InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey
After having seen and evidenced the tangible benefit of lean at Mashreq Bank, agile was seen as a natural progression, an evolutionary step. Agile and lean are well-linked; you still need to identify waste, and remove non-value add activities so you can spend more time doing what the customer needs, argued Steve Snowdon. Together with Ed Capaldi he spoke about Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey.
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The Role of Executives and Managers in Value Stream Management: Insight from Al Shalloway
As organizations are transitioning to agile, executives' role is to design and communicate the vision of an effective organization that best aligns with its culture and performance goals. In the most effective organizations, managers have the responsibility of reducing the cost of delay, by removing any organizational blocker impeding the flow of value.
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Agile in Higher Education: Experiences from The Open University
Universities need to embrace an agile and product mindset, as they are grappling with hypothesis-driven development of new kinds of products and services of which they understand very little, for users whose behaviours and needs they little understand, said Matthew Moran. He presented applying the agile mindset, principles and practices for online course development at Aginext 2019.
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Design and Security in Agile: QCon London Q&A
Reviews of design diagrams by domain experts can detect potential security breaches not found by vulnerability scans or security automation. Such reviews should focus on critical functions like issuing and managing access tokens, transferring data to external services, and running untrusted code, said Kevin Gilpin, enterprise software engineer and co-founder of AppLand, at QCon London 2019.
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Microsoft Survey to Study the JavaEE to Cloud Migration: A Call to the Java Community to Participate
The Microsoft Azure engineering team is calling on the Java community to participate in a special survey to understand the challenges of migrating Java EE applications to the cloud. The team would appreciate input from developers who either: have already migrated Java EE applications to cloud; are currently going through a migration; or are planning to start a migration.