InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Agile Executive Forum 2016 Summary
The Agile Alliance hosted a one-day Executive Forum in San Jose, CA on September 19. The event attracted participants from around the world and a range of senior speakers from large organisations, and focused on how adopting agile development impacts companies and what executives need to do to help ensure successful cultural transformation, which is what agile adoption at scale is about.
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Scaling Scrum to Build a New-Technology Printer
When developing a high speed printer based on a new print technology things change often; you need an effective and flexible solution for managing a large project with many different disciplines. Océ Printing Systems decided to customize Scrum and scale it to enable collaboration and make progress transparent.
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Refactoring and Code Smells – A Journey Toward Cleaner Code
Refactoring helps to move towards cleaner code that is easier to understand and maintain. It takes practice and experience to recognise code smells: symptoms of bad design which indicate deeper problems in the code. Tools can be helpful to refactor in small steps and prevent breaking the code.
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Serverless, Microservices, Architecture, Streaming, & Culture Highlighted for QCon SF 2016
QCon San Francisco tracks are heavily focused on architecture, including topics like: Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, Distributed Systems War Stories, Architecting for Failure, and Next Generation Microservices. You can find tracks focused on Culture, Optimizing You, & Softskills. Additionally, there are tracks that offer deep-dives in areas like DevOps, Security, and Web Tier Apps.
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Rethink Leadership: Being Ordinary to Accomplish Extraordinary Results
Ordinariness in leadership can help us to accomplish extraordinary results, argues agile/lean coach Katherine Kirk. Several more people have explored approaches that suggest to rethink leadership and go back to behaviour basics for leading people. Although these approaches are about small ordinary things, their effect may cause a revolution in the way organizations are being managed.
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Refuting the Idea of Rewriting the Agile Manifesto
Alistair Cockburn recently posted his viewpoint on the history of the Agile Manifesto, from the perspective of one of the original authors and signatories. He encourages readers to understand the perspective taken at the time by the authors, and also to explore the ongoing work of many of the original signatories. The original authors explicitly refuted the idea of rewriting the manifesto.