InfoQ Homepage Customers & Requirements Content on InfoQ
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How Continuous Discovery Helps Software Teams to Take Product Decisions
Continuous discovery for product development is regular research that involves the entire software product team, and that can actively inform product decisions. Equating continuous discovery to weekly conversations with one or more customers can be misleading. Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods can help software teams gather data and understand what is behind the data.
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The Myth of Product Mindset: It's What You Do, Not How You Think
Companies nowadays are looking for ways to cultivate a product mindset. While the idea of cultivating a “product mindset” allows us to focus primarily on ourselves, actually transforming our organizations often means changing our behavior to focus on our customers and how we work together to serve them.
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Getting Feedback When Your Colleagues Are Also Your Customers
Getting and using feedback from colleagues who are also customers using your product can improve the quality of the product and help to improve the way of working. In this situation, it’s easier to receive feedback, but you can get overloaded by it.
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How Testers Can Contribute to Product Definition
Utilizing the tester’s feedback during product definition and design is valuable for the business. Listening to the organization's needs, understanding the business goals, and customizing the test process by incorporating different skills and practices is one way testing can begin while the product is still "on paper".
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Virtualizing Design Sprint and UX Workshops
Design sprint and UX workshops can be done virtually using a combination of remote whiteboards and communication platforms. It brings advantages like being able to invite international experts, having remote participants attend, less travelling, smaller carbon footprint, and lower costs.
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Value vs Time: an Agile Contract Model
An agile contract model can help us to focus on the value delivered to the customer. It allows for rewarding teams and people, and can drive continuous improvement towards common goals. InfoQ interviewed Andrea Zomer, CEO at Zupit, about their experiences with an agile contract model.
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Microsoft Introduces Power Virtual Agents, a No-Code Solution to Building AI Bots
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the general availability (GA) of Power Virtual Agents, a service designed to democratize building conversational chatbots using a no-code graphical user interface. The service is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which includes Power Apps, Power BI and Power Automate and democratizes access to building artificial intelligence-powered bots.
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How to Scale Pilots into a Global IT Organization
Scaling pilots into a global IT organization is doable, and if done right, it really works and can help to transform entire companies, said Clemens Utschig. At DevOpsCon Munich 2019 he presented how they go from starting with an idea to scaling it up into the global organization.
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Microsoft Releases PowerApps Portals Preview, a Low-Code Customer Portal Solution
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced PowerApps Portals in preview, a low-code solution for building responsive customer portals. PowerApps Portals is the successor of Dynamics 365 Portals, which generally required developers to use complex web templates. Using PowerApps Portals, people familiar with Microsoft PowerApps can transition those skills into building customer-facing portals.
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How to Become Customer-Focused with Autonomous Teams
Traditional organizations are often suffering from ineffective ways of working and structures not allowing the people to collaborate in a structured way. Organizations need to find ways to enable brain power in cross-functional and autonomous teams that are able to deliver products and services with expected business impact faster, said Mia Kolmodin, founder of Dandy People.
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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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The Customer is Not Always Right and Neither Are You
At the recent Agile 2018 conference, Natalie Warnert gave a talk titled "The Customer is Not Always Right, and Neither Are You!” in which she gave the audience thought-provoking concepts on how to make sure we are building the right thing. She presented three traps that teams fall into - incorrect customer, premature solution and drowning in data, and provided advice on how to avoid them.
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BDD Tool Cucumber is 10 Years Old: Q&A with its Founder Aslak Hellesøy
Cucumber was created as a way to overcome ambiguous requirements and misunderstandings, but if you think Cucumber is a testing tool you are wrong, Aslak Hellesøy, who created Cucumber in 2008, stated a few years ago. In an interview with InfoQ he described his experiences using Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and Cucumber, and what he thinks about the future for a tool that’s now 10 years old.
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12th State of Agile Report Published
The 2018 State of Agile Report has been published by CollabNet VersionOne. Some of the conclusions from the report are that the need for customer and user satisfaction is increasing, more and more organizations are scaling agile, distributed teams are becoming the norm in agile software development, and many organization have started or plan to start a DevOps initiative in the next 12 months.