12th State of Agile Report Published
The 2018 State of Agile Report has been published by CollabNet VersionOne. Some of the conclusions from the report are that the need for customer and user satisfaction is increasing, more and more organizations are scaling agile, distributed teams are becoming the norm in agile software development, and many organization have started or plan to start a DevOps initiative in the next 12 months.
Software Engineering for Creativity, Collaboration, and Inventiveness
A software engineering discipline must be iterative, based on feedback, incremental, experimental, and empirical. Craftsmanship is not sufficient; engineering is an amplifier, it enhances creativity, collaboration, and inventiveness. Continuous delivery is grounded in engineering principles.
Perspectives on Mob Programming and Mob Testing
Maaret Pyhäjärvi, author of the Mob Programming Guidebook, wrote about her experience with mob testing, and how it contributed to her team's journey to recognising improved cross-functionality. Woody Zuill also recently spoke to the Agile Uprising podcast about discussing how mob programming provides an effective collaboration model for delivering software in small releasable increments.
Dealing with the Broken Human Machine: How to Create High-Performing Teams
To really progress in developing software and build anything at a scale, you have to examine your blind spots and learn to deal with people. The culture we build is important: the difference between a high performing engineering team and a low performing one is orders of magnitude in terms of productivity and quality. Focusing on how we do things is as important as what we’re doing.
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.
Pairing for Learning
Pairing can be used to learn new topics that you can take back to the workplace, and to make your accomplishments visible and celebrate success together. Learning partners can encourage each other to make bold statements, commit to do something, and gently push each other to make it happen.
The Relationship between Team Emotion and Delivery
AI firm Deep Affects studied Jira projects, presenting a relationships between emotional health and team productivity. Their findings are also supported by Gallup's 2017 State of the Workforce survey which indicates the cost of not having emotionally engaged teams.
How to Win a Solar Race Using Agile
The Nuon Solar team uses agile and Scrum to take the steps which add the most value to the project first, integrate different disciplines, ensure transparency and focus, and reflect to improve. Their goal is promote and educate the use of clean energy; the mission is to win the Sasol Solar Challenge in South Africa using the power of innovation.
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.
Using Agile Principles with Scrum Studio to Increase Organizational Responsiveness
Using a change approach based on agile principles with Scrum Studio helped a Dutch pension and investment management company to become more responsive at structurally lower costs. The change team practiced what they preached by applying transparent and iterative change with similar characteristics as the intended end result. They established a culture where people are taking responsibility.
GitHub Team Discussions Aim to Improve Collaboration
Announced at its last Universe conference, Team discussions aim to power processes like planning, analysis, design, and others directly from within GitHub.
Real-Time Collaboration Comes to Atom
At QCon San Francisco 2017, GitHub’s Nathan Sobo has unveiled Atom’s new real-time collaboration plugin, Teletype. Teletype aims to make it possible for two developers to code together with the same ease as coding alone.
Game Changers for Organizations
We want to approach strategy using choices, direction, and iterative experiments, establish a growth mindset in organizations, and work towards a common purpose or goal with leaders and teams sharing the same values, principles, and mindset; these are some of the game changers for organizations to become more innovative, deliver faster and better, and have happier and more engaged employees.
Making Our Language and Behaviour More Inclusive
To avoid excluding people, we need to gain more awareness when we are in the wrong and be introspective to find out why someone is upset or offended by what we have said or done. By being excluded, people will eventually leave their jobs, communities or profession, which is something that we need to prevent. Peter Aitken suggested taking a positive approach when addressing inclusion issues.
The Future of Work - Afternoon Sessions from Agile People Sweden
The future of work is about microlearning and unlearning, freedom by technology, agile companies, alignment for autonomy, and self-organized groups of people around common goals and interests; these are some of the ideas that were discussed at Agile People Sweden.
