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Culture & Methods

Empathy is a Technical Skill

Empathy, like software, is a deeply technical topic that can challenge you in the best way while making your life richer and more rewarding. This article explores how an empathy-focused approach to software development can help pay down technical debt, increase automated test coverage, build trust among team members, and contribute to the overall health of a software system.

Andrea Goulet
on Aug 13, 2019
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership

The book Applied Empathy by Michael Ventura explores how understanding people and learning about their perspectives can help us to lead with empathy. Questions are more important than answers; as leaders we should look for ways to connect with our customers and employees, and listen more and talk less.

Ben Linders Michael Ventura
on Jul 01, 2019
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Empathy at Work

The book Empathy at Work by Sharon Steed explores the role empathy plays in team communication and interaction, and provides tools to help people become better empaths in difficult situations. It describes the steps we can take in order to show empathy daily and contribute to a healthy, collaborative, positive work culture.

Ben Linders Sharon Steed
on Jun 26, 2019
Culture & Methods

2018 State of Testing Report

The State of Testing 2018 report provides insights into the adoption of test techniques, practices, and test automation, and the challenges that testers are facing. It shares results from this year’s testing survey. InfoQ held an interview with the organizers of the State of Testing survey.

Ben Linders Lalit Bhamare Joel Montvelisky
on Jul 01, 2018
Culture & Methods

Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of Your Agile Organisation

Communities of practice bring together people who share areas of interest or concerns. They have specific applications in agile organisations: scaling agile development and allowing individuals to connect with others who share similar concerns. Communities of practice bring people together to regain the benefits of regular contact while keeping the value of multidisciplinary agile teams.

Emily Webber
on Sep 14, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Lean IT Field Guide

In the book The Lean IT Field Guide Mike Orzen and Tom Paider explain how to initiate, execute, and sustain a Lean IT transformation. InfoQ interviewed them about how lean can be seen as a learning system, why managers should have both technical and social skills, how to assure that changes will sustain, and establishing a culture of engineering excellence and craftsmanship.

Ben Linders
on Feb 24, 2016
Increasing your Agility: An interview with Dave Thomas

At the GOTO Amsterdam 2015 conference Dave Thomas gave a keynote presentation titled "agile is dead". While the "Agile" industry is busy debasing the meaning of the word, the underlying values are still strong. Dave Thomas suggests to stop using the word agile and switch to agility: repeatedly taking small steps towards where you want to be and evaluate what happened.

Ben Linders
on Jul 21, 2015
How Agile Has Changed Test Management

Agile methods have many traditional test management activities built into them. With desired agile team traits like self-organising, role blurring and skill diversification, the nature of test management is changing. We have to question whether the role of Test Manager should exist in effective agile organisations and how the activities which have long made up the role are divested?

Ben Linders
on May 11, 2015
Culture & Methods

Enterprise Agility Through Culture

Culture plays an important role in organizational change. Successful agile adoption tends to depend on the ability to change the culture. Making the culture explicit and becoming more conscious of the existing culture is important in agile transformations according to Olaf Lewitz and Michael Sahota. Giving attention to culture can increase the agility of an organization.

Ben Linders
on Apr 06, 2015
DIVAs Weed Them out or Nurture Them? Five Best Practices

Your DIVA is eating garlic AGAIN??? At Qcon SF, Rob Cromwell introduced the DIVA: Difficult, Infallible, Victim and Arrogant; referring to insufferable geniuses. To help Rob and leaders & managers with coaching a great technical employee who has interpersonal and social behavioral issues, Michael Nir compiled FIVE best practical practices for handling the DIVAs. Find them here.

Michael Nir
on Jan 05, 2015
Q&A with John Sonmez on His Book on Soft Skills

The book “Soft Skills - The software developer's life manual” addresses interesting topics for professional software developers. The book aims to help developers to become better programmers, more valuable employees, and happier and healthier people. An interview with John Sonmez on managing careers, remote working, mentoring, getting more work done, negotiating salaries and positive thinking.

Ben Linders
on Jan 03, 2015