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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Internal Tech Conferences - How and Why

    Software engineering today is every bit as much about the people as it is about technology - empowered teams don’t appear overnight. We need to oil the wheels of collaboration so they roll smoothly. Here, Matthew Skelton and Victoria Morgan-Smith discuss how to use internal conferences to boost your organisation’s social capital, the currency by which relationships flourish and businesses thrive.

  • Proper Usage of Metrics with Flow Debt as an Example

    Flow Debt is a leading indicator that provides a view of what is happening inside a delivery system; an important metric for improving software development. This article provides an example how a metric like Flow Debt can be used improperly, i.e. out of their domain, or properly, i.e. context aware usage of Flow Debt with an IT operations team.

  • Ways to Make Code Reviews More Effective

    Performing Code Reviews helps to increase code quality, share knowledge and responsibility, and build better software and a better team. However, the big question remains – what is it we should be looking for? There are a lot of different things to consider. This article will list a wide range of items to check, and drill a little deeper into two specific areas: performance and security.

  • Standardizing Requirements Descriptions on Scrum Projects for Better Development and Testing Quality

    Standardizing requirements descriptions on Scrum projects benefit development and testing quality. Without standardizing, the project may suffer. Standardizing requirements descriptions provides a minimum of eight benefits from requirements descriptions unification, which in turn positively affects testing and makes management of ongoing changes in requirements easier with the help of tools.

  • Book Review: Site Reliability Engineering - How Google Runs Production Systems

    "Site Reliability Engineering - How Google Runs Production Systems" is an open window into Google's experience and expertise on running some of the largest IT systems in the world. The book describes the principles that underpin the Site Reliability Engineering discipline. It also details the key practices that allow Google to grow at breakneck speed without sacrificing performance or reliability.

  • Agile in the UK Government - An Insider Reveals All

    The Government Digital Service (GDS) aims to transform the relationship between citizen and state, moving the UK towards becoming a world-leading digital-by-default government. Nick Tune explores what GDS has achieved with assessments, sharing agile practices and experiences, and open source software, and shares what isn’t working so well in government IT.

  • The Top 5 Problems with Distributed Teams and How to Solve Them

    In this article, Hugo Messer shares the top 5 challenges distributed teams face along with practical solutions. They are based on his 6 books, many workshops and a decade of hands on experience. The top 5 challenges: 1. We're thinking 'us versus them'; 2. Keeping the team in the dark; 3. Culture is a mystery; 4. We stop communicating; 5. The black box.

  • What’s Wrong With Using Design Templates?

    By choosing a web design template, businesses save on time and the cost of developing their website. Templates are often hard to customize and generate a range of other issues that affect the website's performance an negatively impact the brand. Contrary to custom design, templates can only serve as a starting point for creating a web presence.

  • Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of Your Agile Organisation

    Communities of practice bring together people who share areas of interest or concerns. They have specific applications in agile organisations: scaling agile development and allowing individuals to connect with others who share similar concerns. Communities of practice bring people together to regain the benefits of regular contact while keeping the value of multidisciplinary agile teams.

  • Q&A and Book Review on Liftoff, Second Edition

    The book Liftoff, Second Edition by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies, provides practices and insights for chartering teams by understanding their needs, building trust, and defining how they will interact in the team and align with other parts of the organization. It's a book for Agile coaches, Scrum masters or agile product and project managers to help teams to understand the why behind the work.

  • Adaptable or Predictable? Strive for Both – Be Predictably Adaptable!

    Our efforts to improve software development face the question of what to focus on. Should we govern for predictability without concern of value, maximizing cost-efficiency without concern for end-to-end responsiveness? Or maybe do the opposite and govern for value over predictability, focus on responsiveness over cost efficiency? What we really need is to be predictably adaptable.

  • Agile 2016: Interview with ICAgile on Certification, Growth and Expert Tracks

    At the recent Agile 2016 conference, ICAgile announced a number of milestones – more Certified Experts qualified, some additional certification pathways, and substantive growth in certified participants and member training organisations. Ahmed Sidky and Shannon Ewan discuss all of this with InfoQ and why the agile mindset is more important than any set of practices or techniques.

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