InfoQ Homepage Collaboration Content on InfoQ
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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.
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InfoQ Book Review: The Responsibility Virus
Agile teams can use a regular learning cycle to shift gradually and organically into a more collaborative mode. But the rest of the business may not be equally well equipped. Deborah Hartmann proposes that the Responsibility Virus is an important book for the change agent's library, suggesting that it may provide a tool to help other parts of the organization also grow into greater collaboration.
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Coding Dojos to Master the Art of Development
Coding Dojos are meeting places where developers can go to practice coding together and improve their development skills in a relaxed and enjoyable setting. Emily Bache and others have started to document dojos on a wiki where the public can go to get started.
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InfoQ Article: Lean Kanban Boards for Agile Tracking
"Big Visible Charts" aren't unique to Agile - Lean manufacturing also has its Kanban Boards. "Kanban" roughly means "card or sign," and each Kanban card is "pulled" onto the board only when the work represented by an "in progress" card is retired. In this InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to track Agile project status (Time, Task, and Team) to enhance collaboration.
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InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker
In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.
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InfoQ Article: Creating a Collaborative Workspace
We may imagine an extremely Agile team as working in a minimalist teamroom, surrounded by whiteboards. But that isn't enough - some of the comforts left behind in our traditional spaces were there for good reasons. In this InfoQ article several experienced coaches offer advice from experience, on creating collaborative team spaces that work.
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Working with Mingle
InfoQ had some time with Mingle project engineer Jay Wallace, to use ThoughtWorks' much anticipated Mingle software and demonstrate to us how it differentiates itself from other products by being a truly agile project management tool.
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XWiki 1.0: Extensible Java-based wiki/application platform
XWiki is an open source wiki and an application platform written in Java and released under LGPL license. Its development platform features allow creating collaborative web applications and also provide packaged applications built on top of the platform (second generation wiki). XWiki 1.0 launched last month, but there have been almost 10,000 deployments to date.
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Can Virtual Teams Ever Work?
Co-location is one of the cornerstones of Scrum, so the increasing trend toward non-co-located teams raises questions on how Agile can work in such an environment. David Churchville has blogged some common distributed team scenarios, and offered solutions to common pitfalls of delivering Agile projects using different types of distributed teams.
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Incremental Software Development without Iterations
David Anderson described how his team is using a kanban system for their sustaining engineering (maintenance and bug fixing) activities. Iterations have been dropped although software is still released every two weeks. Work is scheduled, monitored, and run via a "kanban board" and daily stand-up meetings.
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Interview: Linda Rising on Collaboration, Bonobos and the Brain
Seasoned practitioners packed a small room at Agile2006 to hear Linda Rising's "Are Agilists the Bonobos of the Software Community?" where she shared her thoughts on the evolutionary roots of teamwork. In this InfoQ interview, Linda talked with editor Deborah Hartmann about how writing her book "Fearless Change" led her to read on the science of the human brain and the social rituals of apes.
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Jeff De Luca, on FDD: Modeling, Code Ownership, Choosing an Agile Method
In an interview with Stefan Roock, Jeff De Luca, who created and documented Feature Driven Development, discussed developing an overall model, code ownership, choosing an agile method, and more.