InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Lean-Agile Procurement for Outsourcing
One of the last barriers to organisations becoming agile in their operations is the procurement process. At the recent Agilia Conference, Mirko Kleiner presented on Lean-Agile Procurement, an approach to negotiating service contracts which involves procurement specialists, IT teams and suppliers, to move from a combative stance to a collaborative approach to addressing the customers’ needs.
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Updates in the Nexus Guide Stress the Importance of Integration and Transparency
The major changes in the updated Nexus Guide include clarifications to the role of the Nexus Integration team, an explanation on how transparency at scale looks, and alignment with the 2017 Scrum Guide. The Nexus Guide is a framework that helps organizations to scale Scrum.
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GitHub Introduces Multiple Commit Authors
GitHub has started supporting multiple commit authors. The new feature is meant to improve collaboration from several developers on the same commits or pulls requests and ensures every author gets attribution of their commits in their profile contributions graph and the repository’s statistics.
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How the Dutch Railways Applies Agile and Lean
The mindset that goes with agile and lean philosophies is quite similar; lean amplifies agile and vice versa. Agile practices are suitable for the development of complex products, and lean practices help to look for opportunities to reduce waste in your processes. Lean helps to see results from the customer's point of view, from start to delivery, whereas agile supports delivering optimal value.
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Using Self-Selection to Create Teams
At one company, self-selection was applied to redistribute people over teams. It provided the opportunity for developers to get involved in strategic decisions and understand the needs of the business. Using self-selection, they learned that by giving people the power to take difficult and informed decisions, they will become motivated, no matter how tough the decision is.
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Q&A with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about Scrum Guide Updates
The Scrum guide has been updated to better reflect what Scrum is and clear up misconceptions. Scrum can be used for building software products, and it can be applied to many other areas outside of software as well. Scrum is a framework based on empiricism for continuous improvement. Having a potentially shippable product increment at least every sprint or more often is a key element of Scrum.
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The Spotify Model is No "Agile Nirvana"
At Spotify, management and the way the organization works support teams and agile practices by growing people. But Spotify isn’t an “Agile Nirvana”, it’s hard to reach high performance with teams that are constantly growing, changing, and splitting into new teams.
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Experimenting with Self-Organisation
Self-organising teams are much more effective, engaged and happier. Not everyone is comfortable with self-organising; people are conditioned to do what they are told and mainly to work on their own. You need modern leadership approaches like intent-based leadership, sociocracy, and holacracy, to enable self-organising teams.
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How Blogging Empowers Agile Teams
Moving the thinking and decisions a team makes from people’s inboxes onto a blog can make it accessible to all, findable in the future, and referenceable by everyone. Instead of writing documentation, you can use blogumentation to transfer knowledge and document the history of projects that provide context to the code.
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ThoughtWorks Sold to Private Equity Firm Apax Partners
Global software development and digital transformation company ThoughtWorks is to be acquired by London-based private equity firm Apax Partners. The terms of the deal were not disclosed and it is expected to close in Q4 2017.
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Agile 2017 Keynote: Creating Leadership and Engagement at Every Level
At the recent Agile 2017 conference in Orlando, David Marquet, retired Navy captain and author of best selling book “Turn The Ship Around!” gave an entertaining keynote on intent-based leadership.
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Technical Excellence, Organisational Design for CD, and Container Security: Agile on the Beach 2017
At the Agile on the Beach 2017 conference, run in Cornwall, UK, several hundred speakers and attendees gathered to discuss the latest developments within the field of agile and post-agile software development methodologies. Key takeaways from the second day included: cultivating technical excellence; organising for continuous delivery; and container security.
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First Annual Retrospective Report Published
The First Annual Retrospective Report provides a deeper understanding of how retrospectives are used in the real world. The results indicate that retrospectives lead to improved team communication and productivity and help to create an environment of trust. Major challenges are that topics discussed cannot be solved by the team and people do not feel comfortable speaking up.
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The Importance of Learning, Psychological Safety, and Continuous Delivery: Agile on the Beach 2017
At the Agile on the Beach 2017 conference, run in Cornwall, UK, several hundred speakers and attendees gathered to discuss the latest developments within the field of agile and post-agile software development methodologies.
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QCon New York Day 2 – Developer Experience Track Summary
Day 2 of QCon New York had a Developer Experience track which looked at ways to simplify the development process and provide ideas around removing friction, reducing the time from code to production and becoming more efficient in developer practices.