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Culture & Methods

Takeoff: What Software Development Can Learn from Aviation

A lot of professions have been around way longer than software development and have developed "best practices" to handle typical problems and challenges. Software developers can benefit from taking a closer look at aircraft maintenance or a pilot’s processes to learn from them, optimize our processes. and last but not least, try to reduce some of the stress that we experience over and over again.

Christian Seifert
on Oct 21, 2021
Culture & Methods

Developer Learning Isn’t Just Important, It’s Imperative

Every industry leader worries about the scarcity of high-quality software engineers. That means companies feel serious pressure to constantly hire new and better developers. But rather than looking externally for a solution, what if companies looked internally? Here’s the reality: meaningful developer learning helps companies convert silver medalists into gold medalists.

Fahim ul Haq
on Oct 19, 2021
Culture & Methods

Better Scrum through Essence

Scrum is easy to explain and hard to do well. The majority of Scrum Teams struggle to do Scrum well. The OMG Essence standard promises to make practices more accessible and to free them from the tyranny of formal methods and frameworks. This article explains how Essence Scrum practices produced by Ian Spence and Dr Jeff Sutherland can help your teams get better at Scrum regardless of the context.

Ian Spence
on Oct 12, 2021
Culture & Methods

Speed, Efficiency, and Value: Using Empiricism to Achieve Business Agility

Customers seek solutions that improve their outcomes, and organizations don’t know what will achieve this until they deliver something to them, measure the results, and adapt accordingly. Doing so repeatedly, frequently, and with the smallest investment to achieve the greatest amount of feedback, is the essence of organizational agility. This is key to success in today's complex world.

Kurt Bittner
on Oct 07, 2021
Culture & Methods

The Three Symptoms of Toxic Leadership and How to Get out of It

None of us are born toxic leaders, but anyone can easily become one. In the past several years, workplaces have started to feel the effects of “toxic leadership.” Now is the time to educate everyone on the importance of speaking right, doing right, treating each other right in the workplace, and above all, being a non-toxic leader.

Raj Subrameyer
on Oct 06, 2021
Culture & Methods

How to Decide in Self-Managed Projects - a Lean Approach to Governance

Whether self-managed or self-governed as a project, the power still needs to be distributed internally. If the project is open to decide how things are done, how do we decide? A solid but flexible set of tools and practices like sociocracy is a great starting point for projects to have clear but lean processes that can grow as we grow.

Ted Rau
on Sep 30, 2021
Culture & Methods

Best Practices for Letting Go of a Remote Team Member

At Doist, letting go of a team member is a last resort. Over 14 years, the remote-first pioneer has parted ways with approximately 25 team members, which has evolved the way they handle remote terminations. Today, Doist employs 100 people in 35+ countries with a 90+% employee retention rate. Here COO Allan Christensen offers his lessons learned on letting go of a remote team member.

Allan Christensen
on Sep 29, 2021
Culture & Methods

Gamification: a Strategy for Enterprises to Enable Digital Product Practices

To embrace the changing needs of consumers, organizations are exploring new ways to ideate, collaborate and create products, some of them being embracing co-creation models, investment in long-term value, and fostering collective wisdom through gamification. This article shows how gamification helps to create perspective around product practices and bring us closer to next-generation products.

Garima Bajpai
on Sep 27, 2021
Culture & Methods

How Medical Companies are Innovating through Agile Practices

The adoption of Agile methods has been steadily growing in medical product companies over the past ten years. Practices vary from cloud-based continuous flow for data-intensive services to sprint-based for physical devices with embedded software. The question is no longer whether, but how Agile can work in medical product development - for our mix of technical, market, and regulatory constraints.

Nancy Van Schooenderwoert Brian Shoemaker
on Sep 22, 2021
Culture & Methods

Hybrid Work is Here to Stay, and Software Teams Need to Adapt

In a post-pandemic workplace, face-to-face conversation is no longer the de facto collaboration method. As hybrid and distributed software development teams emerge, we look at ways that tools and processes can foster collaboration no matter where the team is located. Asynchronous work, a single source of truth, clear documentation and owners, and automation will empower hybrid development teams.

Aaron Upright
on Sep 20, 2021
Culture & Methods

Resetting a Struggling Scrum Team Using Sprint 0

Sprint 0 can be a great mechanism in Agile transformations to reset existing teams which are not delivering value, exhibiting a lack of accountability, or struggling with direct collaboration with customers. This article shares the experiences from doing a Sprint 0 with an existing team which was struggling to deliver, helping them to align to a new product vision and become a stronger team.

Carly Richmond
on Sep 16, 2021
Culture & Methods

Essential Soft Skills for IT leaders in a Remote World

Leading teams is always challenging, especially when your team is remote; it requires more effort and more skills to be developed. This article describes the skills needed if you would like to become not just a good team leader, but a great one. To start, here are three essential soft skills: be vulnerable and authentic, build a collaborative and safe environment, and provide candid feedback.

Anastasiia Tymoshchuk
on Sep 14, 2021

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