down talented people’s desire to build is tragic. It saps the world of its limited supply inspiration, creativity and joy. This is evil.

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To combat this evil, my understanding of Agile principles requires honesty and trust among co-workers. A shared ambition to do better and be better while causing each other less unnecessary pain.

I focus on this in retrospectives, in one on ones, in coaching and in reflecting on my own decisions and actions.

17
The great thing about even striving after this goal is as you work towards it your co-workers will give you permission to demand more of them.

…just as they will demand more of you.

This demand gives you an angel on your shoulder. It inspires even as it shames you into action.

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This isn’t easy. It is mortifying to confront your own limitations and the limitations of others.

But the action isn’t to change who you are. It is to adjust specific behaviors one at a time in the larger interests of the people you work with and the work you do together.

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The reward is that you get to be the same person with your boss that you are with your co-workers that you are with your staff. A person you can wear home. A wiser, better person than you were last month or last year.

This is a path my mother and father lay down for me and one I wish for my daughter.

20
I don’t merely want success on a project or a job. I want to spend my life loving what I do. I want to be proud of my accomplishments,

…And I want to be proud of who I was as I attained them.

This is the existential joy I get from Agile practice.

Thank you.

(1-2) Hello,

My premise is the lack of women developers in the US is an impediment to value delivery and product innovation in the software industry.

In light of this, Agile principles call on practitioners to confront hostile workplace conditions and enterprises to address the material impediments of pay and advancement.

This beneficial change in teams and companies can incrementally change perceptions in the larger society.

(3) To introduce myself

I’m a software practitioner not a consultant or educator. I’ve studied and applied Agile methods for nine years.

I’ve spent most of my career in woman run organizations.

(4) I have a daughter

…who loves technology and sought out a culturally diverse, math and science school in Brooklyn. So, this topic is personal to me.

(5) Women are underrepresented in Computer Science

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, women represent 46% of the workforce but only 25% of software developers. Over two decades the percentage of women developers has steadily declined.

(6) Women are leaving mid-career

Women are leaving IT in larger numbers than men. 56% of women leave mid-career across all technology occupations. 41% leave their careers in “high technology” compared to only 17% of men. Half of women leaving STEM careers leave the STEM sector completely.

(7) Women are not studying Computer Science

According to the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, in the decade between 1986 and 1995 the number of women earning Computer Science bachelor’s degrees dropped 55%. As of 2010, the percentage was still falling despite growing percentages of women graduating from four year colleges. This is not typical of STEM where 49% of bachelor degrees go to women.

(8) Young Women are disinterested in pursuing high tech education or careers

The Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study, a longitudinal study of 1,400 white and african american students found that women were much more likely to have no interested in IT related careers and degrees than men.

(9) At what cost to the software industry?

In the last decade, the U.S. software industry represented $200B in annual sales and employed 2.2M software professionals. McKinsey & Co estimates in this decade, demand for mid-career IT professionals will increase by 25% while the available pool will decrease by 15%. This in a country where 71% of workers are in jobs with low demand or an oversupply of eligible candidates.

(10) The cost of attrition

And let’s also get at the cost of attrition. According to HR magazine, it costs approximately 100-125% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them. Retaining one-quarter of the women who leave computer engineering mid-career could represent a ten year savings of $8B to the industry.

(11) Lost opportunity in the software industry (Product)

The lack of women on software teams is also a potential loss to product innovation…

(12) Women are our customer

Women directly or indirectly influence 61% of U.S. consumer electronics purchases[18].

(13) Women in gaming

Women are 42% of active game players and 48% of frequent game purchasers. And if you think they’re just buying them for their kids, industry research shows women 18 and over are 37% of game players whereas boys 17 and under are only 13%[19].

(14) Women on the internet

Half (50.4%) of the internet population is women 18 and over. They spend an average of 38 hours per month online. They spend 5% more time than men in online social networking and 20% more time on online shopping. Women account for 58% of internet buyers, 61% of internet transactions and 58% of internet dollars.

(15) Women are underserved

Software products are generally designed with no consideration for women as distinct user groups. In “Gender differences in Web Usability”, Frank Spillars states, “Gender differentiation is barely present in North American technology product design… let alone Web experiences[22].”

(16) how women perceive and use software

In “Towards Female Preferences in Design.” the authors found differences in the ways men and women perceive and describe software products. “The results of this research have revealed female-oriented themes that should… enlarge views of pleasurable product design attributes and language for the genders[23].”

(17) three ways companies fail.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) highlights three ways companies fail to address women consumers: Poor product design: failing to tailor products to women’s unique needs and challenges.

(18) three ways companies fail.

Clumsy sales and marketing: based on outdated images and stereotypes.

(19) three ways companies fail.

Inability to provide meaningful hooks or differentiation: considering women indistinguishable from the general customer population or thinking of them as one monolithic segment[24].

(20) How would having women on dev teams help software better address the needs of women

For this, I’ll lean on the research of Nonaka Ikujiro and Takeuchi Hirotaka . This slide is an illustration of their concept of the product development cycle in serially innovative companies. It requires the creation and sharing of two kinds of knowledge within the organization. Explicit knowledge – that which we can explain in words – and tacit knowledge – that which can best be expressed by doing. This concept of knowledge creation and techniques for forming teams that support it are the roots of the most widely adopted Agile process framework, Scrum[39]. Nonaka and Takeuchi emphasize that an enabling condition for sustained innovation is, requisite variety, having a product team made of members with different backgrounds, perspectives and motivations. Requisite variety applies to cross-functional teams but also to team members with diverse life experience. Because it is through life experience that we acquire tacit knowledge.

(21) Matsushita Example of Tacit Knowledge

The classic example of the incorporation of tacit knowledge into a disruptive product design is the first Matsushita bread machine. It took a hands on experience of baking bread by one of the product engineers (a woman) to crack how to implement the mechanics of kneading dough in a bread maker.

(22) Team diversity and delivering value

Women are significant customers and influencers in the buying decision for software and software dependent technology. Statistically, women have different perceptions and preferences for software. Therefore, according to knowledge creation theory, it is a competitive advantage to have women individual contributors bring their tacit knowledge to software product development.