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  • Q&A on the Book Internal Tech Conferences

    The book Internal Tech Conferences by Victoria Morgan-Smith and Matthew Skelton is a practical guide on how to prepare, organise, and follow-up on internal tech conferences. It shows how to run internal events that enable sharing and learning across teams and departments, and explores the benefits that such events can bring.

  • Supporting Mental Health in the Tech Workplace

    Mental health is heavily stigmatized in our society. People living with mental illness do not want to be treated differently; they may need help and accommodation in specific instances. Nara Kasbergen shares her volunteer work for Open Sourcing Mental Illness: a distributed, volunteer-based, non-profit organization that seeks to change the way we talk about mental health in the tech industry.

  • How to Boost Your Skills to Become a Better Developer

    Katas are great for learning new skills or to improve existing ones but don't address the intensity we face at work when there is a raging fire such as a deadline, release date, fixing a bug in huge legacy code, etc. This article covers the skills of good developers and highlights changing your training approach to improve your skills for high-intensity and challenging environments.

  • Internal Tech Conferences - How and Why

    Software engineering today is every bit as much about the people as it is about technology - empowered teams don’t appear overnight. We need to oil the wheels of collaboration so they roll smoothly. Here, Matthew Skelton and Victoria Morgan-Smith discuss how to use internal conferences to boost your organisation’s social capital, the currency by which relationships flourish and businesses thrive.

  • Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of Your Agile Organisation

    Communities of practice bring together people who share areas of interest or concerns. They have specific applications in agile organisations: scaling agile development and allowing individuals to connect with others who share similar concerns. Communities of practice bring people together to regain the benefits of regular contact while keeping the value of multidisciplinary agile teams.

  • Exchanging Industry Experiences with Agile Methodologies

    The Agile Consortium Belgium, Sirris and Agoria organized an event to share experiences with agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, visual management, XP, DSDM and Lean. An interview about the different agile methodologies that were covered, on using agile for innovation and how events where organizations share their experiences can help the industry to adopt agile practices.

  • Solving the Gordian Knot of Chronic Overcommittment in Development Organizations

    Why do we promise more than we can deliver? Why do we say yes when we are already too busy? Chronic Overcommitment is a pervasive problem in the IT industry. In this article we take a look at the behaviors that drive over commitment and the dynamics at play in your organization the make it a difficult problem to solve. Finally, we offer some advice to those who suffer from this affliction.

  • Virtual Panel: Specification by Example, Executable Specifications, Scenarios and Feature Injection

    In the last couple of years terms like Specification by Example, Executable Specifications and Feature Injection have showed up quite frequently in the community, often in relation to Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) or tools like Cucumber or SpecFlow. InfoQ have talked to some of the leading experts in this domain about what these practices are and how they relate to BDD.

  • A Discussion With Neal Gafter on the Future of Java

    Microsoft's Neal Gafter, who was primary designer and implementer of the Java SE 4 and 5 language enhancements and now works for Microsoft on .NET platform languages, discusses the impact of Oracle's acquisition of Sun on Java,makes the case for adding segmented stacks and a meta-object protocol to Java,, and offers some insights into how Java and C#/.NET compare.

  • Elisabeth Hendrickson: Agile - An Inclusive Community

    Elisabeth Hendrickson, 2010 winner of the Gordon Pask award, talks about the collaborative nature of the agile community and how it has changed the nature of work in organisations large and small. She reflects on how the community has changed over the years and become more and more inclusive, and invites one and all to join the conversation and contribute to the changes happening in the workplace.

  • Linda Rising visited Japan and talked about "Fearless Change" - a report from Agile Japan 2011

    AgileJapan held it's third incarnation this year in Tokyo. The conference organizers decided to go ahead with their plans even though the event followed the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of northern Japan a month previous.Linda Rising was the keynote speaker and her words of encouragement for Japan echoed those felt by the rest of the world.

  • Agile at 10 – A State of Contradiction

    Mike Beedle states that agile is in a state of contradiction, the agile of 10 years ago is now passé and we run the disk of diluting the real meaning of being agile through lip service implementations without focusing on quality. He echoes the call in the 10 Year Reunion meeting for a concerted focus on quality, and asks what an Agile Manifesto 2.0 should contain.

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