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The Excel Formula Language Is Now Turing-Complete
The Excel team announced LAMBDA, a new feature that lets users define and name formula functions. LAMBDA functions admit parameters, can call other LAMBDA functions and recursively call themselves. With LAMBDA, the Excel formula language is Turing-complete: user-defined functions can thus compute anything without resorting to imperative languages (e.g., VBA, JavaScript).
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Outcome Mapping - How to Collaborate with Clarity
To truly improve, organizations need to deliver change to people, process, and tools. To make change effective, they need to identify where that change is needed, what the map of their current state looks like, and what is the best next step to make progress. Outcome mapping helps align teams to a clear goal, gain an understanding of the landscape, and develop a clear plan of action.
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Moving into "Modern Test Leadership"
Test management is dead; it just really needs to evolve. Test Leadership means focusing more on raising the awareness of testing across an organisation, and coaching/mentoring your team to be passionate advocates for quality. As a test leader, you need to learn to adapt to remain relevant, take time to self-reflect on what is important to you, and build personal leadership values.
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How Outsourcing Practices Are Changing in 2021: an Industry Insight
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way businesses think about outsourcing their processes. While security and sustainable outsourcing have become top priorities, cost reduction has become a driving factor in outsourcing decisions. The practice of nearshoring is gaining prominence, while other practices are becoming obsolete. This article explores how outsourcing practices are changing in 2021.
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Building Stronger Human Teams by Managing the Inner Lizards
Each of us has an inner lizard that frets constantly about our safety. People come with brains that are pre-configured to scan everything you say for threats to their safety. Learning to recognize when you're operating under reptilian influence is a great start. This article introduces some techniques to help you manage the lizard within you along with those around you.
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Inclusion Has to Be Continuous
To create a truly diverse culture, we need to have inclusion throughout the whole lifecycle of an employee’s career journey. Leaders need to foster a psychologically safe inclusive environment to allow diversity and diversity of thought to exist. They need to grow people to move them out and continuously get new people in to shake things up, to maintain diversity and inclusion.
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Software Engineering at Google: Practices, Tools, Values, and Culture
The book Software Engineering at Google provides insights into the practices and tools used at Google to develop and maintain software with respect to time, scale, and the tradeoffs that all engineers make in development. It also explores the engineering values and the culture that’s based on them, emphasizing the main differences between programming and software engineering.
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Microsoft's Low-Code Strategy Paints a Target on UIPath and the Other RPA Companies
Microsoft is investing big in the low code space and has put together a collection of products that is hard for other companies to match, capped recently by the announcement of PowerFX. The target in their sights is the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) companies such as UIPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism who are closing big deals with big enterprises.
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Agile Transformation: an Integral Approach
The book Agile Transformation - Using the Integral Agile Transformation Framework to Think and Lead Differently by Michael Spayd and Michele Madore provides an integral approach to agile transformations. The integral approach operates on all levels, from individuals to teams to the whole enterprise, helping us take multiple perspectives on situations and to think and act from multiple worldviews.
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Q&A with Eveline Oerhlich on Building an Effective DevOps Culture
The DevOps Institute recently released their latest report entitled "Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report". The report found that automation and security remain vital to business success. A focus on building the human skills of DevOps was also identified as companies with the best learning cultures were most likely to succeed.
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Applying the “Whole Product Model” to the “Technology Adoption Life Cycle”
In order to develop products customer love, product managers need to truly understand how their “whole product” delivers value and when to address which customer segment. Two models that are very powerful when applied together, and that a product manager can use to develop extraordinary products, are The Whole Product Model and The Technology Adoption Life Cycle.
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Key Metrics to Track and Drive Your Agile Devops Maturity
To promote DevOps and Agile process improvement, a meaningful set of metrics should be tracked. In this article we will discuss which metrics are appropriate based on the stage of the culture change. Coupling these metrics with strong support from leadership will ensure the best improvements in team measures such as cycle time, deployment frequency, and software quality.