InfoQ Homepage Collaboration Content on InfoQ
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How Personality Matters in Software Development
Leaders have to orchestrate diverse contributions from individuals with different personalities to build great teams. Team members might decide to act out of character and engage in behaviour outside their comfort zone to advance the team goal. To reduce the risk of burning out or compromising physical health, there should be restorative niches in which they can be their natural selves again.
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Tackling Awesome Superproblems with Collaborative Games
Awesome superproblems are large, complex and enduring problems which can only be solved through collaboration. The key to making collaboration work is serious games, where participants voluntarily agree to follow the rules of the game to create a better and more durable result.
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What a High Performing Team Looks Like and How to Create One
High performing is a team property, a temporary state which needs attention if teams want to keep on performing well. Things you can do to build a high performing team include creating safety, investing in developing collaboration skills, and giving peer-to-peer feedback.
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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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GitHub for Testers
Talk to a developer about version control, and you’ll likely hear about Git as a workflow tool, and GitHub as both a place to store code and a personal resume. It can be beneficial for testers to join and use Github for personal and professional projects and to contribute to existing projects.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.