InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Trunk Based Development as a Cornerstone for Continuous Delivery
Dave Farley, co-author of the pivotal Continuous Delivery book, recently wrote about push-back to the practice of trunk based development, despite evidence of its role in achieving the benefits of CI and high performing teams. Jez Humble, his co-author, also commented in a twitter-thread on the cultural aspects of the practice to understand its relation to programmer psyche.
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12th State of Agile Report Published
The 2018 State of Agile Report has been published by CollabNet VersionOne. Some of the conclusions from the report are that the need for customer and user satisfaction is increasing, more and more organizations are scaling agile, distributed teams are becoming the norm in agile software development, and many organization have started or plan to start a DevOps initiative in the next 12 months.
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Dr. Nicole Forsgren on the DORA & Google Collaboration on the New Accelerate State of DevOps Report
DORA and Google Cloud will conduct original research to be delivered as The Accelerate State of DevOps Report focused on software developer issues. The research aim is to surface new findings that provide guidance for improvement in resource management, productivity and quality of technology delivery teams.
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Great Engineering Cultures and Organizations - Morning Sessions from QCon London
The building great engineering cultures and organizations track at QCon London 2018 included talks from practitioners representing digital leaders of the consumer internet as well as transformational corporates from “traditional” sectors. The speakers presented how they established and scaled engineering cultures that keep their organisations ahead of the rest. A summary of the morning sessions.
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Data-Driven Thinking for Continuous Improvement
Organizations need an objective way to measure performance and tie actions back to business outcomes to improve continuously. Avvo uses a data-driven decision framework with an autonomous team model and a practice of retrospectives to help people make better decisions and proposals for continuous improvement.
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How the Dutch Railways Applies Agile and Lean
The mindset that goes with agile and lean philosophies is quite similar; lean amplifies agile and vice versa. Agile practices are suitable for the development of complex products, and lean practices help to look for opportunities to reduce waste in your processes. Lean helps to see results from the customer's point of view, from start to delivery, whereas agile supports delivering optimal value.
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Should Teams Decouple Cadences?
Recently a Twitter discussion took place about allowing teams to have multiple cadences, for instance by using a different rhythm for planning the work and for learning and improving. Decoupling cadences gives teams room to explore and learn what works best for them; it can lead to more adaptability and autonomy and better outcomes.
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Post-Mortems Trends and Behaviors
Eric Siegler presented his findings at Velocity from analyzing data from 1000 post-mortems ran by 125 different organizations over a six month period. Main trends include the prevalence of blameless post-mortems; the fact that only 1 in 100 post-mortems refer to "human error"; and that analyzing the lifecycle of incidents can provide useful insights on weaknesses in the incident response process.
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XebiaLabs Announce DevOps Intelligence Engine
XebiaLabs, the developers of Continuous Delivery and DevOps tooling XL Release and XL Deploy, has announced availability of the first release of XL Impact, a goal-based, data-driven recommendation and decision making tool for DevOps organisations. XebiaLabs claims this is the first tool of its kind and the capability is essential for organisations to prove DevOps performance improvements.
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Q&A with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about Scrum Guide Updates
The Scrum guide has been updated to better reflect what Scrum is and clear up misconceptions. Scrum can be used for building software products, and it can be applied to many other areas outside of software as well. Scrum is a framework based on empiricism for continuous improvement. Having a potentially shippable product increment at least every sprint or more often is a key element of Scrum.