BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ

  • Why the Dual Operating Model Impedes Enterprise Agility

    Most organizations adopt a dual approach to agility, with some parts of the organization working in an agile way that delivers value in increments, measures the response and adapts accordingly, while the “traditional” organization continues to work as it always has in a relatively top-down way. In this article, This approach must eventually be left behind after an Agile transition.

  • How to Run Your Product Department Like a Coach

    Having found what I thought was my calling as an agile coach, I took the tough decision to move sideways into Product Management in the hopes of using what I’d learned to one day run my own department. I believed that coming from coaching would allow me to see things others could not and create something special. Time will tell if I have succeeded. This is the story of where I am so far.

  • Adaptability by Agreement: Valuing Outcomes over Imposed Solutions

    In the pursuit of agile at scale, the landscape is dominated by process-driven approaches which are broken. This article explores a solution-driven rollout approach, one that puts authentic agreement on outcomes before solutions. The principles on which it is based are also effective as leadership strategies, where frameworks are resources to draw upon as people find fitting solutions.

  • Connecting Goals to Daily Teamwork

    While we all believe that goal setting is important, it’s work that often doesn’t feel quite urgent enough to be included in our daily routine. It is critical to team success for managers to implement a regular cadence that connects daily work more directly to high-level goals, removing administrative roadblocks while helping teammates focus on what matters most.

  • Reducing Cognitive Load in Agile DevOps Teams Using Team Topologies

    In this article we will be sharing our experience from 12 months of adopting certain management and organisational insights from the book Team Topologies. It explores how we identified areas of responsibility and assigned those into mostly customer-facing domains which could be given to our teams. It shows how an inverse Conway manoeuvre can be used to improve the architecture.

  • Making Agile Work in Asynchronous and Hybrid Environments

    Making Agile work in the age of hybrid and remote teams requires extra effort to stay aligned and collaborative. This article explores how development teams can stay agile, even when face-to-face collaboration isn’t an option, by using visual collaboration to build context and alignment, and adopting new practices for engaging meetings.

  • Chaos Engineering and Observability with Visual Metaphors

    This article introduces a new actor for visualising chaos engineering and observability: metaphors. It provides the conceptual foundations of chaos engineering and observability, presents a state of art of visualisation techniques available in the market and shows how treemaps, gauge charts, geocentric and city metaphors can enrich the spectrum of the visual strategies to observe the chaos.

  • Improving Your Estimation Skills by Playing a Planning Game

    Underestimation is still the rule, rather than the exception. One bias especially relevant to the estimation process is the planning fallacy. This article explores the planning fallacy and how we are vulnerable to it. It explains how you can reduce your vulnerability to this fallacy through playing a planning game that has been specifically devised to help mitigate it.

  • Dynamic Value Stream Mapping to Help Increase Developer Productivity

    We explore the value stream optimization technique that has proven useful across a number of industries yet is still emerging in the software field. Explore a number of dynamic value stream map practical cases, and see the industry differences in value stream usage between Lean and Agile.

  • Sustaining Fast Flow with Socio-Technical Thinking

    To sustain a fast flow of changes over long periods of time, organizations address both the social and technical, socio-technical, aspects of reducing complexity. Examples are incentivising good technical practices to keep code maintainable, architecting systems to minimize dependencies and maximize team motivation, and leveraging platforms to preclude whole categories of infrastructure blockers.

  • The Top Three Priorities for Engineering Leaders in 2022 and beyond

    For engineering leaders, the Great Resignation has made it clear that maintaining employee satisfaction should be a top priority in the coming year. In 2022 and beyond, engineering leaders need to invest in developing a strong engineering culture, using data-driven decision-making to lead their teams, and to prioritize people before performance.

  • How Psychological Safety at Work Creates Effective Software Tech Teams That Learn and Grow

    This article provides the foundations of psychological safety and shows how it has been applied for team effectiveness. It explores how psychological safety supports learning and improvement and how we can foster a psychologically safe culture in tech teams.

BT