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Creating Psychological Safety in Your Teams
Psychological safety is a work climate where employees feel free to express their questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes. We cannot have high-performing teams without psychological safety. In this article, you will learn practical ideas, interesting stories, and powerful approaches to boost psychological safety in your team.
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How Space Shapes Collaboration: Using Anthropology to Break Silos
Software companies strive to keep innovating and changing the rules of the market. These companies are made of people who, unlike smartphones, personal computers or smart watches, have not evolved as much in recent years. This article proposes an analysis of workspaces from anthropology to solve one of the most common problems: the appearance of silos instead of a culture of collaboration.
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Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt
Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. What we observe and label “technical debt” is the by-product of a dysfunctional process. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.
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Remote Ensemble Testing - How an Experiment Shaped the Way We Work
This article shares how an experiment evolved into a common practice at the workplace, using an experimental approach with remote ensemble testing to get teammates on our cross-functional team more involved in the testing activities of the jointly created product. This all started in the times of a global pandemic where the entire team was working from home.
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Growing an Experiment-Driven Quality Culture in Software Development
Have you ever faced a challenge at work that you weren’t sure how to tackle? Experiments to the rescue! In a complex environment like software development, no one can tell what might work, so we have to try things out. Read this article to learn about key challenges, insights and lessons, and get inspired for your own path to experimentation.
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How to Decide in Self-Managed Projects - a Lean Approach to Governance
Whether self-managed or self-governed as a project, the power still needs to be distributed internally. If the project is open to decide how things are done, how do we decide? A solid but flexible set of tools and practices like sociocracy is a great starting point for projects to have clear but lean processes that can grow as we grow.
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Best Practices for Letting Go of a Remote Team Member
At Doist, letting go of a team member is a last resort. Over 14 years, the remote-first pioneer has parted ways with approximately 25 team members, which has evolved the way they handle remote terminations. Today, Doist employs 100 people in 35+ countries with a 90+% employee retention rate. Here COO Allan Christensen offers his lessons learned on letting go of a remote team member.
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Hybrid Work is Here to Stay, and Software Teams Need to Adapt
In a post-pandemic workplace, face-to-face conversation is no longer the de facto collaboration method. As hybrid and distributed software development teams emerge, we look at ways that tools and processes can foster collaboration no matter where the team is located. Asynchronous work, a single source of truth, clear documentation and owners, and automation will empower hybrid development teams.
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Resetting a Struggling Scrum Team Using Sprint 0
Sprint 0 can be a great mechanism in Agile transformations to reset existing teams which are not delivering value, exhibiting a lack of accountability, or struggling with direct collaboration with customers. This article shares the experiences from doing a Sprint 0 with an existing team which was struggling to deliver, helping them to align to a new product vision and become a stronger team.
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How to Enable Team Learning and Boost Performance
Team performance is dependent on safety, teamwork and ongoing learning. Clarity in roles, psychological safety, breaking bad habits and constantly learning are critical to enabling high performance.
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Improving Testability: Removing Anti-Patterns through Joint Conversations
Code is always testable, but the cost may be high, and the effort exhausting. We can change code to be highly testable by identifying anti-patterns and fixing them. And developers can make the code fit the test requirements, by having discussions with the testers who actually test it.
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How to Recognise and Reduce HumanDebt
We know TechDebt is bad; chances are HumanDebt is worse, and once you’ve seen it, you can’t “unsee” or ignore it. What is now needed is a focus on the humans who do the work. Psychological safety in teams is key. The “people work” -both at an individual, but especially at a team level- is the key to sustainability and growth of high-performing tech teams.