Better Engineering via Better Discourse
Killing opposition with kindness is a real strategy in online discussions; there is power to disarm in acting as if the other party did not intend to be insulting or condescending. Accept that there will be bias in online communication, use facts and reason to deal with it, and practice awareness of bias and attempt to compensate.
Managing Crowdsourced Testing
Crowdsourced testing is a unique way of involving the crowd- meaning the real users/testers- into software testing under real world conditions. It helped Swisscom to find defects very early in the development process and increase the quality of products.
How Testers Can Become More Technical
Testers who are able to successfully apply technical techniques of the testing craft during testing are more valuable; they increase both the quality and productivity of their teams. To become more technical, testers can learn something about code, and they should know how to manipulate and parse text files and how to use the most important analysis tools for their application platform.
How to Build Open Source Communities
Seeing programming as a social activity changes how we build communities around programming. We should focus on building a community, and not on building a codebase, argued Ash Furrow at Craft. He suggested using a code of conduct, moving long or heated discussions into a Skype call or Google Hangout, avoiding fixing easy issues yourself, and distributing power and responsibilities.
Fearless Feedback for Software Teams
Feedback builds trust, increases team cohesion, and helps individuals to improve their skills and grow in their craft. An effective feedback cycle is the best possible tool for improving team performance. With feedback, issues are addressed before they become toxic and mistakes can be course-corrected early on.
2017 Tech Leavers Study Report Released
The Kapor Center for Social Impact has released the results of a study that looked at the reasons people leave tech roles. The four key takeaways from the study are: unfairness drives turnover, experiences differ dramatically across groups, unfairness costs billions each year, and diversity and inclusion initiatives can improve culture and reduce turnover, if they are done right.
Exploring the Seven Principles of Sociocracy 3.0
Principles guide behaviour, and when made explicit can raise consciousness and help to evolve culture. The seven Sociocracy 3.0 principles support organizations that want to act in integrity with their environment, learn from experience, and generate a collaborative, adaptable and intelligent system to navigate complexity.
Atlassian Opens up Team Health Monitors and Team Playbook Blueprints
After introducing a tool-agnostic version of its Team Health Monitors at Summit 2016, Atlassian now also bundles Team Playbook blueprints with the recently released Confluence Server 6.1. A Health Monitor workshop is a team self-assessment aiming to identify pain points and formulate a plan to address weak spots by running low-ceremony "plays" that "can help improve a team's overall health".
Lean Organisations for the Digital Age
Lean IT should help to simplify and improve the way we create value for customers and develop better solutions for tomorrow. Organisations of the future will focus on horizontal product or service streams- and everything else, including experts and managers, is there to enable the front-line to do their work right-first-time-on-time, with no hassles.
Michael Nir on Conduct Objectives for High Team Performance
Michael Nir will give a talk at the upcoming Agile Games conference titled "Bring the Scrum Master a Glass of Water: Conduct Objectives for High Performance Team". InfoQ spoke to Nir about the goal of Conduct Objectives, the way to measure behavior, the common problem with the appreciation of personalities, how to use a Team Charter, and the link with Core Protocols.
The Agile Journey of Buurtzorg towards Teal
Buurtzorg, a Dutch nationwide nursing organization, operates entirely using self-managing practices. Teams are fully self-organized, and the organization has developed a culture where these independent teams are supported by the back office. Their IT system was developed in an agile way to help teams deliver nursing care to their patients.
3 Years of the Merit Money System, a Revolution on the Recognition Methods Proposed by Cláudio Pires
Back in 2014, Cláudio Pires, a CEO in the healthcare business, implemented an alternative employee recognition method, the Merit Money System. Three years later, InfoQ challenged him to talk about the wins, the pitfalls and the lessons learned so far.
Driving Improvements with Lean Pilots
Lean, agile and Lean Startup can strengthen each other for driving improvement. Lean Pilots, a data-driven improvement framework for removing major cross-functional organizational impediments, has been used to drive internal continuous improvement.
Creating a More Equal Workplace
Women are leaving the tech industry because they are unhappy, don't feel valued or lack access to opportunities. We need to create environments that retain and grow employees, regardless of what they look like on the outside, argued Kate Heddleston. During her QCon London talk she suggested a process that organizations can use if they want to create equal access opportunities.
Making Distributed Development Work
Distributed development depends on effective communication: you need to look for ways to have robust and diverse communication, build empathy towards each other to encourage feedback, and keep an eye on motivation. Team members are more engaged and creative when there’s shared ownership and responsibility for complete delivery from idea to production in distributed teams.
