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  • Cultivating a Learning Organisation

    This article explores how creating an internal culture of experimentation and learning enabled a company to keep pace with the rapid iterations in tech that have become the regular way we do business. It shows that psychological safety is a key component of the learning organisation; employees need to be able to experiment and learn from any outcome - without fear that failure will be punished.

  • Three Keys to a Successful “Pre-Mortem”

    Talking about what might go wrong acknowledges that many things are out of our control, and that we might mess up the things which are within our control. To have this conversation safely involves a structured activity called a pre-mortem. If held with some regularity, and always with creative problem solving time at the end, it can build a safe space for adaptation in the face of adversity.

  • What Should Software Engineers Know about GDPR?

    EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is moving out of the transition period next summer to become enforceable GDPR strongly emphasizes risk-based thinking; you take every step to mitigate privacy risks until the risks become something you can tolerate. As a software developer, this will affect you. This is what you need to know.

  • Q&A on The Antifragility Edge: Antifragility in Practice

    In the book The Antifragility Edge, Sinan Si Alhir shows how antifragility has been applied to help organizations evolve and thrive. He provides examples of how antifragility can be used beyond agility on an individual, collective (team and community) and enterprise level, and explores a roadmap for businesses to achieve greater antifragility.

  • Book Review: Site Reliability Engineering - How Google Runs Production Systems

    "Site Reliability Engineering - How Google Runs Production Systems" is an open window into Google's experience and expertise on running some of the largest IT systems in the world. The book describes the principles that underpin the Site Reliability Engineering discipline. It also details the key practices that allow Google to grow at breakneck speed without sacrificing performance or reliability.

  • Adaptable or Predictable? Strive for Both – Be Predictably Adaptable!

    Our efforts to improve software development face the question of what to focus on. Should we govern for predictability without concern of value, maximizing cost-efficiency without concern for end-to-end responsiveness? Or maybe do the opposite and govern for value over predictability, focus on responsiveness over cost efficiency? What we really need is to be predictably adaptable.

  • Continuous Delivery Coding Patterns: Latent-to-Live Code & Forward Compatible Interim Versions

    This article describes two novel practices for continuous delivery: Latent-to-live code pattern and Forward compatible interim versions. You can use these practices to simultaneously increase speed and reliability of software development and reduce risks. These practices are built on top of two other essential continuous delivery practices: trunk-based-development and feature toggles.

  • Test Management Revisited

    The concept of test management sits awkwardly in agile, mostly because it’s a construct derived from the time when testing was a post-development phase, performed by independent testing teams. Agile, with its focus on cross functional teams, has sounded the death knell for many test managers. While test management is largely irrelevant in agile, there is still a desperate need for test leadership.

  • The Mathematics of Adaptive Security

    Enterprise security teams are charged with maintaining the “perfect” set of security policies. In their pursuit of the perfect security policy, they are often the department of slow (because the pursuit of perfection takes time). At the same time, “to err is human…”

  • From a Project to a Product Approach Using LeSS at Agfa Healthcare

    By changing the inner workings from a project perspective to a product perspective Agfa Healthcare established a less complicated process using a single backlog for the entire organisation. Main advice is to try to avoid setting up silos where they do not belong. When applying LeSS it is important to stick to its basic rules even though they are, in most organisations, very disruptive.

  • Probabilistic Project Planning Using Little’s Law

    When working on projects, it is most of the time necessary to forecast the project delivery time up front. Little’s Law can help any team that uses user stories for planning and tracking project execution no matter what development process it uses. We use a project buffer to manage the inherent uncertainty associated with planning and executing a fixed-bid project and protect its delivery date.

  • Q&A on Conscious Agility

    The book Conscious Agility (Conscious Capitalism + Business Agility = Antifragility) by Si Alhir, Brad Barton and Mark Ferraro describes a design-thinking approach for business to benefit from uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown. An interview about conscious agility and antifragility, increasing business agility, dealing with uncertainty, and the three phases of a conscious agility initiative.

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