InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
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Jim Highsmith at Agile Australia - advice for managers
Jim Highsmith spoke at the Agile Australia conference this week, he presented at an executive breakfast on ways executives and managers can assist an Agile transition and gave the opening keynote about the need to rethink performance measures and how the dimensions of the project management “Iron Triangle” need to change as organisations adopt Agile techniques.
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Do ScrumMasters need to be Technical?
Does a ScrumMaster need a technical background? Do they need to be able to read code and coach developers on their day to day work?
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Agile Teams as Cohesive Communities
Agile projects are (should be?) highly collaborative team environments built on a foundation of trust and open, honest communication. Such collaborative environments don’t just happen, and they can be easily disrupted. There are many commentators who provide advice on how to establish and maintain collaborative teams. This article summarizes the advice from a few of them.
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A Discussion with Josh Bloch on the Future of Java
Effective Java author and chief Java evangelist at Google Josh Bloch gave a talk at the recent web-based Red Hat Middleware 2020 conference. The thrust of the talk was guarded optimism and concern about the future of the Java platform under Oracle's stewardship. InfoQ spoke to him to find out more about his thinking.
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The End of an Era: Scala Community Arrives, Java Deprecated
It was recently announced that InfoQ is creating a new Operations community. In addition to that, another major change which has been in the works for the last few months at InfoQ is the conversion of the Java community to the Scala community. InfoQ spoke with a prominent Scala expert and members of the former InfoQ Java editorial team to learn more about this change and why it was made.
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What Really Motivates Workers
In a recent Harvard Business Review article Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J Kramer challenged the commonly held mnagement belief that Recognition is the most motivating and positive factor in the workplace. Their multi-year study tracked the motivation and emotions of hundreds of knowledge workers and identified POGRESS as the single most important factor for individual motivation in the workplace
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A Community of Thinkers
Jean Tabaka, Liz Keogh and Eric Willeke got together to contribute something to the "Lean Software and Systems Consortium". Instead they realized the Software Development Community (Lean, Agile, Kanban and well beyond) needed a help remembering the importance and value of true community.
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Do We Need an "Agile Team Lead" Role?
Patrick Wilson-Welsh, Chris Beale, Gary Baker, John Huston, Daryl Kulak, and others are attempting to popularize the idea of a new role, the "Agile Team Lead", to supplant many of the existing leadership roles found in and around agile teams.
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Is Leading Self-Organisation like Conducting an Orchestra?
Traditional management models don't tell leaders how to support their Agile teams without undermining their emerging self-organisation. Allusions to musical performance and "conducting the orchestra" abound - but not all are in agreement. Is the "conductor" model a good practice or an anti-pattern? In his TED talk, conductor Itay Talman shows that it may depend on what we think a conductor does.
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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.
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Retrospective of Retrospectives
Once all your teams use Agile and are busy implementing local improvements, what happens to the larger organization formerly called "IT" or "Systems Development"? A coach with a large Agile program shared the strategy they designed to let the larger community spot trends and benefit from all this learning. Paulo Caroli calls it "Retrospective of Retrospectives".
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DeMarco Reflects on 40 Years of Software Engineering Evolution
40 years after the NATO Conference on Software Engineering, Tom DeMarco paused to reflect on the discipline's evolution, wondering whether the metrics orientation he championed has distracted from the real point of computing: "transformation, creating software that changes the world." Is his earlier advice valid, though? "No", he said, in Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?
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Interview with Robin Dymond at Agile 2008
Robin Dymond gives an overview of Lean, how it can help take Agile to the 'next level' and why organizations that fail to change will not have successful Agile teams. Robin describes an organizational mismatch between traditional hierarchies and team structures. He believes that organizations will need to reorganize around teams to get the most out of Agile.
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Interview with Pollyanna Pixton at Agile 2008
Pollyanna Pixton tells us that within a culture of trust leaders must stand back and if they don't then they are hampering and restricting the productivity and the creativity and the innovation of teams. She discusses how leaders can foster a culture of trust and what they must do to get the most out of Agile teams.
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The Qualities of a Software Architect
The software/enterprise architect job is an important one. The duties of an architect are numerous and require specific leadership, communication and technical skills to be fulfilled.