InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Creating Environments High in Psychological Safety with a Combined Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach
Leadership is critical for making psychological safety happen, but they need to lead by example and show that it’s safe for people to take interpersonal risks. Complementing leadership with team workshops in communication skills can enable people to speak up and feel safe to fail.
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Creating Great Psychologically Safe Teams with Sandy Mamoli
Sandy Mamoli, author and coach at Nomad8, recently appeared on the No Nonsense Agile Podcast to discuss her experience in creating safe, high-performing and self-selected teams. Keith Ferrazzi, author of Competing in the New World of Work, also recently wrote about his experience with using empowering social contracts to cultivate great teams. Both emphasized safety and candour.
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Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.
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Sustainability for Software Companies: Reducing Impact by Deciding What Not to Do
Small and medium-sized companies can contribute to sustainability with emissions reduction, mental health offerings and inclusion. To support sustainability, software engineers can think about “what not to do” to reduce complexity and make solutions smaller, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint.
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Helping Teams Deliver with a Quality Practices Assessment Model
The quality practices assessment model explores quality aspects that help teams to deliver in an agile way. The model covers both social and technical aspects of quality; it is used to assess the quality of the team’s processes and also touches on product quality. With an assessment, teams can look at where their practices lie within the quality aspects and decide on what they want to improve.
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Learnings from Applying Psychological Safety across Teams
Applying ideas from psychological safety can enable people to speak up in teams about what they don't know, don't understand, or mistakes they have made. Trust and creating safe spaces are essential, but more is needed. People need to feel that they will not be punished or embarrassed if they take interpersonal risks.
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Testing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
Advanced driver assistance systems can have a huge number of test cases. Cutting the elephant into smaller pieces can ensure every bit and piece is tested. A good test environment is essential to be efficient, fast and flexible to cover all required tests to ensure quality. Testers should be involved in the project right from the beginning to avoid task-forces, quality- or delivery problems.
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How Defining Agile Results and Behaviors Can Enable Behavioral Change
Specifying and measuring behavior within a certain organisational context can enable and drive behavioral change. To increase the success of an agile transformation, it helps if you link the desired behaviors to the expected results. This way you set yourself up to be able to reinforce the behavior you want to see more of in order to reach your results.
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Mythical Man Month Author and Father of the 8-Bit Byte, Fred Brooks, Dies at 91
Dr Frederick P Brooks Jr, originator of the term "architecture in computing", author of one of the first books to examine the nature of computer programming from a sociotechnical perspective, architect of the IBM 360 series of computers, university professor and person responsible for the 8-bit byte, died on 17 November at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. Dr Brooks was 91 years old.
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Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators
Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization.
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How We Can Use Data to Improve System Quality
To understand how systems are being used, we can collect metrics and identify trends over time. The data and insights gained can be used to improve system quality by improving software design or testing patterns.
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Applying Machine Learning for Business Outcomes at Travelopia
Travelopia changed its focus from a technology approach to business outcomes, and adapted agile and lean for delivering machine learning solutions. This enabled them to deliver machine-learning business models faster and better.
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Hybrid Working Matters to All Generations
A number of recent surveys explore the current state of hybrid and remote working. The results reinforced the preference for hybrid working, identified the importance of finding ways to stay connected when not in-person and showed how the driving factors for work have evolved. The in-person workforce is feeling under-appreciated and many are at risk of leaving.
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Scalable Automation Frameworks for Functional and Non-Functional Testing
Separating the capabilities of a testing framework from the actual tests can enable scaling automated testing for complex enterprise products. According to Alexander Velinov, we should agree on the types of tests to execute automatically during release and what should be kept as manually triggered tests.
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Unraveling Techno-Solutionism: How I Fell out of Love with “Ethical” Machine Learning
At the recent QCon San Francisco conference, Katherine Jarmul gave a talk on unravelling techno-solutionism, in which she explored the inherent bias in AI training datasets, the bias that assumes there will be a technical solution to almost any problem and that those technical solutions will be beneficial for mankind. She posed questions for technologists to consider when building products.