InfoQ Homepage Collaboration Content on InfoQ
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Microsoft Live Mesh Keeping your World in Sync
Microsoft released a technology preview of their Windows Live Mesh service designed to connect and synchronize devices, folders and news. The details from Microsoft include giving users of PCs, Macs and Mobile phones access to their information from anywhere.
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A Preview of Mingle 2.0
On April 15th Thoughtworks will release Mingle 2.0, nine months after the initial release of Mingle. InfoQ got some time with product manager Adam Monago to talk through the new functionality provided by Mingle 2.0.
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Managers: Help your Teams Learn Communication Skills
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm requires that team members develop strong interpersonal skills. Now management gains an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills without crushing a team’s growing self-organization, and suggests some sources of helpful material for developing new skills.
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Well Formed Teams: Helping Teams Thrive, not just Survive
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
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GitHub - Rails-based Git repository hosting
Github is a new service, built in Ruby, for hosting git repositories. But there's more: by exploiting git's features, such as quick branching/merging, it allows new, more streamlined ways of cooperation between and experimentation with open source projects.
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Improving Productivity without Formal Metrics
Ron Jeffries has started writing a series of fictional stories based on his observation of real teams. The first story (Kate Oneal: Productivity) focuses on the character Kate O'Neal (CTO) and one of her teams "Rimshot". In this episode Ron explores achieving and measuring Productivity improvements without formal metrics.
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Apple Manager Writes "Managing Humans" to Help Techies
It’s Michael Lopp’s belief that developers are trained to manage bits well, but not humans. When developers are promoted to managers much harm can be inflicted. Michael uses stories and humour to warn us of the many perils of management and how to navigate around them.
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Review Board - Online Code Review Tool
Recently there has been a resurgence in interest in code reviews. InfoQ looks at Review Board, an open source application that helps facilitate the code review process, that has been gathering momentum in the open source community.
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Unconsciously Agile? (Rhythms of Agile Development)
Damon Poole wrote recently that many of us maybe practicing Agile development without even realizing it. It turns out that many of us maybe showing signs of the Agile disease without knowing it.
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Agile Beyond the Workplace
Many of us in this field have had our work habits affect our family life - many times for the better. Some of us use index cards in their daily life for scheduling, prioritizing, and discussing daily tasks with their families. Peter Abilla blogged about how he uses a Job Chart (a type of information radiator) to teach his children.
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Successful Collaboration Doesn't Happen by Accident
Partnership Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can find themselves playing a "consultant" role, and should consider using consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not regarding the exchange of money, but to create a climate for stellar results for the client, while also communicating their own values and preferences.
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I'm Not Sure What You Heard is What I Thought I Said
Are family celebrations a challenge? You get together to catch up and swap stories, and invariably something gets "taken the wrong way." It's not restricted to families is it? So it's not surprising that the Satir Communication Model jumped the fence from family therapy to team building! J.B. Rainsberger uses an amusing Christmas-at-Walmart anecdote to illustrate its use.
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Can architecture create a gap between developers and software they build?
Many software project management and architecture approaches tend to parcel out work on a project in a way to create hierarchical layers. This helps simplify both developers’ work and management. However, the underlying information shielding among layers can potentially create a gap between developers and the software they are building, if their tasks are totally taken out of functional context.
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InfoQ Presentation: Jean Tabaka on Surviving Meeting Burnout
Teams moving to an Agile approach may feel irritated as they move from command-and-control to a collaborative culture - which can start to look like non-stop meetings, starting first thing every Monday morning. In this InfoQ exclusive presentation, recorded at Agile2007, Agile coach Jean Tabaka shared her experiences working with teams, offering guidance on how to alleviate meeting burnout.
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Holding a Program in Your Head
Your code: is it that stuff you store in version control or, as Paul Graham argues, "... your understanding of the problem you're exploring"? Graham has written an essay offering eight suggestions for developers trying to understand the code on which they're working - some of which seem to contradict the advice of the agilists.