InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Going from Architect to Architecting: the Evolution of a Key Role
This article explores the cultural change of moving towards shared architecture, and the role that the architect has evolved into; from one with an air of authority and singular vision, to one in which system design issues are surfaced, which require team-wide input to resolve. Teams being coached and guided towards shared ownership might be struggling with the paradigm shift of ownership.
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The Future of Technology Depends on the Talent to Run it
Effective nearshore staff augmentation—a savvier form of outsourcing—allows organizations to bypass the skills gap and mitigate turnover. Nearshoring can help companies build great teams of professionals who are located in the same time zone, charge reasonable rates, and collaborate directly with in-house teams.
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Great Leaders Manage Complexity with Self-Awareness and Context Awareness
People's perception and expectations on leadership requires a leader to understand their own contextual significance which makes it difficult to become an appreciated leader. Also trivialisation many times unknowingly stands in the way of progress in complex situations. This article explores specific traits that distinguish people who repeatedly provide appreciated and appropriate leadership.
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What Does Technical Debt Tell You?
Technical debt is a popular metaphor for communicating the long-term implications of architectural decisions and trade-offs to stakeholders, but there are limitations to its usefulness. Incorporating quality attribute requirements, or using a different metaphor such as deferred maintenance, can help improve decision making.
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Enabling Effective Remote Working - Principles and Patterns from Team Topologies
This article shares ideas, principles, and practices from Team Topologies (and related topics) to help organizations approach their structures' design and evolution to better support interactions in remote working. It also shares examples to showcase their impact when used to better approach organizational design, in general, and particularly to support remote working.
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Extinguishing IT Team Burnout through Mindfulness and Unstructured Time
Burnout is taking a toll on IT and creating serious skill shortages. How can you keep your IT team engaged, productive, and happy? Mindfulness and unstructured time are delivering tangible business benefits that positively impact the bottom line, all while driving worker satisfaction and well-being.
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Craftleadership: Craft Your Leadership as Developers Craft Code
Learning software craftership made me reconsider how I wrote code. Being an experienced software team manager, I try to reevaluate my management practices in the same way: what could test-driven management or pair-management be? Here I propose different insights on how software craftership tools and mindset are transposable to the management domain.
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The Challenge of Cognitive Load in Platform Engineering: a Discussion with Paula Kennedy
In a recent article, Paula Kennedy shared her thoughts on the ever-increasing cognitive load being saddled onto development teams. Although platform engineering is touted as a solution to this challenge, a poorly designed platform will increase the cognitive burden on developers utilizing it. We must also be careful that we are not just transferring that cognitive load onto the platform teams.
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When, Why and How Facilitation Skills Help Scrum Teams
Effective Facilitation helps Scrum and Agile Teams leverage differences in positive ways, guiding teams to frame their discussions with clear purpose, decisions, outcomes and engagement with one another. This article talks about how facilitation can make or break team interactions, the amount of facilitation needed in certain scenarios, how to drive decisions with facilitation, and more.
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Bringing a Product Mindset into DevOps
To be successful, organisations need two things: products and services their customers find valuable, and the ability to deliver these products and services well. This article shows why we must design, implement and operate our delivery pipelines (the means of turning ideas into products in the hands of users) as we would any other product or service: by adding a “product mindset".
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Are Your “Value Streams” Keeping You Stuck in the Past?
The essence of business agility is being able to respond quickly and systematically to feedback. As a means of achieving business agility, value stream management falls short, and ends up being not very different from what organizations have done for a long time: using program management practices to coordinate work across different teams in a large organization.
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From Async Code Reviews to Co-Creation Patterns
This article dives into the throughput and quality of the async code review process, which are very important dimensions to optimize for in product development teams. It also explains why co-creation patterns – Pair and Mob programming – as an alternative way of working are able to optimize for both of those dimensions, instead of needing to trade off between them.