Agile Austin, Oct 10, 2017 - Rage, Disorder, and Your Agile Team

At Agile Austin this month Matt McBride from Genesis10 talked about Agile team culture at Kasasa.com headquarters.
He wrote Leadership Patterns for Software and Technology Professionals.

My random notes:
* Rage, Stress, and Its Impact
Rage is one specific behavior that our teams are exposed to in their daily lives.
Rage and anger are types of stress.  Rage and anger are specific instantiations of the "abstract class" named stress.

What is impact of stress?: Health, Behavior, and relationships with our team members.
Stress can be a good thing for short periods.

Cortisol is the chemical produced during stress.  Long-term Cortisol can shrink your brain.
Sources of Anger: disappointment, frustration, judgement, rejection fear.

Anger make people indiscriminately punitive.

* Threat of Architectural Disorder
complexity grows at an exponential pace
Nonfunctional features (security, testing ...) tend to get lost or ignored
Grady Booch on characteristics of successful projects: strong architectural vision and well-managed iterative cycle (scrum).

Major Classes of Program Features to  Think about At the Beginning
1. Significant features for business/customer
   We look for functional features with a high business risk
2. Architecturally significant features
    We look for functional and non-functional features with high technical risk.

From Agile we need to embrace these:  commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect.

Missing in college education is leadership skills.  How to educate non-technical customers.


Leadership:
1. Leaders are avid learners.
Leaders try, fail, learn, and grow.
2. Leadership is a choice.
We have to change the way we think about ourselves, careers, and work.

* Tactics for reducing anger, rage, and stress
Have everyone take one deep breadth
Then followup with a specific goal

Partnership Pattern - moving forward from newbie to Trusted Partner
1. Performance - establish record of success
2. Credibility - be trusted based on performance
3. Trust -
4. Become a Trusted Partner

* The resolute pattern
Recast problems as assumptions to be questioned

Invest in your team and in development of leadership and interaction skills.