Agile 2016: Persona Based Teams - The Ultimate Focus
At the Agile 2016 conference Andy Hircock, Mike Lowery, and Rob Vandenburg, discussed how they transitioned to persona-based teams, instead of feature or component based, and how they used this to help teams keep focused on their customers despite significant growth.
Diversity Takes Centre Stage on First Day of the SpringOne Platform Conference
During the opening keynote at Pivotol’s SpringOne Platform Conference in Las Vegas this week, Senior Director of Technology Cornelia Davis spoke about diversity.
Why Diversity and Inclusion Matters, and How to Drive It
Leveraging and harnessing different ideas, perspectives and experiences from a talented and capable workforce regardless of their organizational position and background drives effectiveness in organizations. Diversity and inclusion matters to reach business objectives and be seen as a social responsible organization.
Helping Great Teams Form Using the Core Protocols
The Core Protocols are a set of ideas identified by Jim and Michelle McCarthy. Richard Kasperowski will open the second day of the Agile Games Conference with an explanation of how to use these protocols to help a team transform to greatness. He spoke to InfoQ about how this happens and how they relate to other team formation models.
Is it Difficult for an Introvert to be a Mob Programmer?
This post covers the challenges of an introverted mob programmer and some possible solutions.
Business Case for Diversity in Organizations
There is a positive correlation between diversity and financial performance and in an inclusive workplace, employees are more engaged which is crucial for retention and performance says Regina Chien. Having a diversity of thought and life experiences is going to help engineers create the best products.
Neuro-diversity in the Work Place
Dr. Sallyann Freudenberg talked about neuro-diversity in the work place at QCon London. Programming is a complex creative task, and Freudenberg explored a number of the techniques that programmers in general use to help them achieve it.
Pivot-Thinking – The Neuroscience of Design
The Center of Professional Development at the Stanford University offers a free live seminar on 8th March (9.00 am / PST) addressing the thinking behind design thinking. Pivot thinking is a new research area that addresses how to bridge the gap between "convergers" and "divergers" in teams which is particularly interesting for software engineering projects.
Diversity in Agile – Women in Agile interviews available
The Agile Alliance sponsored Diversity in Agile program launched the first set of interviews from the Women In Agile series at Agile 2010 today. Shane Hastie spoke to Lisa Crispin about the work that has been done and the interviews that are available for viewing.
Cost of Cross Functional Teams
Cross functional teams are the teams in which all members work on delivery of the same business value. It could potentially be the same feature or the same product. Though, Agile recommends cross functional teams due to a lot of inherent advantages, there are some caveats that organizations need to be aware of.
The Value of Diversity
This is the second in a series of discussions looking at factors that enable Agile teams to be successful. Diversity of gender, culture, opinion, perspective, skills and background is considered to be an important factor in forming and persisting high-performance teams. This news item examines the perspectives from variety of commentators.
Ladies: Please, Would You Submit a Proposal?
Although it's widely accepted that diversity leads to innovation and performance, visible leadership in the IT community often doesn't represent the diversity of the community itself. What can be done to increase diversity in the leadership of our high-tech communities? One suggestion is to actively help a more diverse group to get their talks accepted at conferences.
High-performance Teams – Avoiding Teamicide
High-performance teams constitute a mere 2% of the workforce, but Agile processes appear to stimulate the formation of these types of teams. This article discusses Steve Denning's perspective on how such teams can be nurtured in the workplace; it also looks at a recent talk by Ominlab Media's Stefan Gillard on how to select and employ for the formation of high-performance teams.
Handling Your Team's "Rotten Apple"
Recently there has been an active discussion in the Scrum Development Yahoo Group about handling an "under-performing" team member. In the 130+ response thread, "Rotten apple in Scrum team", talk ranged from advice for the primary question, to talk of team morale and who manages it, to the classic debate of measuring individuals, to distinguishing whether a team is really a "team", and more.
Do Specialists Outperform Generalists on an Agile Team?
An Agile team is mostly a cross functional team comprising of generalists and specialists. Jurgen Appelo, challenges this concept and suggests that having just specialists on an Agile team adds more value. The post tries to correlate various view points on team composition by other members of the Agile community.
