InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Miki Szikszai on Growing Technical Talent at Snapper
At the JAFAC conference Snapper CEO Miki Szikszai gave a talk on how the company overcame some of the challenges of growing their technical team in an environment of perceived skills shortage. Their approach of employing teams of graduates and giving them real customer facing work to do rather than interspersing them into existing teams results in better outcomes and enabled rapid growth.
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Spark the Change: Sparkling Disruptions
A new transportation system that enables people to live and work anywhere, networking through an app to share stories and get ideas that change your company, and high-speed internet through space to connect people everywhere on the planet; these are sparkling disruptions which were presented at the Spark the Change conference.
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Chatbots 101 for Developers: Q&A with Anamita Guha
Chatbots are becoming more critical to developers in their daily lives – from understanding how the technology operates, to creating better code. Developers tend to have a natural curiosity about bots and the tech behind it. Artificial intelligence tools exist to address emotional intelligence with chatbots in conversational interfaces.
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The Power of Serendipity and Networking
Meeting new people gets you out of your own head. It’s a good way to get outside perspective on your projects and look at them in new ways. A conversation with someone who works in a completely different field could spark the idea that changes your company. Focus on meeting people who share your values and interests, and make networking part of your daily habits.
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New Details Emerge Regarding Oracle’s Layoff of Java Mission Control Team
Following our story last week that Oracle was laying off most of the Java Mission Control Team after open-sourcing the product, a former Oracle employee provided us with some additional information regarding the turn of events.
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Sandy Mamoli on Holacracy for Humans
Sandy Mamoli has been supporting New Zealand transport ticketing company Snapper in their adoption of holacracy over the last two years. At a recent Agile Welly meetup session she explained what holacracy is, described their journey to date, the benefits they’ve found, and provided advice for others considering holarcacy.
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Enabling Continuous Delivery with a Dedicated Team
Robin Weston describes how an external enablement team was able to introduce continuous delivery practices in an organization with high resistance to change and siloed teams. Rather than just bringing in new technology and tools, the team focused on sharing and educating teams. Practices ranged from continuous integration, to following the test pyramid, or reducing cycle time by identifying waste.
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Making Games for High Performing Teams
The gamestorming model describes a process to create games. It provides concepts like game space, boundaries, rules, artifacts and goals, for creating compelling learning experiences in an organizational setting. Such games can be used by teams to experiment, focus on outcomes, and try out disruptive patterns.
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What it Takes to Become and Remain an Adaptive Agile Leader
Leadership at every level in an organisation and in every role, and the ability to be adaptive in leadership, are topics which have been discussed in a number of publications recently. Adaptiveness is considered to be necessary for leadership in any domain today and remaining agile in your thinking and leadership behavior is crucial to leadership success.
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Testing Software with Artificial Intelligence
Advances in computer vision algorithms and the application of modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have made writing visual tests practical. With AI in testing, autonomous testing becomes possible. The boring and rote tasks will be delegated to the AI so that the tester can do the thinking.
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Ron Jeffries Says Developers Should Abandon "Agile"
Ron Jeffries, author, speaker, one of the creators of Extreme Programming (XP) and a signatory of the Agile Manifesto back in 2001, shared a post on his blog in which he advocates that developers should abandon “Agile”, meaning they should stay away from the “Faux Agile” or “Dark Agile” forms and get closer to the values and principles of the Manifesto.
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Incorporating Improv into Agile with Games
The rules of Improv provide a short-hand to enhance active listening, collaboration, and mutual reinforcement skills, all of which are integral to Agility. You can incorporate Improv activities and games to reinforce Agile mindset. The game debrief is where the value of the game becomes sustainable, as it explicitly ties emotions and aha-moments from the game experience to working scenarios.
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The Three Habits of Highly Effective Product People
Kent McDonald, agile practitioner acting mostly on the product field and co-author of the book “Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility”, recently gave a webinar in which he talked about several techniques to improve and being successful when practicing Product Ownership at Distance, and described which for him are the "Three Habits of Highly Effective Product People".
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Management Support in Agile Adoption
It is essential that everyone involved in operating the business be aware of how IT can change daily operations. Senior management can look across silos and teams to impact the throughput of the entire system. IT managers and executives rely on business managers being active participants for teams to work effectively and efficiently. Management commitment remains key for agile across the company.
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Happy Cultures and How They Grow High Performers
ITV's Tom Clark spoke at DOXLON in February, proposing the hypothesis that high performance is a side-effect of creating happy teams. Andy Flemming, contributor to Deliberately Developmental Organization, also recently spoke about how to reap business and strategic benefits by creating a culture with an intentional focus on transparency, and the learning, growth and happiness of individuals.