InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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13th State of Agile Report Released
On 7 May, 2019, CollabNet VersionOne released the 13th State of Agile report. Highlights of this year’s report include the level of agile adoption, which has reached 97% of organisations saying that they practice agile development methods. Proficiency in the agile practices is still low, with only 17% of organisations claiming a high level of proficiency with the practices.
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QCon NY (Jun 24-28): New Talks, a Focus on the Skills That Matter & Why You Should Join Us This Year
In the recent Stack Overflow 9th annual survey of over 90,000 software developers, we learned that non-development work remains a productivity challenge for software managers and leaders. At QCon New York, the conference for senior software developers, we have many sessions to help you learn how others have overcome those challenges.
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Experiences from Getting Started as a Lead
Having a transition period to lead teams together with a mentor helped Dan Persa to have a smooth switch from senior software engineer to engineering lead. At Codemotion Amsterdam 2019 he shared some of his experiences and learnings, in order to inspire other developers to take the leadership path.
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Summary of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019
Javascript, MySQL and Linux have retained their places as most popular technologies, according to the 2019 Stack Overflow developer survey. Public cloud providers- AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform - make the list for most popular platforms again. The survey of almost 90,000 developers also collated demographic information, with huge imbalance of genders and ethnicities in the industry.
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Mature Microservices and How to Operate Them: QCon London Q&A
Microservices is an architectural approach to keep systems decoupled for releasing many changes a day, said Sarah Wells in her keynote at QCon London 2019. To build resilient and maintainable systems you need things like load balancing across healthy nodes, backoff and retry, and persistence or fanning out of requests via queues. The best way to know whether your system is resilient is to test it.
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How the Agile Business Consortium Leveraged Agility to Hire Their New Chief Executive
At the Business Agility Conference, held in March 2019, Geof Ellingham, chair of the Agile Business Consortium, presented why and how they hired their new chief executive, John Mark Williams, leveraging Agile principles and practices. Ellingham reviewed why old ways of hiring are inefficient for the way companies need to operate and described hiring techniques aligned with Agile.
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Lynne Cazaly on Making Sense Using Hand-Drawn Images
At the recent Agile on the Beach New Zealand conference, author and graphic facilitator Lynne Cazalay presented a masterclass on sensemaking; some techniques to clarify ideas through graphical images - simple diagrams which can help identify the important elements of any narrative and represent them in a style that makes content meaningful.
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Sitting Considered Deadly: Introduce Movement in Our Workdays
Prolonged sitting wreaks havoc on our bodies and our minds. A first step to introduce more movement throughout your workday is to organize a sit-stand workstation, claimed Marek Stój in his talk Sitting Considered Deadly at Codemotion Amsterdam 2019. He suggested alternating between the two and trying out various ways in which one can sit or stand.
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Samsung's Agile & Lean UX Journey
Samsung has applied a team-led agile transformation followed by a culture-led agile transformation, to focus teams on real users and valuable products. Teams create and use personas which they use to do team-driven user research throughout product development, said Jaesung Jo, senior UX designer at Samsung SDS, in his talk at the Lean and Agile ME Summit 2019.
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Experimenting with #NoProductOwner at F-Secure
Maaret Pyhäjärvi experimented with no product owner and reported the benefits on team performance. The team developed a cross-team ownership that increased their ability to solve problems, they improved the flow of value, delivered solutions faster, and drove innovation as they anticipated features that were not expected by the business. they introduced data driven feedback mechanism.
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Discovering Culture through Artifacts: QCon London Q&A
Behavior and values are two critical components to organizational culture; values denote what the organization believes in, and behaviors are rooted in those values, argued Mike McGarr, engineering leader at Slack. At QCon London 2019 he spoke about improving your understanding of an organization’s culture, the key components of culture, and what to look for in order to learn about the culture.
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Tuckman Was Wrong! Doc Norton on Reteaming Models
At Agile India 2019, Doc Norton shared why the Tuckman team formation model doesn’t work and described new reteaming models that are more applicable to current agile teams. Norton shared reteaming models that foster organizational innovation and learning and identified 4 criteria leading to better teams’ performance: autonomy, connection, excellence and diversity.
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Web-Based Monte Carlo Simulation for Agile Estimation
A web-based tool for calculating project estimates using a Monte Carlo simulation was recently made publicly available. It was created in the hopes that agile teams will use it to facilitate conversations between scrum masters and product managers, focusing on realistic outcomes and not overly optimistic projections.
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Building High-Quality Products with Distributed Teams
To ensure the quality of the products and services, Intermedia uses a common test & pre-production environment for all distributed teams. Lilia Gorbachik, product manager at Intermedia, mentioned at European Women in Tech that having a mature testing process, working with risks, and making daily decisions from a high-quality product perspective are key aspects to build high-quality products.
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Effectively Using Jira with an Overarching Vision
Dzmitry Hryb of Atlassian partner DevInit has recently published an article responding to a TechCrunch story that claimed using Jira's issue-centric model could result in a myopia, which misses the "macro-vision." Recent writing by architect Eltjo R. Poort and DevOps lead Matt Saunders also offers patterns for using Jira with other best-fit tools to capture vision and architectural direction.