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  • How to Deal with Cognitive Biases That Hinder Collaboration

    People are hardwired to instantly decide who we trust, but also to work collaboratively in small groups. Cognitive biases can get in the way of collaboration, but when you understand how these biases work and what agile practices can do to help, you are more likely to build better interpersonal relationships and create successful products.

  • Johanna Rothman – Scaling Agile Projects to Programs

    In a presentation for OnAgile 2016, Johanna Rothman states that thinking small, and building upon the informal communication networks already at play in an organization, can help scale practices to manage large programs. Rothman provides advice on planning, architectural design, and measuring progress.

  • Scaling Teams to Grow Your Startup

    Once a startup becomes successful it needs to scale its teams and technology to grow. Scaling has to be done in way that the startup remains effective, and thus capable of quickly delivering products to satisfy the needs of the fast growing user base. Some of the challenges faced are hiring people and onboarding them, along with technology decisions that allow you to grow and get the right people.

  • Netflix Engineer Lorin Hochstein on Chaos Monkey 2.0

    Netflix made waves when it initially announced Chaos Monkey, a tool that would terminate normally healthy VM instances in production. The goal was to embrace failure and thereby increase resiliency. Rags Srinivas caught up with Lorin Hochstein at Netflix regarding the recent upgrade to Chaos Monkey.

  • QCon Awarded 10 Diversity Scholarships for QCon SF 2016

    QCon San Francisco has provided diversity scholarships to underrepresented groups in the technology community. The Conference is committed to encouraging diversity.

  • Increase Learning with 10% Autonomy Time

    Giving teams autonomy to spend 10% of their time for learning reduces delivery time, increases quality, and increases motivation. The 10% rule gives teams full autonomy to work on things they consider important. It results in freeing up people's creativity and letting teams grow their potential.

  • Autonomy and Job Satisfaction

    Lack of autonomy at work is directly related to reduced levels of motivation and engagement, and increased levels of stress and poor health. What can leaders do to improve the sense of autonomy in individuals, thereby increasing levels of motivation and job satisfaction?

  • Grow with Conway’s Law, Not against It

    Jason Goth, Micah Blalock, and Patricia Anderson of Credera explained at SpringOne how they used Conway's law to tailor a client's technical architecture and processes to reverse falling productivity and accelerate the production of high-quality code.

  • Achieving Cloud-Native Operability

    To drive operational maturity you need a microservices architecture, continuous delivery process, DevOps culture and platform automation. Together these four help you to transform your whole organization for achieving cloud-native operability to continuously deliver additional value to your customers.

  • GitHub Adopts New GraphQL API

    GitHub recently introduced at their Github Universe conference the alpha release of their new API, written in Facebook’s GraphQL (a query language that allows for self-service API contracts). GitHub writes in its engineering blog that its main reason for switching API paradigms is lack of scalability with their existing RESTful contracts.

  • Google and the Perfect Team

    Google researchers studied teams and what traits help with their efficiency. Named Project Aristotle, the study provides insight into what helps teams succeed, such as psychological safety, structure, and a sense of purpose.

  • "10% Time": The Pros and Cons from Elizabeth Pope at Agile on the Beach

    At the Agile on the Beach 2016 conference, Elizabeth Pope presented “10% Time: The Pros and Cons”, and discussed her experience of devoting a percentage of work time to R&D and learning, which was popularised by Google with their ‘20% time’. Key learnings included strive to reduce barriers to entry, support non-development teams, and encourage collaboration across the organisation.

  • Continuous Delivery at Klaverblad Insurance

    Continuous delivery should be treated as an agile project as it is about automating your deployment. You have to speed up in small steps and gain trust by doing small deliveries and solve problems fast. The story about how Klaverblad insurance has implemented Agile, DevOps, continuous delivery, and microservices.

  • Don't Copy the Spotify Model

    The Spotify model can help you to understand how things are done at Spotify, but you shouldn’t copy it in your own organization. It changes all the time as people at Spotify learn and discover new things. There is no one way in which software is developed at Spotify.

  • Behaviour-Driven Development Anti-Patterns

    Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) can help in improving how business stakeholders and software developers communicate with each other, but there are some common anti-patterns when using Cucumber to run the automated tests, which Aslak Hellesøy, Matt Wynne and Steve Tooke described in a recent discussion.

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