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  • Kent Beck: Software Design is an Exercise in Human Relationships

    In the closing keynote at QCon SF, Kent Beck spoke about how software design is an exercise in human relationships, why iterative and incremental development is the most cost effective way to build software, and how the overall cost of a software system is directly related to the cost of coupling and decoupling and the jackpot changes which result in cascaded coupling.

  • WhatsApp Adopts the Signal Protocol for Secure Multi-Device Communication

    WhatsApp is testing its new architecture aimed to enable true multi-device message synchronization while preserving end-to-end cryptographic security. To this aim, WhatsApp is adopting the Signal protocol.

  • Lynne Cazaly on Making Sense Using Hand-Drawn Images

    At the recent Agile on the Beach New Zealand conference, author and graphic facilitator Lynne Cazalay presented a masterclass on sensemaking; some techniques to clarify ideas through graphical images - simple diagrams which can help identify the important elements of any narrative and represent them in a style that makes content meaningful.

  • Introversion, Ambiversion and Extroversion at Work

    Introversion and extroversion are not binary personality types; people fall somewhere on the scale between the two types and the way someone behaves can change depending on the context they find themselves in at the moment. In fact, most of the population are ambiverts. Understanding these differences can make for more effective teamwork and communication.

  • QCon New York – Optimizing Yourself Track

    Day 3 of QCon New York had a track focused on how individuals can build non-technical competencies. Titled Optimizing Yourself, the track had five talks covering a wide range of personal skills from empathy to communication, remaining relevant as an older person in tech, deep listening and working remotely.

  • Courage to Become Agile

    Being brave is about doing what is necessary, even when you are afraid. The single most important thing in agile is to inspect and dare to change things which aren't working. You can start with small experiments to find solutions, and if it turns they do not work, then you can stop them.

  • Q&A with Gerald Weinberg on The Influence of Individual Moods on Team Working

    InfoQ is researching the factors that influence the mood of teams. As team mood is an aggregation of the individual moods of team members, understanding the individual mood and how it influences team working can help to learn more about team moods. InfoQ interviewed Gerald Weinberg about individual and team mood, influencing the mood of individuals and discussing moods in teams.

  • DevOps Days Amsterdam Day 1 Focused on Continuous Delivery and DevOps Culture

    The first day of DevOps Days Amsterdam had its focus split between continuous delivery and promoting a DevOps culture. Talks focused on how to automate the deployment pipeline but also system recovery in case of failure. On the culture side leveraging distinct personality types to successfully introduce changes and the positive impact of strong company culture on hiring were some of the takeaways.

  • Interview: Linda Rising: Prejudices Can Alter Team Work

    In this interview filmed during Agile 2008, following the presentation "Who Do You Trust?", Linda Rising shows how prejudices can affect the relationships between team members. According to Linda, we all have a tendency to categorize others based on characteristics like race, religion, sex, but also based on more trivial characteristics, and many times we are not even aware we are doing it.

  • Agility Means Truthfulness

    Talk about agile can often tend toward the tangible things that people do day-to-day, toward the "process of agile", but true agility is really less about process and more about principle. Travis Birch presents his perspective about some of these more intangible aspects of agile, namely "truthfulness".

  • Article: "Who Do You Trust?" by Linda Rising

    During Agile 2008, Dr. Linda Rising held a presentation centered on experiments conducted many years ago, presenting how deep, powerfully affecting, and difficult to avoid are human “prejudices” and “stereotypes” as seen from the perspective of psychology and cognitive science. The article, written by Tsutomu Yasui, is a summary of that presentation.

  • Renowned Orchestra Embraces Scrum-like Practices

    A Scrum team has no designated leader; the team is expected to self-organize. Similarly, one of the world's most renowned orchestras has dispensed entirely with the role of conductor in favor of a process where leadership is shared and decisions are made by the team. Along the way, they have learned lessons and ways of working together that any Scrum team can benefit from.

  • How to Evaluate a Good Fit for XP?

    XP might not be for everyone. An interesting discussion on the Extreme Programming group, tries to find the factors, on which, an individual should be evaluated, to determine, whether he is fit to be on an XP team.

  • Truthfulness - an Agile Value?

    Declan Whelan wrote a thought-provoking blog citing an idea he learned from Mishkin Berteig about an (unspoken) principle behind successful Agile teams: truthfulness. The idea is simple: without individuals being honest and open, most agile practices will not work.

  • Voting Someone Off the Island on an Agile Team

    On Agile teams there is a definite possibility of having a team member who is not a good fit. Members of the Agile community discuss the reasons and possible ways of voting someone off the island.

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