InfoQ Homepage Collaboration Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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.
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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.