InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Building a Scalable Minimum Viable Product
Scalability should be considered when developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP needs to be technically scalable and you need to have a plan on how to scale quickly when your MVP attracts many users and becomes successful. Knowing your possible performance bottlenecks and using common sense while developing your MVP will get you very far, says Erik Duindam, CTO at Unboxd.
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Continuous Improvement Beyond Retrospectives
If you want continuous improvement you can start with retrospectives, but you must go far beyond that with change management, culture change, and innovation. The most important thing in order to make change happen in organizations is creating new habits and changing your culture.
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Better Estimations Using Techniques from Psychology
Bias, priming, and salience are the main psychological factors that influence our ability to estimate. Knowing what happens psychologically when we estimate, and using techniques from psychology, helps us to deal with those factors so that we can improve our estimations argued Joseph Pelrine, social complexity scientist and PhD researcher in psychology.
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Researcher Recognized for Advances in Team Performance Techniques
Eduardo Salas is recognized by the APA for his 30 years of research on team work. His implementation of team training includes defining team structure, identifying specific communication needs, clarifying roles and leadership skills, and practicing with scenarios. This technique has been used across many fields of work, and is part of the program as NASA prepares to send a team to Mars.