InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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QCon Plus: Summary of the Inclusion & Diversity in Tech Track
QCon Plus is running over three weeks in November. One of the tracks on the first day focused on Inclusion and Diversity in Tech. The track was designed to to change perceptions about DEI and advance the conversation. Three talks provided the audience with concrete tools, difficult questions and invited them to deep self exploration.
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Applying Lean and Accelerate to Deliver Value: QCon Plus Q&A
Understanding the science and math behind lean principles and practices can enable engineering leaders to advocate for and implement them in their workplace. This way they can directly impact employee engagement and morale, as well as the bottom line, as David Van Couvering explained in his talk about applying lean principles and practices for delivering value at QCon Plus 2020.
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Creating and Nurturing an Intentional Remote Culture
Company culture isn’t built in the short term, nor can it be imposed. It’s deeply rooted in the founders’ ideologies and behaviours around work. From there, it grows and evolves organically as the company hires individuals who embrace these values, and who also bring their own identity into the mix.
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Value vs Time: an Agile Contract Model
An agile contract model can help us to focus on the value delivered to the customer. It allows for rewarding teams and people, and can drive continuous improvement towards common goals. InfoQ interviewed Andrea Zomer, CEO at Zupit, about their experiences with an agile contract model.
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Remote Onboarding Changes the New Hire Experience
As organisations make remote working more and more the norm, the employee onboarding experience needs to change to engage new people with their colleagues and the organisation effectively. The onboarding experience needs to be designed to engage the new employee and actively make them feel welcome and a part of the team.
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How Stopping Estimations Helped a Team to Become More Predictable
When making estimations using story points didn’t feel helpful, a team decided to experiment with #NoEstimates. Breaking down stories into smaller tasks gives them insight into their velocity and has made them more predictable. It also helps them to spend less time on process and have more time available for delivering value.
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Articulating Leadership through Nemawashi and Collaborative Boards
High performance teams don’t need to be managed, but led. Collaborative boards is where leadership and teams meet to align direction and initiatives. Nemawashi can be used to separate conversations from meetings. Fernando Guigou spoke about articulating leadership using an approach that he calls ZenSum at Agile Tour London 2020.
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Applying a Zero-Bug Policy at Redgate
A zero-bug policy is a simple yet effective bug management system that can help you avoid being buried deep in months or sometimes even years-old bugs. Any bugs you agree are serious enough for you to fix, you fix right away, and any other bug will not be fixed and closed. Tom Walsh spoke about how Redgate Software applied the zero-bug policy at Lean Agile Exchange 2020.
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Remote Working for Tech Workers is Here to Stay
Remote working is here to stay for tech workers, irrespective of what happens with COVID-19. Many tech companies are changing their long term planning and hiring practices to allow for remote working in the future, and benefits packages are being reworked to provide support for parents with child care and home schooling pressures.
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Experiences from Using a Disciplined Approach to Change
When a company embraces the agile path, the first question is: “Where do I want to go?” and not “What is the right framework to do agile?” A disciplined approach to change can help you to choose from possible practices such as a “design pattern book” for agile transformation, and to identify when a practice is promising and when the current context is not the most favorable for it.
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Chaos Conf Q&A: Adrian Cockcroft & Yury Niño Roa
In preparation for ChaosConf 2020, InfoQ sat down with Adrian Cockcroft and Yury Niño Roa to explore topics of interest in the chaos engineering community. Key takeaways included: there are clear benefits to running “game days” to develop psychological safety, and the future of chaos engineering points toward incorporating security and scaling up experiments to test larger failure modes.
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Growing Personal and Organisational Courage
Courage is vital for organisations if they want to thrive in today’s complex world as it will create the right conditions for the highest possible levels of creativity, adaptability and productivity. We all have the power to lead with courage, no matter what our role is.
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Q&A with Katherine Kirk on Managing Entropy in Uncertain Times
InfoQ talks to Katherine Kirk about her recently published talk on thriving when control is removed. We discuss the impact of the current pandemic on organisations. Kirk explains the importance of contextual strategies which acknowledge and counterbalance the impact of entropy.
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How to Build the Dark Star: a Serious Collaborative Game
Games are learning experiences. They can help people to better understand soft skills and grow by providing space to safely experiment. InfoQ interviewed Corrado (Dex) De Sanctis about the benefits of playing games and his experience from playing the DSBuilders game.
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Navigating Complex Software Projects and Leading in Uncertain Times: InfoQ Live, Sept 23rd
InfoQ Live brings together world-class practitioners such as John Willis, senior director in Red Hat's Global Transformation Office, and Sarah Wells, technical director for operations and reliability @FT, to share their valuable insights and practical advice on software engineering leadership.