Andrew Smith - Community Author: Finextra Research

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Building infrastructure

Recently I have been approached by a few people that agree with all my previous posts on agile, however, at the same time they question how it can work when it comes to building infrastructure. I get asked this because many will say, “surely at RTGS.global you're not following agile to build out the underlying infrastructure?” Now when I say infra...

29 September 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile series: Evolved roadmaps

In my last post within this series, I looked at roadmaps and how to build them in an agile environment. In this post I will share with you more the type of roadmaps I like to build. Following on from my last post, I received lots of questions around “dates” and maintenance of the roadmap, and while there are many ways to “skin a cat” as they say, ...

08 July 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Building roadmaps

The first, and probably most important thing to stress here is, you are building product roadmaps. The second thing to say is, do NOT build out product roadmaps at an executive level. All too often, product gets mixed in with strategy, as in, the executive think they are putting together strategy but rather they are talking products. To be frank, ...

14 May 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Including risk, compliance and internal audit

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Including risk, compliance and internal audit

This maybe the most 'controversial' article within this series, but it's potentially the one that could solve the most headaches, and for a COO/CIO/CTO maybe the one that removes the most stress, if risk, compliance, and internal audit are onboard. The truth across many functions within a financial institution is that they have not been exposed to ...

05 May 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: DevOps

In all of the articles that make up this “Agile Series”, a fair few of the same themes keep on flowing richly through each article. This one is no different…If you want your teams to be autonomous, if you want your teams to build self-contained products, if you want to be able to value delivery, then you need your teams to be able to deploy their ...

15 April 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Enabling agile with your software architecture

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Enabling agile with your software architecture

If you have the wrong software architecture, then your ability to really implement an agile engineering culture will be dramatically hampered. In previous posts, you will have noted that I outlined three core principles I like to instil within any engineering department. These principles being: Value delivery over predictability Value principles ...

31 March 2021 /devops

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Motivating Engineers

If you have spent most of your working life outside any form of IT department or engineering team, you probably won’t have come across many of the personalities that you find within those areas. I have been a software engineer since graduating from university and I can safely say that we are a unique bunch, more so when compared against a cross se...

18 March 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Applying your values and principles

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Applying your values and principles

In the previous article, we looked at underlying core values and setting principles to help create the right environment in which a good effective agile engineering culture can grow. In this article, we will look at how you can apply these to really build a great engineering culture. You need to coach a team Like many people I have long followed ...

05 March 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Agile values and principles

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Agile values and principles

When we talk 'agile' there are a few big issues that I notice, especially from management and the executive within financial institutions. These are preconceptions, thoughts of what agile is, what agile means based on previous IT project type experiences or from what they have picked up listening to podcasts, reading articles like this or what the...

19 February 2021 /devops

Agile Series: Decoupled, distributed domains

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

Agile Series: Decoupled, distributed domains

This is my first article in a series of articles aimed at helping financial services executives understand software concepts, design principles and how these contribute (and even shape) agile principles. As a result, I hope these articles illustrate just how effective agile can be, helping shape and cultivate different cultural behaviours across a...

12 February 2021 /devops

Long reads