InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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The Three Symptoms of Toxic Leadership and How to Get out of It
None of us are born toxic leaders, but anyone can easily become one. In the past several years, workplaces have started to feel the effects of “toxic leadership.” Now is the time to educate everyone on the importance of speaking right, doing right, treating each other right in the workplace, and above all, being a non-toxic leader.
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How to Decide in Self-Managed Projects - a Lean Approach to Governance
Whether self-managed or self-governed as a project, the power still needs to be distributed internally. If the project is open to decide how things are done, how do we decide? A solid but flexible set of tools and practices like sociocracy is a great starting point for projects to have clear but lean processes that can grow as we grow.
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Best Practices for Letting Go of a Remote Team Member
At Doist, letting go of a team member is a last resort. Over 14 years, the remote-first pioneer has parted ways with approximately 25 team members, which has evolved the way they handle remote terminations. Today, Doist employs 100 people in 35+ countries with a 90+% employee retention rate. Here COO Allan Christensen offers his lessons learned on letting go of a remote team member.
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How Medical Companies are Innovating through Agile Practices
The adoption of Agile methods has been steadily growing in medical product companies over the past ten years. Practices vary from cloud-based continuous flow for data-intensive services to sprint-based for physical devices with embedded software. The question is no longer whether, but how Agile can work in medical product development - for our mix of technical, market, and regulatory constraints.
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Hybrid Work is Here to Stay, and Software Teams Need to Adapt
In a post-pandemic workplace, face-to-face conversation is no longer the de facto collaboration method. As hybrid and distributed software development teams emerge, we look at ways that tools and processes can foster collaboration no matter where the team is located. Asynchronous work, a single source of truth, clear documentation and owners, and automation will empower hybrid development teams.
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Resetting a Struggling Scrum Team Using Sprint 0
Sprint 0 can be a great mechanism in Agile transformations to reset existing teams which are not delivering value, exhibiting a lack of accountability, or struggling with direct collaboration with customers. This article shares the experiences from doing a Sprint 0 with an existing team which was struggling to deliver, helping them to align to a new product vision and become a stronger team.
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Essential Soft Skills for IT leaders in a Remote World
Leading teams is always challenging, especially when your team is remote; it requires more effort and more skills to be developed. This article describes the skills needed if you would like to become not just a good team leader, but a great one. To start, here are three essential soft skills: be vulnerable and authentic, build a collaborative and safe environment, and provide candid feedback.
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Leveraging Diversity to Enhance Cybersecurity
How can we ensure there is a diverse mindset applied to cybersecurity? By including non-technical people, those from non-traditional backgrounds, and being intentional about avoiding herd mentality. If we as an industry proclaim security as a best practice, we must equally ensure diversity to ensure we have most effectively mitigated the risks that abound.
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Technical Debt Isn't Technical: What Companies Can Do to Reduce Technical Debt
In this article, three experts discuss some of the key findings of the “State of Technical Debt 2021” report including the impact of technical debt on engineering teams, the pros and cons of dealing with maintenance work continuously, the future of technical debt and what each engineering teams can do to communicate the importance of dealing with technical debt to companies’ leadership.
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How to Enable Team Learning and Boost Performance
Team performance is dependent on safety, teamwork and ongoing learning. Clarity in roles, psychological safety, breaking bad habits and constantly learning are critical to enabling high performance.
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How Tech Leaders Can Leverage Their Mentoring and Teaching with Coaching
You may have heard about coaching and wondered what it entails and how you might incorporate it into your role. Do you need to have “coach” as part of your job description in order to use coaching skills? This article defines coaching and shows how anybody can use it in their role. It also shows how coaching can be incorporated into management and technical leadership roles as examples.
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Value Stream Mapping and Value Stream Management: How They Can Work for You
Value stream mapping is a largely qualitative tool that creates visibility into the waste in a system while also creating alignment around ways to improve. Value stream management codifies the system, allowing for continual monitoring and management.