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  • How to Debug Your Team: QCon London Q&A

    Lisa van Gelder spoke about debugging your team at QCon London 2020, where she presented her toolkit for how to diagnose and address issues with a team’s pace of delivery. “It is all about ensuring they have mastery, autonomy, purpose and psychological safety”, she said. She uses that toolkit to introduce change to teams in a way that gets the buy-in from the team.

  • How to Embrace “You Build It, You Run It” with Paul Hammant at QCon London

    Paul Hammant talked at QCon London about having developers responsible for the first line of support in production, as the saying goes, “if you build it, you run it.” Hammant recommends following this practice only if there are proper support levels and escalation policies defined. As a result, companies could reduce the chances of burnout or staff quitting.

  • How N26 Scales Technology through Hypergrowth

    As N26 grew fast, they had to scale their technology to keep up. This meant scaling not only their infrastructure, but also their teams; for instance, they had to decide how to distribute work over teams and what technology to use or not use. Folger Fonseca, software engineer and Tech Lead at N26, shared his experience from scaling technology at N26 at QCon London 2020.

  • Involving Engineers in Incident Management: QCon London Q&A

    Learning from past incidents can increase engineers' confidence in handling live incidents and convincing them to join the on-call team. Samuel Parkinson spoke about how we can benefit from past incidents and encourage engineers to get involved in incident management at Qcon London 2020.

  • DevOps beyond Development and Operations with Patrick Debois at QCon London

    Patrick Debois talked at QCon London about thinking of DevOps beyond development and operation silos. DevOps is inherently complex, and there are other risks, challenges, and bottlenecks outside the software delivery pipeline where collaboration is vital, for instance, when collaborating with other groups like suppliers, HR, marketing, sales, finance, or legal.

  • Trust in High Performing Teams: QCon London Q&A

    High-performing teams flourish in a culture of trust and safety. It’s important that trust come both from within and outside of the team, in order to avoid isolating teams from their stakeholders. Stephen Janaway shared his experience with trust in high performing teams at Qcon London 2020.

  • Remote Work Flourishes and Enables Business Continuity

    Buffer.com and AngelList recently published the 2020 State of Remote Work survey results. The survey coincides with a report by the Wall Street Journal on a sudden boom in remote working within China. Remote work has enabled business continuity across companies like Alibaba, in response to mobility restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 virus.

  • How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams

    A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.

  • Effective Product Development for the 2020s

    Ram Sivasankaran examined the market failures of Google’s social media attempts, Kodak and Blockbusters. His analysis identified slow adoption of technology, a lack of data-driven decision-making and low customer focus. Martin Reeves and Bill Lydon have also both written about a more competitive market in the 2020s, requiring the adoption of product strategies which embrace emergent technologies.

  • Avoiding Loneliness as a Servant Leader

    Team success is often celebrated without recognizing or acknowledging the role the servant leader has played. A lot of what they do can go undocumented or is not always visible to others. To avoid loneliness, servant leaders can create support networks to share what they do, celebrate successes with peers, blog about how they do it, and give demos to management about their accomplishments.

  • Agile Companies Have Higher Employee Engagement

    The Business Agility Institute has released a whitepaper which summarises research into employee engagement. They concluded that high levels of employee engagement has a direct correlation with greater talent attraction and retention, innovation, profitability and production. They also show that organisations with high levels of agile maturity have a 25% higher Glassdoor rating.

  • What Will the Next 10 Years of Continuous Delivery Look Like?

    Dave Farley and Jez Humble talked at the DeliveryConf about their expectations for the next ten years of Continous Delivery (CD). For CD to succeed, the IT industry needs to focus on three performance aspects: technical, organizational, and cultural–all profoundly interrelated. DORA's report has shown that technical practices can lead the change, but they alone aren't enough.

  • Building a Generative Culture at Redgate: QCon London Q&A

    A generative culture has a clear sense of mission and there’s a high degree of cooperation and learning. In a generative culture, people have the time to learn and the space to bring in new ideas. Jeff Foster, head of product engineering at Redgate, will present how Redgate improved the way they build products by developing a generative culture at QCon London 2020.

  • Jenkins Creator Launches ML Startup in Continuous Risk-Based Testing

    Jenkins creator, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, starts Launchable, a startup using machine learning to identify risk-based tests. Testing thought leader Wayne Ariola also writes about the need for a continuous testing approach, where targeted risk-based tests help provide confidence for continuous delivery.

  • Collaborative Decision-Making in Self-Organizing Teams

    Giving people the opportunity to express their full potential in self-organizing teams is the best way to make an organization thrive today, argued Lorenzo Massacci. At Agile Business Day 2019, he presented how teams that organize themselves can continuously make decisions effectively and efficiently.

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