InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Dealing with Cognitive Biases in Software Development
Cognitive biases help us to think faster, but they also make us less rational than we think we are. Being able to recognize and overcome biases can prevent problems and increase the performance of software teams.
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How Mob Programming Collective Habits Can be the Soil for Growing Technical Quality
Mob programming can support teams in changing old habits into new effective habits for creating products in an agile way. Collectively-developed habits are hard to forget when you have other people around. Mob programming forces individuals to put new habits into practice regularly, making them easier to adopt. Teams are intolerant of repetition, looking for better ways of doing their work.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.
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How a Safe-to-Fail Approach Can Enable Psychological Safety in Teams
Companies can establish a culture of psychological safety among their employees, a culture in which failing is not frowned upon but rather is accepted as something that can happen to anyone. Safe-to-fail should be part of the corporate culture. A shift in the way we envision success can lead to a better understanding of where failure lies and provide courage to overcome our fears.
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Four-Day Work Week Gaining Traction
A number of studies and reviews have recently been published which look at the changes needed and the impact of shifting to a four-day work week. The consensus is that, while there are some challenges to be overcome, generally shifting to a four-day work week results in happier, more engaged staff with increased productivity.
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The Future of Agile in Africa: Challenges and Progress
The African continent is trailing behind in the adoption of agile compared to other continents as it faces wicked challenges and setbacks. However, the next two decades seem to be promising to the young continent, as tech startups, SMEs and large corporations are recognizing that a collaborative approach to product development leads to more productive and value-driven results.
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MLOps: Continuous Delivery of Machine Learning Systems
Developing, deploying, and keeping machine learning models productive is a complex and iterative process with many challenges. MLOps means combining the development of ML models and especially ML systems with the operation of those systems. To make MLOps work, we need to balance iterative and exploratory components from data science with more linear software engineering components.
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How External IT Providers Can Adopt DevOps Practices
IT suppliers can follow the “you build it, you run it” mantra by working in small batches, using an experimental approach to product development, and validating small product increments in production. The supplier has to find out what his client’s goal is, and it has to become the supplier’s goal as well to work in a collaborative way.
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Facilitating Team Health Assessments
Teams can do health assessments to explore and discuss their team’s health and happiness. It’s good to let teams create their own health check, understanding what healthy looks like for the team in question. As facilitators, we can help teams decide where and how to improve.
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Distributed DevOps Teams: Enabling Non-Stop Delivery
Keeping in touch and being cohesive as a distributed team is a challenge many face. Assigning stories from a shared backlog helped a distributed team in doing non-stop delivery, as did giving all members of the team the authority to promote to production and back-out code at need. You need to give attention to the architecture to prevent creating similar or duplicate micro-services.
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WhatsApp Adopts the Signal Protocol for Secure Multi-Device Communication
WhatsApp is testing its new architecture aimed to enable true multi-device message synchronization while preserving end-to-end cryptographic security. To this aim, WhatsApp is adopting the Signal protocol.
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Assessing Remote Employee Experiences for Hybrid-Remote Work-Settings
Employers and employees have begun to prepare for their return to the office. One of the options is a hybrid-remote work setting which aims to support individual preferences when it comes to where, when, and how to work. According to Kaleem Clarkson, assessing your remote employee experience can help to make decisions on workplace flexibility policies.
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Distributed DevOps Teams: Supporting Digitally Connected Teams
To establish a digital connection within a globally distributed team, an organization provided the team members with both collaboration tools and supplied an extra monitor with a visualization board. Collaboration using the online chat and white board initially posed challenges, as the board was tweaked towards the teams’ needs.
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Engineering Your Organization through Services, Platforms, and Communities
Organizations need to be able to sustainably deliver value to their customers and business; that is why they exist, said Randy Shoup at QCon Plus May 2021. To do so, they need to be able to effectively and efficiently leverage the “resources” they have at their disposal- their people, teams, and technology.
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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.