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Engineering Culture and Methods InfoQ Trends Report - January 2018
At InfoQ we regularly revisit the topics we focus on based on the technology adoption curve. This article provides a view of the topics we see as being important to the community at the beginning of 2018. Some new topics have appeared since 2017 and there have been some significant shifts in what matters to individuals, teams and organisations over the last year.
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Soft Skill Patterns for Software Developers: The “Learning from Unintended Failures” Pattern
Soft Skill Patterns describe human behaviours that effectively solve recurring problems. The "Learning from Unintended Failures" pattern helps us improve the resilience of a system after a failure. The pattern follows 4 steps: identify a failure, quickly resolve any immediate impact, analyse root cause and system behaviour during the failure, and finally generate and implement improvement ideas.
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Culture: a Farming Tale
Culture and diversity are major factors for performance of a company, and influence its long-term success. Impacts include hiring practices, career development and direction, productivity, creativity, communication, and results. This discussion identifies cultural elements and their influence on behavior and production, and how diversity augments performance and company dynamics.
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Oldies in Tech: Hiring and Getting Hired
Denoncourt gives advice to older job seekers with tips on how to go about writing cover letters, filling out resumes, handling themselves in interviews, and preparing for difficult questions and coding assessments. Employers will change their perspective of older applicants and see the benefits of hiring sage programmers that are smart, love learning and have a track record of success.
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Louda Peña from Thoughtworks on Making Diversity Normal
Following on from the awards and recognition that ThoughtWorks has received for inclusiveness and diversity, InfoQ spoke to Louda Peña about what it takes to foster a genuinely diverse and inclusive workplace in a global technology company and her own experiences being part of such a culture.
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How to Communicate Better in Distributed Teams
In this article, Hugo, Arjan and Savita explain how their distributed agile framework can help distributed teams communicate better. Based on over a decade of experience, they share actionable practices that can help you improve the communication with team members across the world. Topics covered are virtues, trust, communication rhythm, retrospectives for distributed teams.
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Teams and the Way They Work
The terms “self-organised” and “cross functional” are often used to describe a team. What does this mean, and how will you recognise if your team has these features? Great teams work with the uniqueness of each person’s skills, experiences and outlook – forging the motivation to achieve a shared goal, within the constraints in which they operate.
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Developing Quality Software: Differentiating Factors
The level of software quality attainable is a reflection of an organizational business decision. There are many factors that influence this decision, including development, build and testing environments effectiveness, resources and their associated skillset, integrity, motivations and experience levels, commercial agreements, and adopted processes and productivity tools.
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The Top 5 Problems with Distributed Teams and How to Solve Them
In this article, Hugo Messer shares the top 5 challenges distributed teams face along with practical solutions. They are based on his 6 books, many workshops and a decade of hands on experience. The top 5 challenges: 1. We're thinking 'us versus them'; 2. Keeping the team in the dark; 3. Culture is a mystery; 4. We stop communicating; 5. The black box.
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Lynne Cazaly on Making Sense using Visual Communications
Lynne Cazaly spoke at the recent Agile New Zealand conference on the importance of clarity and sense-making in a world where VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) is the norm. She presented ideas on how to convey messages more effectively using visual tools and gave the audience a quickfire class on communicating using simple images.
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A Case for Diversity in Our Workspaces
Dr. Sallyann Freudenberg makes a case for supporting neurodiveristy in our workplaces.
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Inviting over Imposing Agile
We are at a crossroads in the agile-adoption narrative. Early in the story teams were the “bottom-up” vector for agile spread. Next the way agile spread started to shift away from teams to executives and “management”. Recent developments move us towards consultancy for bring agile to larger enterprises that struggle with change. Which way is agile going to go next?