InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Leading during Times of High Uncertainty and Change
To help teams succeed during uncertain times, leaders need to navigate different horizons; managing themselves and building strong relationships with their teams. Organisations need leadership at all levels. In order to be successful, leaders should develop skills for self-management, delegation, dealing with ambiguity, managing in all directions, systems thinking, and leading through context.
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Software Systems Need Skin in the Game
Consequential decisions need to be taken by the people who pay for the consequences, by the people with skin in the game, and modern software practices need to reinforce this idea. On-call engineering is the quintessential modern engineering practice to create skin in the software development game.
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Improving the Performance of a Route Editor Using a Quadtree
A quadtree is a tree data structure that allows the user to partition a two-dimensional space and to quickly find the intersection of objects. In this article we show how we used it to improve the performance of our route editor.
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The Toyota Way: Learn to Improve Continuously
The book The Toyota Way, 2nd Edition by Jeffrey Liker provides a view of the Toyota Production System with fourteen management principles for continuous improvement and developing people. The book, including the 4P model (Philosophy, Processes, People, Problem solving) and principles, has been updated to reflect new insights in systems thinking.
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Who is on the Team?
Ahmad Fahmy and Cesario Ramos take the changes to the new Scrum Guide as an opportunity to explore what it means to be "on a team." They draw on research to create an ACID test to differentiate who is on the team and who isn't. They discuss different mental models around the idea of a team with the hopes that you take this opportunity to discuss and elevate the roles within your organization.
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Improving Organizational Agility with Self-Management
This article presents "self-management" as a possibility to natively support agility to plant seeds and let both institutions and people thrive and benefit from it. Agility may go hand-in-hand with self-management as a way to shift mindsets and open a conversation to really find new ways of working in organizations.
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Adaptive Frontline Incident Response: Human-Centered Incident Management
The third article in a series on how software companies adapted and continue to adapt to enhance their resilience zeros in on the sources that comprise most of your company’s adaptive resources: your frontline responders. In this article, we draw on our experiences as incident commanders with Twilio to share our reflections on what it means to cultivate resilient people.
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Cynefin Applied: Adapting to Changing Contexts
The book Cynefin: Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of our World by Dave Snowden describes the Cynefin framework and explores how it has developed over the years. It also provides stories where people who have applied Cynefin share their experiences.
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Breaking the Taboo – What I Learned from Talking about Mental Health in the Workplace
Mental illness is a topic that does not get discussed openly very often. Many people concerned hide their own history for fear of being stigmatized, especially in the workplace. This is a story about how speaking openly about mental illness, even with your boss and co-workers, can help yourself and others. The author shares with you what she has learned from breaking the taboo.
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Learning from Incidents
Jessica DeVita (Netflix) and Nick Stenning (Microsoft) have been working on improving how software teams learn from incidents in production. In this article, they share some of what they’ve learned from the research community in this area, and offer some advice on the practical application of this work.
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Five Reasons You Shouldn't Reproduce Issues in Remote Environments
Bugs are an unavoidable part of software development and also one of the biggest time sinks developers face when building software. One way we waste time when working on bugs is trying to reproduce issues in remote test environments. There are some circumstances where this is a wise approach and some where it is a waste. Knowing the difference is an important skill.
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The Kollected Kode Vicious Review and Author Q&A
Addison Wesley Professional The Kollected Kode Vicious by George V. Neville-Neil aims to provide thoughtful and pragmatic insight into programming to both experienced and younger software professionals on a variety of different topics related to programming. InfoQ has taken the chance to speak with author Neville-Neil about his book.