InfoQ Homepage Distributed Team Content on InfoQ
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Jeff Sutherland: Are Agile Teams Truly Agile?
Ten Years after the Agile Manifesto Jeff Sutherland muses the question of whether Agile teams are truly Agile. You’re not Agile if you’re not producing product at the end of each sprint. Jeff discusses doing scrum well, velocity and production measurements and the next big challenge for Agile leaders.
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Jeff Patton on the Product Owner’s World
In this interview, Jeff Patton discusses the Product Owner role and points out that Agile has never been very focused on the customer. While Agile development excels at “delivery”, it struggles to support “discovery” (i.e. defining what the customer really needs). Also discussed are techniques such as Lean Startup and story maps and the importance of defining business value in an Agile context.
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Linda Cook Discusses the Agile Coaching Profession
Linda Cook, a well-known agilist, and board member of both the Agile Alliance and the Agile Leadership Network, discusses the agile coaching profession. Among other things, she covers servant leadership, being as a role model, types of individuals appropriate for the profession, and the differences between being an external coach versus being an internal employee in the coach role.
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Systems Thinking for Management
Esther Derby talks about common management and team traps that can impact organisations adopting Agile methods. She describes the conditions needed to form "real teams" and how management can create the right environment to nurture the formation of self organizing teams.
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Rod Johnson on Entrepreneurialism
Spring creator Rod Johnson discusses the importance of vision, teamwork, perserverance and sacrifice as he relates what it took to successfully build SpringSource from a small open source consultancy to a middleware powerhouse aimed at simplifying Enterprise Java, that sold to VMWare for hundreds of millions.
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Elastic Leadership
Roy Osherove talks about the challenges and opportunities of being a software team leader. He shares his hard won experiences in growing teams, their members and influencing behaviour. Being a software team lead is about getting out of your comfort zone, creating trust and commitment in your team but also about knowing about team maturity levels and the different approaches needed.
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ThoughtWorks’ Fowler and Humble Talk Continuous Delivery
Two of ThoughtWorks’ finest, Martin Fowler and Jez Humble, talk about the notion of Continuous Delivery, which enables organizations to build software that is production ready at all times. To do this, enterprises automate the build, deployment, and testing process, and improve collaboration between developers, testers, and operations. The duo discusses a variety of related issues.
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Transforming Businesses to Agility
M Dwyer of BigVisible Solutions talks about the process of transforming businesses to agility, including the concept of Agile localization in global efforts. Dwyer says that with distributed teams across multiple time zones and cultures it is good to establish a group of Agile missionaries to go forth and train people on Agile. He also discusses how to transfer Agile skills to the next generation.
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Johanna Rothman: Managing Agile Teams
In this interview, Agile management expert Johanna Rothman talks about the process of managing in Agile environments, particularly for distributed teams. Rothman also helps to distinguish between self-directed, self-organized and self-managed teams. And she stresses the importance of clear communication amongst team members, as well as the ability for managers to learn new skills.
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ThoughtWorks’ Jez Humble Delivers on Continuous Delivery
In this interview Jez Humble discusses the concept of continuous delivery, which implies that software should always be production ready throughout its lifecycle. That means that every build could be released into production and run effectively. Continuous delivery involves build and deployment automation, continuous integration, test automation, managing infrastructure and environments and more.
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Esther Derby Discusses 13 Questions for Team Managers
In this interview, team development expert Esther Derby talk about her 13 questions for team managers – a set of questions aimed at helping managers make their development teams more effective. Derby said her goal is to help managers to look at their organization in terms of its capacity, in terms of what its customers desire and in terms of creating more effective work systems.
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IBM's Elizabeth Woodward on Distributed Team Collaboration
In this interview, Elizabeth Woodward talks about overcoming the collaboration problems that arise in distributed team development. She also discusses using Scrum in distributed teams. As co-author of "A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum," Woodward focuses on establishing good, fundamental practices – as she says good practices are paramount for teams and tooling comes second.
