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Culture & Methods

Product Owner Raison d'Etre in an Agile Team

Companies may claim they're implementing Scrum, but is the claim really valid? Do they uphold the philosophy of Scrum? It turns out it's not, as a lot of companies are still practicing a distorted version of Scrum. Part of the common dysfunction is the misunderstood role of the product owner: a role essential to success with Scrum. What then is the actual job of a good product owner?

Adam Pahlevi
on Feb 05, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on The Great ScrumMaster

In The Great ScrumMaster Zuzana Šochová explores the ScrumMaster role and provides solutions for dealing with everyday and difficult situations. She describes the #ScrumMasterWay, a concept which defines three levels of operation of ScrumMasters.

Ben Linders
on Feb 03, 2017
Culture & Methods

The Misaligned Middle and Getting off the Hamster Wheel Using Kanban

At the Agile 2016 conference, Dominica DeGrandis and Julia Wester of Leankit gave talks on helping middle managers adapt to change and how Kanban can be used to identify problems in workflows, which people need to address.

Shane Hastie
on Jan 31, 2017
Java

Building Reactive Applications with Akka Actors and Java 8

Akka and Java 8 make it possible to create distributed microservice-based systems that just a few years ago were the stuff of dreams. Actor based systems enable developers to create quickly evolving microservice architectures that can elastically scale systems to support huge volumes of data.

Markus Eisele
on Jan 23, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Soul-Centered Leadership

The book Soul-Centered Leadership by Michael Anderson provides ideas and exercises for developing skills to lead people while being in touch with your soul. It explores a leadership approach based on emotional intelligence, psychology, and spirituality.

Ben Linders
on Jan 21, 2017
Culture & Methods

What Does "Being Digital" Actually Mean?

Digital transformation is a key aim of many organisations these days, with varying levels of success. This is often due to a lack of understanding about what being digital really means. Being Digital is the re-imagining of business processes to be by default a fully online, fully automated process from end user interaction to back office processing, with no need for human intervention.

Reda Hmeid
on Jan 17, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on The Antifragility Edge: Antifragility in Practice

In the book The Antifragility Edge, Sinan Si Alhir shows how antifragility has been applied to help organizations evolve and thrive. He provides examples of how antifragility can be used beyond agility on an individual, collective (team and community) and enterprise level, and explores a roadmap for businesses to achieve greater antifragility.

Ben Linders
on Jan 14, 2017
DevOps

Q&A on Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise

The book Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise by Gary Gruver provides a DevOps based approach for continuously improving development and delivery processes in large organizations. It contains suggestions that can be used to optimize the deployment pipeline, release code frequently, and deliver to customers.

Ben Linders
on Jan 12, 2017
Culture & Methods

Adding Purpose to Scrum with Holacracy

Organisations passionately working with Scrum are still missing a key ingredient: their organizational governance got stuck in the last century. Holacracy can be a complete replacement for the traditional management hierarchy and can significantly increase motivation and productivity.

Ben Linders
on Jan 09, 2017
DevOps

Interview with Wesley Coelho on Challenges in DevOps

At the Agile 2016 Conference InfoQ spoke to Wesley Coelho, Senior Director of Business Development for Tasktop, about the communication challenges inherent in DevOps and how to overcome them; how DevOps and agile expose organisational silos and waterfall communications flows that need to become adaptive and automated.

Shane Hastie
on Jan 04, 2017
Culture & Methods

How Difficult Can It Be to Integrate Software Development Tools? The Hard Truth

Integrating tools used in software development and delivery is very hard. Getting endpoints to inter-operate is not a purely technical challenge, it’s more of a business problem. While there are a few choices in selecting the technical integration infrastructure (integration via APIs or at the database layer), the real challenges have more to do with friction caused by the dissimilarities.

Betty Zakheim
on Jan 02, 2017
Culture & Methods

People Re-engineering

People Re-engineering is a concept bundling whatever's needed to keep software people fit to meet the growing and pressing challenges caused by merciless market demands. A typical implementation of the concept includes efforts along five axes: Mentoring and Coaching, Leadership Enablement, Team Energizing, Executive Engagement and finally Monitoring to measure results and steer efforts.

Medhat Sabry
on Dec 28, 2016