InfoQ Homepage Productivity Content on InfoQ
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Enhance Productivity with Visual Studio 2012 Power Tools
Microsoft recently released Power Tools for Visual Studio 2012 with three new features to enhance developers productivity.
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The Exact Science of Communication Patterns
Alex "Sandy" Pentland, professor of MIT, talks about his experiments with sociometric badges in context of teams productivity in his interview for Harvard Business Review. His research can help in defining optimal communication patters that will make you and your team members more efficient and more satisfied at work.
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Seven Options for Handling Interruptions on Agile Teams
Interruptions are something that every team has to deal with and, if not managed appropriately, they can potentially have a detrimental affect on their ability to deliver. In a recent post on the Agile Advice blog, Mishkin Berteig described seven options that teams could consider to deal with interruptions when using Scrum or iterative Agile approaches.
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Too Much Technology?
As technologists we often never question how technology is affecting us and our world. This interview with Eric Brende presents an a different view on progress, innovation and technology.
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Enabling and Sustaining High Performing Teams
Agile practices should foster high-performance self-organizing teams. It is important that high-performance equals value delivery, to ensure that the team solves the right problem. It is also important to create an environment where high-performance can flourish which requires thinking and action at a management level. We examine three commentators perspectives on enabling high performance.
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Is Velocity Killing Agile?
Velocity, the measure of work completed by the team divided by the time taken to complete it, is increasingly being used to manage the productivity of a team and as a comparison between teams. Jim Highsmith, Mark Levison, and Scott Ambler discuss the misuse of velocity as a productivity measure.
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Simple Tools Preferred in the Agile Tools Space
Agile does not necessarily mandate or recommend the use of tools. Ideally the development could be done on a command line interface with requirements present on index cards. However, in the last few years, several tools have emerged and they have acted as a catalyst to successful Agile development. Migan and Gaia recently conducted a survey to find out the use of such tools in the Agile space.
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The “Do Not Disturb” Team Member
Many developers like to work in isolation, for some time, if not always. XP recommends a room arrangement called “Caves and Commons”. Commons area is organized to maximise osmotic communication. Caves are meant to facilitate isolation for activities like personal email, phone calls or a quick spike. However, there could be a situations where a team member wants to take this isolation too far.
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What Really Motivates Workers
In a recent Harvard Business Review article Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J Kramer challenged the commonly held mnagement belief that Recognition is the most motivating and positive factor in the workplace. Their multi-year study tracked the motivation and emotions of hundreds of knowledge workers and identified POGRESS as the single most important factor for individual motivation in the workplace
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Need an Answer to Context Switching? Get Disturbed
Context Switching is defined as changing focus and attention from one task to the other in relatively short periods of time. It is widely considered harmful for the team member and the project that he is working on. Charles Miller mentioned a few ways of how they handle context switching at Atlassian.
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Agile Addresses "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team"
Tathagat Varma, general manager with a large provider of IT management solutions, wondered whether Agile's productivity improvements could be linked to how it improves teamwork. His article analyses Agile values and practices by mapping them against Patrick Lencioni's business fable "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."
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Kent Beck Suggests Skipping Testing for Very Short Term Projects
Kent Beck suggests that on very short term projects, when you're trying to figure out if there is a viable concept, you might do less (even no) automated testing to help get off the ground quickly. This goes against all of the conventional wisdom surrounding TDD.
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How TDD and Pairing Increase Production
"Test-driven Development" and "Pair Programming" are two of the most widely known of agile practices, yet are still largely not being practiced by many agile teams. Often, people will cite being "too busy" to adopt such practices as TDD and pairing; in essence, implying that striving for high code quality will reduce productivity. Mike Hill explains how this logic is seriously flawed.
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Is Five the Optimal Team Size?
There have been a lot of discussions and debates about the optimal team size for maximum productivity. While most Agilists agree that smaller teams are more functional and productive as compared to larger teams, however defining the optimal team size is still a challenge.
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J.B. Rainsberger: "Integration Tests Are A Scam"
Well-known agilist and TDD expert J.B. Rainsberger has begun a series of posts to explain why his experience has led him to the thought-provoking conclusion that "integration tests are a scam".