InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Dialling in: Atkins and the Communication Challenge, Runners up to the 2017 Spark Award
The benefits of collaboration and knowledge sharing are well-known, yet any large organisation understands how challenging it is to keep employees feeling connected. The runners up to this year’s Spark Award, sponsored by HotelBeds, are Atkins, a design, engineering and project delivery organisation of over 18,000 people who have been experimenting with a mix of communication methods.
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How to Sell Refactoring? The Case of Nordea Bank AB
Refactoring is often not a technical challenge. Teams can accurately diagnose inefficient code design. If they have sufficient time and budget at their disposal, they would probably get things done. In this article, we focus on the strategic code refactoring. This distinction was introduced by the BNS IT consultants as part of the method called Natural Course of Refactoring.
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2017 State of Testing Report
The State of Testing 2017 report provides insights into the adoption of test techniques, practices, and test automation, and the challenges that testers are facing. This is fourth time that this survey has been done. InfoQ held an interview with the organizers of the State of Testing survey.
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Product Development in Distributed Teams
This article focuses on how to do product development in distributed teams. It shares some virtues and practices which help to minimize challenges and develop the right product. It covers tools to help overcome challenges due to distribution and foster good behaviours. It explains how to perform various product oriented activities like user research, story mapping, planning and refinements.
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Enhance Your Testing Skills with Mindset Tools
Quite a lot of testers often miss out on the mindset necessary for the testing and delivery of quality products. Sometimes it seems that quality consciousness is missing. This article is about how I discovered a way to grow my test mindset, and how my discovery has been useful in enhancing my testing skills.
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Using Structured Conversations to Discover Your MVP
In an increasingly more complex world, finding the smallest possible chunk to deliver to get feedback is essential. This is the idea behind the term MVP. This article describes a model where business and technology together explore the product needs along seven product dimensions, which is a great way of finding small slices of work to develop.
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Predictable Agile Delivery: The Executive Challenge
As agile grows-out of its years of self-obsession and teenage petulance into a post-agile state, ‘Predictable Agile Delivery’ feels like a realistic goal that advantages both the business sponsor and their development stakeholders. This article shares some ‘good, bad and ugly’ examples of practices that often work and some that always fail at improving large organizations.
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Book Q&A on Product Mastery
The best product owners are insatiably curious about their customers; they observe them in action, interview them, and collaborate with them and bring them into the development process, said Geoff Watts. In his new book Product Mastery he explores what he calls “the difference between good and great product ownership”.
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The Divisive Effect of Separate Issue Tracking Tools
Separate issue tracking systems for Development and IT Operations are a source of conflict and ineffectiveness for many organizations. For effective Database Lifecycle Management (DLM), we typically need shared issue tracking systems where DBA teams can see upcoming work from Development and Development teams can see details of live service issues logged from Production.
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Agile Scaling in Action
The biggest reason for adopting agile at scale is that despite the fantasy that a collection of agile teams will somehow organically integrate to deploy a program, that is not the reality. That’s why for larger dev/test outfits or projects, companies sometimes roll up individual agile teams into one agile environment at enterprise scale. Yousef Awad presents lessons learned and words to the wise.
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Teams and the Way They Work
The terms “self-organised” and “cross functional” are often used to describe a team. What does this mean, and how will you recognise if your team has these features? Great teams work with the uniqueness of each person’s skills, experiences and outlook – forging the motivation to achieve a shared goal, within the constraints in which they operate.
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Monte Carlo Planning Improves Decision Making
De la Maza helped a startup IPO by applying Monte Carlo to a planning problem. Learn how Monte Carlo planning provides a rigorous, quantitative account of what the future may bring. It has advantages over standard average case approaches and you can start with a simple Excel spreadsheet.