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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Cultivate Team Learning with Xtrem Reading

    To thrive in the 21st century, companies have to continually enhance their capabilities to create what they want to create. Becoming a learning organization is key to success in the modern world. Peter Senge defined 5 disciplines of a learning organization. This article introduces workshop techniques that will help you start your journey in the 4th discipline, team learning.

  • How to Spread Technical Practices Like TDD in an Organization

    One of the success factors for Agile and DevOps is developers changing the way they work and adopting practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD). It’s not something that just happens by itself, and many of the “usual” ways of introducing change fail for TDD. This article outlines some of the things that actually do work and explains “Samman,” which is a coaching method used with developers.

  • Building Reliable Software Systems with Chaos Engineering

    Advances in large-scale, distributed software systems are changing the game for software engineering. As an industry, we are quick to adopt practices that improve flexibility and improve feature velocity. If we can move quickly, can we do so without breaking things? Chaos Engineering practices can be used to navigate complexity and build more reliable systems.

  • How Journaling Puts Leadership in Action

    Have you ever wondered how keeping a journal (or even a so-called “diary”) and business-related topics go together? In this article, Cosima Laube explores how regular structured writing for the sake of reflection and learning looks, and shares her own experience with different journaling variants and techniques, as well as some science and meta-level views.

  • Increasing Developer Effectiveness by Optimizing Feedback Loops

    We can think of engineering as a series of feedback loops: simple tasks that developers do and then validate to get feedback, which might be by a colleague, a system (i.e. an automation) or an end user. Using a framework of feedback loops we have a way of measuring and prioritizing the improvements we need to do to optimize developer effectiveness.

  • Continuous Learning as a Tool for Adaptation

    The fifth and capstone article in a series on how software companies adapted and continue to adapt to enhance their resilience explores key themes with a special view on the practicality of organizational resilience. It also provides practical guidance to engineering leadership and recommendations on how to create this investment.

  • Designing & Managing for Resilience

    The fourth article in a series on how software companies adapted and continue to adapt to enhance their resilience explores the strategies used by engineering leaders to help create the conditions for sustained resilience. It provides stories, examples, and strategies towards designing an organizational structure to support resilient performance and managing for resilience.

  • The Toyota Way: Learn to Improve Continuously

    The book The Toyota Way, 2nd Edition by Jeffrey Liker provides a view of the Toyota Production System with fourteen management principles for continuous improvement and developing people. The book, including the 4P model (Philosophy, Processes, People, Problem solving) and principles, has been updated to reflect new insights in systems thinking.

  • Learning from Incidents

    Jessica DeVita (Netflix) and Nick Stenning (Microsoft) have been working on improving how software teams learn from incidents in production. In this article, they share some of what they’ve learned from the research community in this area, and offer some advice on the practical application of this work.

  • Shifting Modes: Creating a Program to Support Sustained Resilience

    The second article in a series on how software companies adapted and continue to adapt to enhance their resilience explores how organizations can shift to a Learn & Adapt safety mode and compares the traits of an organization that is well poised for successfully persisting this mode shift. This shift will not only make them safer but will also give them a competitive advantage.

  • Kick-off Your Transformation by Imagining It Had Failed

    Large scale change initiatives have a worryingly high failure rate, the chief reason for which is that serious risks are not identified early. One way to create the safety needed for everyone to speak openly about the risks they see is by running a pre-mortem. In a pre-mortem, we assume that the transformation had already failed and walk backward from there to investigate what led to the failure.

  • Learning from Bugs and Testers: Testing Boeing 777 Full Flight Simulators

    The aviation industry has developed the habit of scrutinizing every reported event in order to prevent another occurrence, to understand the root causes and suggest changes to design, process, or better training. This article goes over a couple of noticeable accidents and shows you techniques that could be applied to software development.

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