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A Culture of Continuous Experimentation: Learnings from QCon New York
At QCon New York 2023, Sarah Aslanifar presented Building a Culture of Continuous Experimentation. She showed how fostering a culture of continuous experimentation and leveraging the principle of continuous learning can drive efficiency, eliminate waste, and improve product outcomes.
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eBay Doubles Team Velocity after Reworking Their Most Important Page
eBay consolidated services responsible for serving their View Item page, which has over 250 million daily page loads, to remove code duplication and improve developer productivity. As a result, they doubled the team velocity and can now deploy changes to this page even daily, with a much lower change failure rate.
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Considering Remote Mob Programming in a High Stakes Environment
Remote mob programming helped a team in a high-stakes environment to be resilient, work under pressure, and deliver successfully. Setting expectations on the first call and being serious about the reasons for doing mob programming ensured that the team kept doing it.
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Applying Test-Driven Development in the Cloud
In the cloud, application development can be treated end-to-end with its accompanying infrastructure. This makes it possible to use test-driven development (TDD) and refactoring on the full application, which can bring down maintenance costs.
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Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.
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Sustainability for Software Companies: Reducing Impact by Deciding What Not to Do
Small and medium-sized companies can contribute to sustainability with emissions reduction, mental health offerings and inclusion. To support sustainability, software engineers can think about “what not to do” to reduce complexity and make solutions smaller, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint.
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Helping Teams Deliver with a Quality Practices Assessment Model
The quality practices assessment model explores quality aspects that help teams to deliver in an agile way. The model covers both social and technical aspects of quality; it is used to assess the quality of the team’s processes and also touches on product quality. With an assessment, teams can look at where their practices lie within the quality aspects and decide on what they want to improve.
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Learnings from Applying Psychological Safety across Teams
Applying ideas from psychological safety can enable people to speak up in teams about what they don't know, don't understand, or mistakes they have made. Trust and creating safe spaces are essential, but more is needed. People need to feel that they will not be punished or embarrassed if they take interpersonal risks.
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How Defining Agile Results and Behaviors Can Enable Behavioral Change
Specifying and measuring behavior within a certain organisational context can enable and drive behavioral change. To increase the success of an agile transformation, it helps if you link the desired behaviors to the expected results. This way you set yourself up to be able to reinforce the behavior you want to see more of in order to reach your results.
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Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators
Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization.
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The Myth of Product Mindset: It's What You Do, Not How You Think
Companies nowadays are looking for ways to cultivate a product mindset. While the idea of cultivating a “product mindset” allows us to focus primarily on ourselves, actually transforming our organizations often means changing our behavior to focus on our customers and how we work together to serve them.
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State of Value Stream Management Report Shows Platform Adoption Increased 4X in a Year
The Value Stream Management Consortium has produced their 2022 report, which most notably shows a 4x increase in the number of respondents implementing a Value Stream Management platform. Organisations implementing VSM are using value streams to break down silos, and rather than setting a vision and goals up-front, many are just starting with a VSM mapping exercise treated as an experiment.
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Using Data to Predict Future Usage and Increase User Insights
By identifying usage trends, you can proactively adjust load, scaling, and routing to better handle the load on particular parts of the globe when you know it will peak there. Data about how users interact with your application can be used to design future features that better mimic these patterns and ensure that new features have a better chance of solving real user problems and getting adopted.
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Establishing Autonomy and Responsibility with Networks of Teams
Working in outdated ways causes people to quit their work. Pim de Morree suggests structuring organizations into networks of autonomous teams and creating meaningful work through a clear purpose and direction. According to him, we can work better, be more successful, and have more fun at the same time.
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Trust-Driven Development: Accelerate Delivery and Increase Creativity
By building trust you can break silos, foster collaboration, increase focus, and enable people to come up with creative solutions for products and for improving their processes. The DevOps movement was created to break the silos in the organisations; trust can be built by organising pair programming across various functions and various teams.