InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Usability Testing and Testing APIs with Hallway Testing
Hallway testing can be used to enhance the usability of products and make your UX better. You can also use it to test APIs as Ewa Marchewka, head of software integration and test department at Nokia, presented at TestCon Europe 2019. It’s cheap, straightforward, there’s no need for complicated tools, and it’s fast, getting feedback from the end-user almost instantly.
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How Lean Has Helped the IT Team Take Pride in Their Work
More teamwork, a better vision of daily work, a team that works in a concentrated way, and more pride in doing a job well; these are the benefits that Mélanie Noyel mentioned that their IT team at Acta gained from using Lean. At the Lean Digital Summit 2019 she presented on how they applied Lean to improve the IT team’s daily work.
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How Team Feedback Can Drive OKRs
Team feedback meetings can help teams to define their own goals. Such meetings increase focus and motivation within teams, and with proper transparency they enable alignment between the teams’ and organizational goals. In his talk at Agile Leadership Day 2019, Michael Sommerhalder presented how Digitec Galaxus combined quarterly team feedback meetings and team missions with OKRs.
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Refactoring Organizations to Reduce Organizational Debt
Organizations can accumulate organizational debt when adopting new ways of working. An agile mindset can be a driving force to remove organizational impediments and promote continuous improvement, said Jess Long, enterprise Agile coach at LeanDog. At the ACE Conference 2019, she presented how we can reduce organizational debt by refactoring organizations.
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DevOps Needs Continuous Improvement to Succeed
Continuous improvement is not a new thing and is often misunderstood. To be successful, we can take guidance from agile principles and apply them to the DevOps world, argued Mirco Hering, managing director at Accenture. At Agile Portugal 2019 he spoke about DevOps leadership in the age of agile.
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Experience Building a QA Team in a Growing Organization
Shifting the test team to the left brought the whole team closer together, enabled faster learning, and improved collaboration, claimed Neven Matas, QA team lead at Infinum. He spoke at TestCon Moscow 2019 where he shared the lessons learned from building a QA team in a growing organization.
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How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A
Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.
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Retrospective 3.0 at Ocado Technology
Toni Tassani identifies retrospective pitfalls, such as stale and repetitive activities and raises risks: the retrospective as an excuse for not solving issues on the spot, identifying an experiment but not driving the impediment to resolution, Post-it theater. He suggests looking at retrospectives radically differently, leveraging continuous improvement techniques borrowed from Kanban.
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What Can We Learn from the Digital Natives Using Lean
Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder and CEO of Theodo UK, presented "what lean can learn from digital natives" at Lean Digital Summit 2018. Digital natives are familiar with the lean startup and agile practices. They go further by combining Agile with the Toyota Production System which enables them to experiment with ideas, spread innovations, and scale fast.
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The Importance of Feedback for Skill Development and Careers
Feedback and continuous learning are crucial for personal and professional development. Non-technical skills like creative problem solving, critical thinking, and an entrepreneurial mindset are important to make progress in your career. You have to own your career direction and know what you ultimately want to be in order to decide on the next steps.
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Psychological Safety in Post-Mortems
Emotions often come to the fore when there is an incident; psychological safety in blameless post-mortems is essential for the learning process to happen. The post-mortem session must be fairly moderated, preferably by an outsider, giving everyone a turn to speak without criticism. Don’t start the analysis of the incident before there is a clear and common understanding of what actually happened.
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Think in Products, Not Projects: Q&A with Ardita Karaj
Organizations structured around products oversee their work end-to-end. Reversing Conway’s law to establish long-lived teams around the products brings stability and makes it easier to manage and prioritize work. Retrospectives are a powerful tool for product management; they give confidence to continue and help you pivote quickly on what might become high risk or loss for the organization.
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Incorporating Improv into Agile with Games
The rules of Improv provide a short-hand to enhance active listening, collaboration, and mutual reinforcement skills, all of which are integral to Agility. You can incorporate Improv activities and games to reinforce Agile mindset. The game debrief is where the value of the game becomes sustainable, as it explicitly ties emotions and aha-moments from the game experience to working scenarios.
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From Darwin to DevOps: John Willis and Gene Kim Talk about Life after The Phoenix Project
IT Revolution recently published an audiobook with nearly eight hours of conversation between Gene Kim and John Willis; Beyond the Phoenix Project – the Origins and Evolution of DevOps.
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Sustainable Software with Agile
Sustainable software enables you to deliver changes to the customer more quickly with a lower likelihood of bugs, decrease of the total cost of ownership of applications, and increase business agility. It’s possible to verify the sustainability of software using a combination of automated analysis of source code, expert review of technical artifacts, and comparison with benchmark data.