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  • ‘Debt’ as a Guide on the Agile Journey: Technical Debt

    In this article in a series on how ‘debt’ can be used to guide an agile journey, we will provide two examples of smells that are related to technical debt, explain the symptoms, the impact on the business and in our organization, outline the experiments (countermeasures) that we have introduced in an effort to try to remove the smell, and provide some specific advice for you to be inspired.

  • Signs You’re in a Death Spiral (and How to Turn It around before It’s Too Late)

    Don’t let feature work blind you. Enterprises are ramping up their software delivery to compete in the digital-first world. But more features and faster time-to-market can lead your business into a death spiral if you neglect technical debt and risk work. Learn how to use value stream metrics to identify whether your business is in danger and how to reverse the trajectory before it’s too late.

  • The Flow System: Getting Fast Customer Feedback and Managing Flow

    The Flow System elevates Lean Thinking in an age of complexity by combining complexity thinking, distributed leadership, and team science into the Triple Helix of Flow, which organizations can use to become more innovative, adaptive, and resilient. This first article explores the importance of quality, getting fast feedback from customers, the concept of flow, and The Flow System.

  • Applying Stoicism in Testing

    Agility stands for being aware of your environment. There is a specific set of values for a tester that you should stick to; they set limits to what you can deliver as a tester, and within those limits, you can keep your agility. But your values can cause a “collision” with agile people around you, because they don’t have to be perfectly in line with how people apply the agile principles.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Q&A on the Book Accelerating Software Quality

    The book Accelerating Software Quality by Eran Kinsbruner explores how we can combine techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning with a DevOps approach to increase testing effectiveness and deliver higher quality. It provides examples and recommendations for using AI/ML-based solutions in software development and operations.

  • In the Search of Code Quality

    Software development process being a convoluted interplay of technical, business, sociological and psychological forces makes it very hard to understand. This leads to a multitude of myths and hypes. Recent scientific research challenges many commonly held beliefs and intuitions.

  • 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.

  • Q&A on the Book Learning to Scale

    The book Learning to Scale by Régis Medina explores how to apply lean as an education system to scale companies and help people think about their work and learn together to create value. It provides an enterprise model built on how people learn and grow based on the idea that when people understand what they do and why they do it, they become better in what they do and the company moves faster.

  • Q&A on the Book Leading Quality

    The book Leading Quality by Ronald Cummings-John and Owais Peer explores how to become a leader of quality, master strategic quality decisions, and lead engineering/QA teams to accelerate company growth. The book is intended for people who lead quality inside their companies, like C-suite executives.

  • Using OKRs to Build Autonomous Impact Teams

    To focus on outcomes rather than outputs, Meilleurs Agents uses the Objective and Key Results framework to align the whole company on what they want to achieve. Christopher Parola and Nicolas Baron gave a presentation at FlowCon France 2019 where they showed how they implemented the OKR method and turned their product and tech teams into impact teams.

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