InfoQ Homepage Assessment Content on InfoQ
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How to Assess Software Quality
The quality practices assessment model (QPAM) can be used to classify a team’s exhibited behavior into four dimensions: Beginning, Unifying, Practicing, and Innovating. It explores social and technical quality aspects like feedback loops, culture, code quality and technical debt, and deployment pipeline.
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Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.
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Helping Teams Deliver with a Quality Practices Assessment Model
The quality practices assessment model explores quality aspects that help teams to deliver in an agile way. The model covers both social and technical aspects of quality; it is used to assess the quality of the team’s processes and also touches on product quality. With an assessment, teams can look at where their practices lie within the quality aspects and decide on what they want to improve.
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Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators
Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization.
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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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Fostering Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Building intercultural relationships are so important to success in the workplace and world today, yet many people are hesitant or unsure of how to build relationships with those who are different from themselves. The first step is to reflect on yourself and notice where and how you spend your time and resources.
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Applying Cynefin in Agile Retrospective
Sense-making can prevent teams from jumping to the first solution that comes to mind. Cynefin helps teams decide what to do in their retrospective after informed sense-making. Facilitators can use Cynefin to enhance transitions from gathering data to generating insights in retrospectives.
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The Benefits of Nostalgia: Q&A with Linda Rising
Remembering the past can bring about benefits; nostalgic reflection can make us more optimistic. Looking back leads us to feel there is meaning and purpose in our lives which enables us to better navigate the future and help us move forward.
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Using a Team Game for Richer Retrospectives
Games can bring freshness to retrospectives and enable rich discussions about how things are going. Patterns emerging from the discussions provide insight into the team’s strengths and weaknesses. Considerate coaching or facilitation can allow everyone to contribute.
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Establishing Change Agents within Organisations Using Shu-Ha-Ri
Shu-Ha-Ri provides us with a learning path toward being agile by mastering the basics and understanding the fundamentals to gain incremental success. By having their own change agents, organisations can adapt quickly to changing market needs and get a competitive edge.
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How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A
Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.
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Retrospective 3.0 at Ocado Technology
Toni Tassani identifies retrospective pitfalls, such as stale and repetitive activities and raises risks: the retrospective as an excuse for not solving issues on the spot, identifying an experiment but not driving the impediment to resolution, Post-it theater. He suggests looking at retrospectives radically differently, leveraging continuous improvement techniques borrowed from Kanban.
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Psychological Safety in Post-Mortems
Emotions often come to the fore when there is an incident; psychological safety in blameless post-mortems is essential for the learning process to happen. The post-mortem session must be fairly moderated, preferably by an outsider, giving everyone a turn to speak without criticism. Don’t start the analysis of the incident before there is a clear and common understanding of what actually happened.
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Think in Products, Not Projects: Q&A with Ardita Karaj
Organizations structured around products oversee their work end-to-end. Reversing Conway’s law to establish long-lived teams around the products brings stability and makes it easier to manage and prioritize work. Retrospectives are a powerful tool for product management; they give confidence to continue and help you pivote quickly on what might become high risk or loss for the organization.
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Sustainable Software with Agile
Sustainable software enables you to deliver changes to the customer more quickly with a lower likelihood of bugs, decrease of the total cost of ownership of applications, and increase business agility. It’s possible to verify the sustainability of software using a combination of automated analysis of source code, expert review of technical artifacts, and comparison with benchmark data.