Vancouver Tech Podcast

Special Guest Alex Cruise, Architect/Development Manager at Splunk Special guest Alex Cruise, Architect/Development Manager at Splunk joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss the development culture, organizational structure and some use cases for Splunk, the company that brings us log monitoring and analaysis tools and services. Cruise explains a little about LeSS (Large Scale Scrum), and that their team has been adopting it as a means of escaping some of the failure modes of traditional small-scale agile. LeSS involves things like a unified product backlog, such that every item that a product manager deems being worthy of being worked on, goes onto the shared product backlog. One of the main reasons for Cruise's teams to be making a transition towards LeSS is to reduce hyperspecialization. Mature organizations tend to have people who develop a great deal of expertise within a narrow field. With these hyperspecialized experts, it becomes increasingly difficult for someone new to get up to speed and be productive