InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Using the Problem Reframing Method to Build Innovative Solutions
Building products that customers love relies heavily on the problem space: how well you know your audience and how clear are the pain points and main problems your users are facing. This means that the solution to a problem depends on how we frame the problem. This article provides different practices and tools on how to apply problem reframing underpinned by a real case study.
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Five Tips on Managing a Remote-First Development Team
Most software development teams have gone remote during the pandemic - and may stay remote even after the lockdowns. Managing remote-first teams is a challenge. Knowing how to do it right can make or break the experience for everyone. Here are five things you can do to succeed as an engineering manager.
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From Couch to Continuous Documentation: Incorporating Documentation into the Development Workflow
As software teams and projects grow, they suffer from knowledge management pains related to their code - lengthy onboarding, limiting knowledge silos, complex code, and risk of attrition. Creating Walkthrough Documentation while practicing Continuous Documentation can address most of the problems that relate to code-related knowledge sharing and management.
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Superior Employee Engagement through Radical Team Autonomy
Radically collaborative organizations have recently doubled in number. Their economic success is due to four cultural imperatives: team autonomy, managerial devolution, deficiency-need gratification, and candid vulnerability. Teams within radically collaborative organizations exhibit six dimensions of autonomy: who, what, when, where, how, and role.
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Using Emergence and Scaffolding to Address Complexity in Product Development
The use of scaffolding and emergence has utility in delivery, supporting the bootstrapping of knowledge and close collaboration with the customer which in turn supports a more organic approach to delivery. Their use is poorly understood but they can be used as part of existing agile practices by tweaking them, avoiding the need for wholesale change
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Building an Effective Digital Platform: Adam Hansrod on the Benefits, Challenges, and Approach
A successful digital platform can improve time to market, increase revenue, reduce operational costs, and improve innovation. An effective platform is one that is differentiating, designed as a product, and is opinionated. InfoQ sat down with Adam Hansrod to discuss how organizations can structure themselves to create effective digital platforms.
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Going Digital in the Middle of a Pandemic
IBM achieved an enterprise-wide digital transformation program despite the challenges posed by 100% remote work and the pandemic. The article explores various transformation levers such as team set-up, process, architecture, engineering practices & tooling, metrics & governance, and culture, and shows how they were applied to achieve sustainable outcomes.
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Using Machine Learning for Fast Test Feedback to Developers and Test Suite Optimization
Software testing, especially in large scale projects, is a time intensive process. Test suites may be computationally expensive, compete with each other for available hardware, or simply be so large as to cause considerable delay until their results are available. The article explores optimizing test execution, saving machine resources, and reducing feedback time to developers.
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Building an Effective and Enjoyable Remote Onboarding Experience
The onboarding experience will make up the new hire’s first impression of your team and company, so it’s really the ideal place to set standards, and therefore requires thoughtful planning, patience, and compassion. In this article, I will dive into some of my own learnings as I onboarded new team members remotely as well as my own wonderful experience joining a new organisation in 2021!
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Goal-Driven Kanban: Improving Performance and Motivating Teams
Goal-Driven Kanban enables teams to choose from and focus on challenging goals along the road. Teams are free to choose their pace and can take a break whenever necessary. They can set a voluntary deadline for the goal chosen together with proper time allocation. Naturally, while pursuing the goal, teams avoid distractions, celebrate achievements, and retrospect frequently.
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Embracing Agile Values as a Tech and People Lead
Having worked as a software developer, the agile community has been a great source of inspiration to me to find better ways of working. In my first leadership role, I incorporated the agile mindset which helped me to get everyone working towards a joint goal: refactoring an inherited codebase for scalability, while enabling cross functional teams to work as autonomously as possible.
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Talking Like a Suit - Communicating the Importance of Engineering Work in Business Terms
This article explores how to construct engineering work as a story, including clearly presenting a problem, offering a solution, and showing the business a path to success that solves their problem and avoids failure. By presenting your case in this way, you significantly increase your chances of getting these engineering problems addressed, while also becoming a better partner for the business.