InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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The Soul of a New Release: Eating Our Own Dog Food
As any software developer well knows, large releases are often delayed, or released sans some important features, and newly released software is often riddled with bugs. In this article Plumbr's development lead describes techniques they used to successfully release a major upgrade to the Plumbr Java Performance Monitoring solution, without getting burned by the usual fires.
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"Outsourcing is Bad": Why Good Vendors Agree
Today all companies are software companies and all software must get coded right and get coded fast. This requires a team with shared culture, shared risk, shared accountability. Some would say this isn’t possible with outsourcing. The author believes it is possible and that it’s the only type of outsourcing that will survive.
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Designing Menlo - a Conversation with James Goebel
While visiting Menlo Innovations for a week the author spoke to co-founder and COO James Gobel about the intentional design of the culture and structure of the organization as a joyous workplace. James explains the joy of building products that people use, the goal of "eliminating human suffering as related to technology in the world" and how Menlonians work together towards that goal.
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Is There a Correlation Between Employee Happiness and Agile?
This article examines the agile culture and explores how it helps create a happy environment. It questions the practices and attitudes evident in some of the Tech Titan organisations, and questions if they actually want to achieve employee satisfaction and sustainable pace. Perhaps the Tech Titans leadership doesn’t want Agile because Agile isn’t good for their questionable labor behavior?
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Q&A with Vasco Duarte on the #NoEstimates Book
In the book NoEstimates: How to Measure Project Progress Without Estimating Vasco Duarte explores how NoEstimates can help to manage projects with a focus on value and predictability, report progress quickly and often, and adapt plans constantly based on existing data.
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Lynne Cazaly on Making Sense using Visual Communications
Lynne Cazaly spoke at the recent Agile New Zealand conference on the importance of clarity and sense-making in a world where VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) is the norm. She presented ideas on how to convey messages more effectively using visual tools and gave the audience a quickfire class on communicating using simple images.
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Go in Action - Review and Q&A with the Author
Go in Action is a new book from Manning that aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to Go, both its syntax and implementation, and its most common idioms. InfoQ has spoken with William Kennedy, author of the book.
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How Project Managers can be a Positive Agent for Agile
An interview with Graham Dick about how agile impacts the role of project managers, if there is a need for project managers in agile, dealing with project managers that oppose to agile, applying agile principles to project management, what self-organized teams expect from project managers, how project managers can be a positive agent for change, and what to do to make collaboration work in agile.
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Why Agile Fails in Large Enterprises
Agile software development has proven to be a major benefit to various teams, but it can affect businesses differently depending on their size and how they integrate the methodology into their operations. Some of the challenges are particular to large organisations, this article provides advice on how to avoid the pitfalls.
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Building Flat Organizations with Cross-functional Teams and Fewer Managers
Hierarchical organizations can't react to new market opportunities and changes fast enough, this impedes the company’s survival in the long run. An interview with Michael Dubakov on how agile transformations impact the role of managers, how to change the culture to increase agility, how to flatten an organization using cross-functional teams, and benefits from increasing agility.
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DevOps at Seamless: The Why, How, and What
The key thing about DevOps is understanding under which circumstances it should be introduced to your organization. Organizations that adopt DevOps go through a change that affects both processes and culture. This article focuses on why DevOps is needed, what concepts and values should support it, as well as how we implemented it at Seamless, what results we obtained and the challenges we faced.
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When your ‘Agile’ Team Moves at Snail Pace: 5 Key Roadblocks and How to Overcome Them
Software development teams adopt Agile-based processes to address age-old IT project management problems. However, many end up neck deep in trouble when the ‘Agile’ approach backfires. In this article, we look at real life examples to outline common but persistent barriers to the successful implementation of Agile projects, and suggest practical methods for overcoming them.