InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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How to Build a Strong Beta Testers Community
It is important to involve the real users at the early stages of your development cycle. A strong beta testers community not only improves your product, but also provides context, pain points and ideas while increasing loyalty and engagement. This article offers tips and tricks on how to build a beta testers program and a process of supporting the program with a modest allotment.
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Exchange Cybernetics: towards a Science of Agility & Adaptation
Agility can become part of a scientific theory of adaptation. The capacity for adaptation is nothing more than the ability to move resources around in order to take opportunities as they emerge. This article describes the ingredients of an agile theory of adaptation and provides examples for how to do tactical planning in order to execute agility.
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Q&A on the Book Retrospectives for Everyone
The book Retrospectives for Everyone by Madhavi Ledalla explains how metaphors can be used to foster reflection and result in actions in agile retrospectives. The book provides examples of metaphors that can for instance be used to nurture teamwork, manage change, focus on objectives and personal reflection, and also provides recommendations for facilitating retrospectives beyond a single team.
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Q&A on the Book Techlash
The book Techlash by Ian Mitroff and Rune Storesund explains why companies need to become socially responsible by considering the potential negative outcomes of technology. It explains how proactive crisis management can help prevent a crisis by the early detection and correction of deviations from expected conditions.
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Q&A on the Book Dynamic Reteaming (2-ed)
In the 2nd edition of her book Dyanamic Reteaming, Heidi Helfand shows that having stable teams is generally unrealistic and that there are ways to effectively reform teams to achieve great outcomes. She explores different approaches to team formation and reformation and provides practical advice on how to create environments where team formation can adapt and evolve effectively.
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Q&A on the Book How to Be an Inclusive Leader
The book How to Be an Inclusive Leader by Jennifer Brown provides a step-by-step guide to becoming an advocate for inclusion. It explains what leaders can do to increase inclusiveness in the workplace, describes the characteristics of inclusive leaders, explores why inclusion matters and how people cover, and provides the inclusive leader continuum.
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Cheesemake: a Declarative Build Tool for C Programs
This article will describe how I came to spend some of the last few months writing a build tool for C programs. Along the way, I'll also try and say something about getting a software project off the ground, how to tackle technical problems that arise, and some of the steps on the path to working software.
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Q&A on the Book The Improv Mindset
The book The Improv Mindset by Bruce and Gail Montgomery provides the framework, activities, case stories, and data to help you apply improv in a business context. They show how you can deal with uncertainty by changing how your brain responds to change, as well as provide methods to systematically improve individual, team, and organization performance by leveraging the core principles of improv.
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Q&A on the Book Further, Faster
Businesses that thrive over the long term can focus on just a few things that truly matter to their teams and core customers. The book Further, Faster by Bill Flynn provides ideas for business leaders to build teams, create a strategy to stay close to customers, and manage a company’s growth with cash as the primary metric.
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Retrospectives for Management Teams
Engaging top management in a recurring retrospective approach can result in long-term value in organizations. Retrospectives can help management teams to explore how they collaborate and cooperate. They can find out whether they should change something and decide on action points that propel the team forward and make them more effective.
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Scaling Distributed Teams by Drawing Parallels from Distributed Systems
An effective distributed team’s characteristics are accountability, good communication, clear goals and expectations, a defined decision-making process, and autonomy with explicit norms. Ranganathan Balashanmugam spoke about scaling distributed teams around the world at QCon London 2020. In his talk he showed how we can apply distributed systems patterns for scaling distributed teams.
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Q&A on the Book Unleashed
The book Unleashed - The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss explores how leaders can become more effective in empowering their people. It shows how they can combine trust, love, and belonging to create spaces where people excel.