Episode 60: Allan Kelly on Agile Development and what’s wrong with it

Meet our next guest, Allan Kelly. Allan began his career as a software developer but quickly moved into consulting. He has authored several books on software development and shares his love of tech and how to be more efficient in software development with others in the industry. Listen in to episode 60 and hear his story.
Say hello to Allan on Twitter!

Allan’s Bio:
Allan makes digital development teams more effective and improves delivery with continuous agile approaches to reduce delay and risk while increasing value delivered. He helps teams and smaller companies including start-ups and scale-ups with advice, coaching, and training. Managers, product, and technical staff are all involved in his improvements.
 
Allan is the originator of Retrospective Dialogue Sheets and Value Poker. He is also the author of four books, including “Xanpan -team-centric Agile Software Development” and “Business Patterns for Software Developers” and more recently “Continuous Digital: An agile alternative to project”. On Twitter he is @allankellynet.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of mentoring developers. Today my guest is Allan Kelly. Allan, how are you?
Allan: I’m very well. Thank you for asking me, Arsalan.
Arsalan: I’m so happy to have you here. You are not in the US. You are in London. Is that correct?
Allan: Yes. I’m sitting here in sunny London. No rain today.
Arsalan: That is incredible. I am so sorry that I have to hold you in your home office right now instead of out there having fun on those rare sunny days in London. So the question is, who Allan is and you told me that you are an Agile coach and you coach people and teams about how to do better. You mentor people. You have so much that you have done in your life, and we really want to go into that. There is one story about your first proper programming job that you got. That was five years after you graduated, and it was supposed to be this amazing new opportunity where you do things and it didn’t go according to plan. What happened?
Allan: I had already been earning money for programming before college. When I went to college I learned how to do it properly. You know that thing when you ask users what they want and you write it all down, and you design it, and you build it, and everything’s cool? I learned all that in college and then I graduated. When I got to the real world, nobody does it like that. It’s all over the place. I do these jobs because you have to earn money, but I spent five years feeling guilty doing projects after projects. I was thinking that we don’t do these things the way we’re supposed to. I was thinking that it was all wrong because we don’t do it how I was taught in college.
Allan: I started working this job for the British railway system, and they were doing it properly. Everything was written down, and they have an ISO approval on all the rest of it. I was so happy to get this job. It was a nightmare. The documentation was as high as a five-year-old kid. I spent half my week writing documents. We got audited and we were coached on how to answer the auditor’s questions. We had these architects who came from a Cobalt background and we were writing in C++. They had no idea about the technology we were using. So, the code and the architecture were two completely different things.
Allan: One day at lunchtime, I wandered into a bookshop that was close to the office. I found this book by a guy called Jim McCarthy. He’s still around and he’s brilliant. He opened my eyes and I suddenly realized that the way I was taught in school was a bit wrong. It never works out like that. It can’t work out like that. Jim laid out how his team at Microsoft does things differently. I suddenly no longer felt alone or the odd one out.

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