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Culture & Methods

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.

Vivien Ibironke Ibiyemi
on Apr 05, 2017
Culture & Methods

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.

Tomas Björkholm Ellen Gottesdiener
on Mar 29, 2017
Culture & Methods

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.

Russ Lewis
on Mar 27, 2017
Culture & Methods

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”.

Ben Linders
on Mar 26, 2017
DevOps

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.

Matthew Skelton Manuel Pais
on Mar 22, 2017
Culture & Methods

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.

Yousef Awad
on Mar 20, 2017
Culture & Methods

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.

Simon Reindl
on Mar 18, 2017
Culture & Methods

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.

Michael de la Maza
on Mar 15, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Agile Engagement

In the book Agile Engagement, Santiago Jaramillo and Todd Richardson explore the reasons why employees can be disengaged and provide solutions for measuring and driving engagement in organizations. InfoQ interviewed them about the factors that influence the performance of teams and how to measure agile engagement to create an engaging workplace culture.

Ben Linders
on Mar 10, 2017
Culture & Methods

The Triangle of Self Organization

Self-organization is a modern management tool that replaces command & control as a method of creating teams and guiding them to deliver desired outcomes. The Triangle of Self Organization identifies three essential components needed to guide this process – goal, rules & tension - and shows how to choose them consciously to successfully use self-organization as a management tool.

Andy Brandt
on Mar 06, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS

The book More with LeSS by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde provides practices to create simpler and more flexible organizations, applying Scrum with many teams working on one product. More with LeSS is the third book on LeSS (see books on LeSS); it’s the most concrete and fundamental book to start learning about LeSS. The book also contains insights on experiences with LeSS adoptions.

Ben Linders
on Mar 04, 2017
Culture & Methods

Developing Quality Software: Differentiating Factors

The level of software quality attainable is a reflection of an organizational business decision. There are many factors that influence this decision, including development, build and testing environments effectiveness, resources and their associated skillset, integrity, motivations and experience levels, commercial agreements, and adopted processes and productivity tools.

Cynthia Freeney
on Mar 02, 2017