It gives me great pleasure to bring you the thoughts and advice of Mr. Dave Coombes as the inaugural post for Agile Tribe of Mentors. Fittingly, Dave was one of the first people to introduce me to Agile when he worked with Thoughtworks back in the early noughties. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude for ensuring I understood the Agile & XP principles and developed an agile mindset from the outset. One of the best developers I've ever worked with he bears a large portion of responsibility for my understanding of Unit testing, TDD, DDD & Continuous integration. His finger gestures to denote dependency injection remain burned into my memory 15 years later.
About Dave
Dave is currently Director of Engineering at Tyro Payments based in Sydney
He is an accomplished technologist with eighteen years experience of delivering mission critical enterprise applications across a range of business domains.
As a technology leader he loves to explore, learn and apply new technologies and techniques, whilst always remembering that the business value and user satisfaction delivered by a solution is the true measure of its success.
You can follow Dave on twitter: @davecoombes
Without further ado here is Dave's advice:
Name 1-5 books you regularly recommend, or that you think all agilists should read:
- Turn the ship around
- Smart leaders, smarter teams
- Radical candor
- 37 things one architect knows
- Just enough software architecture
- How to measure anything
Name 1-5 people you recommend agilists should follow on twitter (or other social media):
- Charity majors (@mipsytipsy)
- Jim Webber (@jimwebber)
- Nat price (@natpryce )
- Swardley (@swardley)
- Dan North (@tastapod )
If you could get one single message across to the entire agile community what would it be and why?
It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.
What do you do when you get frustrated with the industry? Do you have any coping mechanisms?
On an industry perspective, I try and accept that by definition we are as good as it’s ever been and our efforts are just to make it better.
On a wider front, I try to put my frustrations in perspective of people who have genuinely life-threatening issues and realise that my frustrations are within my control to address.
What is your favourite failure you have experienced in your career that set you up for future success?
Not so much a failure but as you get more experienced (ie older) you realise there are no absolutes and context is everything. ‘Agile’ is just a toolbox you pull from to optimise delivery of value
What advice would you give to folks who are just starting their agile journey? What bad advice have you heard given?
You need to understand the prevailing wisdom at the time that the agile manifesto was written. Waterfall/ RUP was the received wisdom at the time and you need to understand that to understand where agile came from.
What direction would you like to see Agile go in in the next 5-10 years?
Less about certification and methodology, more about values and pragmatism
Thank you Dave
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