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  • Embracing Agile Values as a Tech and People Lead

    Having worked as a software developer, the agile community has been a great source of inspiration to me to find better ways of working. In my first leadership role, I incorporated the agile mindset which helped me to get everyone working towards a joint goal: refactoring an inherited codebase for scalability, while enabling cross functional teams to work as autonomously as possible.

  • Talking Like a Suit - Communicating the Importance of Engineering Work in Business Terms

    This article explores how to construct engineering work as a story, including clearly presenting a problem, offering a solution, and showing the business a path to success that solves their problem and avoids failure. By presenting your case in this way, you significantly increase your chances of getting these engineering problems addressed, while also becoming a better partner for the business.

  • Managing Technical Debt in a Microservice Architecture

    At QCon Plus, Glenn Engstrand described how Optum Digital engineering devised a method for reliably and predictably paying down tech debt for hundreds of microservices, forming relevant communities and identifying high-risk areas. The communities' collective decisions can be compiled into an actionable roadmap and presented to product managers in a systemic and non-confrontational way.

  • Better Metrics for Building High Performance Teams

    There is no agreed way to build and measure high performing engineering teams, let alone to track the success of software engineers. This article explores ways to support individuals and teams right from onboarding and identifies useful metrics which can help make performance factors visible and actionable. Developer onboarding, dynamic documentation, and asynchronous communication are key.

  • How the Financial Times Approaches Engineering Enablement

    Companies need teams working on infrastructure, tooling and platforms; the way they work has to change so that they do not become a bottleneck. These teams need to be about enabling product teams to deliver business value. Investment in this area pays off as it speeds up many other teams and allows product-team engineers to focus on solving business problems that provide value to the organisation.

  • Hybrid & Remote Work in 2022 and Beyond

    Moving into 2022, ways of working and interacting are continuing to evolve as organisations adapt to the ongoing changes brought about by a wide range of factors influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Making remote work sustainable, flexible, hybrid and asynchronous working, recognising the importance of employee experience and supporting mental wellness are important trends in the future of work.

  • Creating Psychological Safety in Your Teams

    Psychological safety is a work climate where employees feel free to express their questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes. We cannot have high-performing teams without psychological safety. In this article, you will learn practical ideas, interesting stories, and powerful approaches to boost psychological safety in your team.

  • Getting Rid of Wastes and Impediments in Software Development Using Data Science

    This article presents how to use data science to detect wastes and impediments, and concepts and related information that help teams to figure out the root cause of impediments they struggle to get rid of. The knowledge discovered during research includes an expanded waste classification, and the use of trends to uncover undesired situations like hidden delayed backlog items and defects trends.

  • How Space Shapes Collaboration: Using Anthropology to Break Silos

    Software companies strive to keep innovating and changing the rules of the market. These companies are made of people who, unlike smartphones, personal computers or smart watches, have not evolved as much in recent years. This article proposes an analysis of workspaces from anthropology to solve one of the most common problems: the appearance of silos instead of a culture of collaboration.

  • Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt

    Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. What we observe and label “technical debt” is the by-product of a dysfunctional process. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.

  • Remote Ensemble Testing - How an Experiment Shaped the Way We Work

    This article shares how an experiment evolved into a common practice at the workplace, using an experimental approach with remote ensemble testing to get teammates on our cross-functional team more involved in the testing activities of the jointly created product. This all started in the times of a global pandemic where the entire team was working from home.

  • Safe and Fast Deploys at Planet Scale

    At QCon Plus, Mathias Schwarz, a software engineer at Uber, presented safe and fast deploys at planet scale. Uber is a big business and has several different products. They are, in most cases, deployed to dozens or hundreds of markets all over the world.

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