InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Using Retrospectives for Personal Improvement
Agile retrospectives are used by teams to improve their performance, by reflecting on the way of working and defining improvement actions. But retrospectives can also be used for personal improvement, additional to or as a replacement of performance appraisals. Such retrospectives can be done as a one-on-one by a manager and an employee, individually by an employee, or in a team.
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Agile Retrospectives, Can You Skip Them?
Teams sometimes consider to skip a retrospective meeting, when they feel time pressure, or do not see direct benefits of doing one. Next they question themselves if they have to keep doing retrospectives? Agile retrospectives help teams to learn and improve continuously, and there are valid reasons to keep doing them also with mature teams.
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Sustainable Pace, How to Achieve and Improve it?
Being one of the principles of the agile manifesto, sustainable pace is considered important by many to deploy agile. But achieving a sustainable pace can be difficult, and teams are often asked to improve their velocity. What did you do to adopt sustainable pace with your team? And how did you improve the speed in which your team delivers, and establish a new sustainable level?
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Vim Gets Faster Regex Engine, 1000+ Fixes And Small Improvements
Vim 7.4 was recently released, after more than a month of beta. It is more robust and comes with a new, faster engine for regular expressions.
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Reimagining ALM
Sam Guckenheimer proposes to reimagine ALM to enable continuous feedback on software projects with a metric based on how long it takes to drive an experiment and obtain validated learning from it.
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Why Do Teams Find It Difficult to Do Agile Retrospectives?
Retrospectives are often considered to be a valuable agile technique, but sometimes teams have difficulties doing them: insufficient control of things, thinking that they can’t improve, difficulties defining good actions, or much complaining. Teams may find retrospectives boring, and a waste of their time. How to deal with this, and help teams to discover better ways to do retrospectives?
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Business Process Improvement Using Agile
Organizations want to improve their business processes, and today they need to do it faster. Is it possible to use agile methods and techniques for business process improvement?
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Using Retrospectives for Agile Adoption
To become more flexible, durable and increase organizational effectiveness, retrospectives can be used in adopting agile. Some experiences stories and examples of how teams use retrospectives as a sustainable and adaptable solution for agile adoption, to implement continuous improvement with them.
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Changing people’s behavior by changing the environment
A recent article by Bob Marshall in Business Technology takes a look at how to change people’s behavior in organizations, by addressing the environment in which they do their work.
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Moving Beyond Scrum
Many teams new to Agile start with Scrum. Scrum provides clear guidance, rules, and practices to help teams adopt an Agile mindset. It also surfaces a lot of problems in organizations, which is part of what makes it so difficult for many companies to do successfully. For those that have been doing Scrum for a while, the question becomes, what now? Is this all there is?.
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VS2012: Improvements for ALM and Web Developers
Microsoft has made a "huge bet on HTML5 and JavaScript", and stressed the importance of application lifecycle maintenance. InfoQ takes a look at how VS2012 brings new features to the table in its support for these areas.
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Individual Yield
Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt, enumerates some practical points on individual procutivity. This article wonders how well these apply to software development and contrasts his list with that of other lists.
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Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference 2011
The Amplifying Your Effectiveness (or AYE) Conference took place this year in Cary, North Carolina...
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Is Velocity Killing Agile?
Velocity, the measure of work completed by the team divided by the time taken to complete it, is increasingly being used to manage the productivity of a team and as a comparison between teams. Jim Highsmith, Mark Levison, and Scott Ambler discuss the misuse of velocity as a productivity measure.
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What Agile Architecture and Hurricanes have in Common
In a recent presentation at SATURN 2011 Eric Richardson has drawn some analogies between architects in an agile environment and hurricane meteorologists. For example, both produce various forecasts respectively documents, use many kinds of data sources as inputs, and employ different techniques to acquire data. The question arises is: what can architects learn from meteorologists?