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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Happy Cultures and How They Grow High Performers

    ITV's Tom Clark spoke at DOXLON in February, proposing the hypothesis that high performance is a side-effect of creating happy teams. Andy Flemming, contributor to Deliberately Developmental Organization, also recently spoke about how to reap business and strategic benefits by creating a culture with an intentional focus on transparency, and the learning, growth and happiness of individuals.

  • Pairing for Learning

    Pairing can be used to learn new topics that you can take back to the workplace, and to make your accomplishments visible and celebrate success together. Learning partners can encourage each other to make bold statements, commit to do something, and gently push each other to make it happen.

  • How Technical Practices Support Evolutionary Architecture and Continuous Delivery

    Technical practices of XP such as TDD, Refactoring, CI and Pair Programming support emergent design and enable evolving your architecture. The first practice you need for continuous delivery is CI, committing to mainline every day. Being able to write clean, well-factored, and well-tested modular code is the most important skill for developers.

  • Paradoxes in Culture Change

    Organizations should realize that organizational culture is an important factor in increasing agility, and then act on this realization. The desired organizational culture must be promoted by example top down; what is happening at the top of the organization concerning values, communication and customer involvement will predict what will happen in the "underlying" layers of the organization.

  • The Importance of Learning, Psychological Safety, and Continuous Delivery: Agile on the Beach 2017

    At the Agile on the Beach 2017 conference, run in Cornwall, UK, several hundred speakers and attendees gathered to discuss the latest developments within the field of agile and post-agile software development methodologies.

  • How Testers Can Become More Technical

    Testers who are able to successfully apply technical techniques of the testing craft during testing are more valuable; they increase both the quality and productivity of their teams. To become more technical, testers can learn something about code, and they should know how to manipulate and parse text files and how to use the most important analysis tools for their application platform.

  • Doing Safe-to-Fail Experiments

    Safe-to-fail experiments can be used in complex environments to probe, sense, and respond. You have to know what success and failure look like and need to be able to dampen or amplify the effect of probing to handle potential failures. Safe-to-fail experiments can help you to deal with risks and uncertainty, learn, and keep your options open.

  • Lean Organisations for the Digital Age

    Lean IT should help to simplify and improve the way we create value for customers and develop better solutions for tomorrow. Organisations of the future will focus on horizontal product or service streams- and everything else, including experts and managers, is there to enable the front-line to do their work right-first-time-on-time, with no hassles.

  • Evolving the Engineering Culture at Criteo

    Senior management should make engineering culture a top priority and create the framework which supports building a good engineering culture. You need values for culture to evolve, supported by rules that govern how things are done.

  • Learning to Become Agile

    The agile paradigm adapts processes to human nature, in contrast to the classical management approach which obliges team members to adjust to a particular development process. Bateson's learning model can help us to go from doing agile - following an agile method - to being agile - having your own agile identity and vision.

  • Organizing Improvements with Lean Leadership at ING Bank

    It’s the manager’s job to organize improvements and to make sure that real learnings take place. For real learnings you must accept the unknown and move outside of your knowledge boundary. Agile, lean and continuous delivery help to boost your learning capabilities.

  • Testers Should Think Like Marketeers

    Testers should be sharing stories and talking about the things they care about, to get people interested in what they are doing. The future of testing needs testers to think like marketeers. They can start by making or writing something such as a blog, article, talk, or video, and share it.

  • Overcoming Self-Imposed Limitations

    People can feel limited when challenged, which slows them down or keeps them from trying. It can be a real problem, but their fear might actually be in their imagination. Sometimes the only thing that's holding you back is yourself. Survival rules can hinder us- sometimes you have to break them.

  • Using a Skill Matrix for Growth and Learning

    Skill matrixes support self organization in teams and help to create intrinsic motivation, where people want to learn new things. They can show how cross-functional teams really function and provide insight into bottlenecks found in teams.

  • Increase Learning with 10% Autonomy Time

    Giving teams autonomy to spend 10% of their time for learning reduces delivery time, increases quality, and increases motivation. The 10% rule gives teams full autonomy to work on things they consider important. It results in freeing up people's creativity and letting teams grow their potential.

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