InfoQ Homepage Communication Content on InfoQ
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How to Improve Your Team's Communication and Psychological Safety
Mapping your team’s typical communication style can help improve communication and psychological safety, reduce friction within a team, and make conflict more productive. When we understand how we communicate and how we like to be communicated with, we not only have a better understanding of ourselves, but also of others, and this can play to our and their strengths accordingly.
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The Impact of Radical Uncertainty on People
Humans look for certainty as that makes them feel safe. Suddenly becoming an entirely distributed team due to the pandemic disrupted people. According to Kara Langford, radical uncertainty can cause people to believe they are in danger and lead to health issues. People will respond differently; uncertainty has also shown to lead to fresh ideas, innovations, and social good.
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Developing Testing Skills outside of Working Hours
Gamifying your way of testing, joining online testing communities of practice, and virtual traveling; these are examples of activities you can do outside of working hours that can make you a better tester. You can practice continuous learning with other testers in the world, and then implement things you learned at your workplace and share them with your team to improve ways of testing.
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Becoming Personally Agile for Mental Health
Feeling the need to be constantly producing high-quality deliverables with a high sense of perfection can lead to stress and can cause burnout. You have to first accept that you have a problem to find your way out of burnout. Applying agile on a personal level can help you to achieve high goals while reducing stress and lowering the chance of getting burnout.
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QCon Plus: Summary of the Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks Track
Qcon Plus ran in November 2020. Once of the tracks focused on Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks. Hosted by Randy Shoup of eBay, the track concentrated on some of the important people skills needed for effective communication and collaboration in and outside teams.
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Articulating Leadership through Nemawashi and Collaborative Boards
High performance teams don’t need to be managed, but led. Collaborative boards is where leadership and teams meet to align direction and initiatives. Nemawashi can be used to separate conversations from meetings. Fernando Guigou spoke about articulating leadership using an approach that he calls ZenSum at Agile Tour London 2020.
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Applying a Zero-Bug Policy at Redgate
A zero-bug policy is a simple yet effective bug management system that can help you avoid being buried deep in months or sometimes even years-old bugs. Any bugs you agree are serious enough for you to fix, you fix right away, and any other bug will not be fixed and closed. Tom Walsh spoke about how Redgate Software applied the zero-bug policy at Lean Agile Exchange 2020.
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Microsoft Launches a New Communication Platform with Azure Communication Services
During its annual Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced Azure Communication Services (ACS), a fully-managed communication platform. The offering is currently in public preview.
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Learnings from a Project That Went from Heaven to Hell
Maja Selmer Megard, project leader and department manager at Kantega, shares her experience from a project that at first sight seemed to be a perfect fit in all regards, but ended up as the most exhausting, conflict-ridden project she has been in.
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Making Distributed Organizations More Effective
An autonomous team model with teams organized around geographical or time-zone proximity can make a distributed organization more effective. With the Reverse Conway Maneuver you can deliberately add or remove bottlenecks to better support the designs you are trying to build.
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How to Debug Your Team: QCon London Q&A
Lisa van Gelder spoke about debugging your team at QCon London 2020, where she presented her toolkit for how to diagnose and address issues with a team’s pace of delivery. “It is all about ensuring they have mastery, autonomy, purpose and psychological safety”, she said. She uses that toolkit to introduce change to teams in a way that gets the buy-in from the team.
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How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams
A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.
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Developing Cultural Sensitivity in Working with Other Cultures
Cultural differences can be a challenge in an international workplace, but at the same time cultural diversity can also be fascinating, said Rachel Smets. At Positive Psychology in Practice 2019 she suggested we prepare ourselves when working with other cultures or moving abroad, and develop our cultural sensitivity by learning about new cultures as much as we can.
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How Design Systems Support Team Communication and Collaboration
By using design systems, design teams can improve their workflow, reuse their knowledge, and ensure better consistency, said Stefan Ivanov. They allow one to fail faster and to speed up the iteration cycle, enable spending more time collecting user feedback in the early stages of product design, and reach the sweet spot of a product market fit much faster.
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Experiences from Working with Distributed Agile Teams
Not being able to frequently connect with your colleagues face-to-face makes successful communication more difficult in distributed teams, said Shabi Shafei, Scrum Master at ABN AMRO Bank. A Q&A about how distributed teams can transform into great agile teams.