InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
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Scaling Software Architecture via Conversations: the Advice Process
Andrew Harmel-Law recently published an article describing a decentralised, scalable software architecture process based on the "Advice Process". The Advice Process promotes software architecture by encouraging a series of conversations driven by an empowering, almost anarchistic, decision-making technique. It comprises one rule - anyone can make an architectural decision.
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Becoming a Better Tech Leader with Coaching
Coaching, both personal and professional, can help to understand your potential and discover ways to exercise that potential in your daily work. For Maryam Umar, coaching has proved to be highly useful in her tech work of leading testers and engineers.
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Leading a DevOps Transformation - a Collaborative Engineering Approach
When leading a DevOps transformation, transparency and visibility can help to get teams engaged in chance. Once involved, developers can act as knowledge multipliers and contribute to change initiatives. A mixture of solving frequently-occurring problems, addressing complex problems, and showing progress of the transformation can help to keep stakeholders involved.
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How a Test Strategy Helped to Increase Deployment Maturity and Product Quality
Implementing a test strategy helped an organization to move away from push and pray deployment toward continuous and confident deployment to production. The organization mapped their test strategy in a framework with different enablers, which has helped them align on quality metrics for the whole product together with a strong safety net of tests before moving to production.
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Patterns of Legacy Displacement - Thoughtworks Summarizes IT Landscape Evolution
Martin Fowler recently published a series of articles called Patterns of Legacy Displacement. It summarises the authors’ collective experience in replacing legacy systems. They argue that chances of success are increased by dividing such projects into three phases and following the patterns listed for each one.
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Distributed DevOps Teams: Supporting Digitally Connected Teams
To establish a digital connection within a globally distributed team, an organization provided the team members with both collaboration tools and supplied an extra monitor with a visualization board. Collaboration using the online chat and white board initially posed challenges, as the board was tweaked towards the teams’ needs.
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Shifting Quality Left with the Test Pyramid
Shifting quality left means building in quality much earlier in the software development cycle, rather than testing for quality after completion of development. Using the test pyramid model, a project was able to move testing towards earlier stages, thereby finding defects that caused integration issues earlier in development.
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Fostering Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Building intercultural relationships are so important to success in the workplace and world today, yet many people are hesitant or unsure of how to build relationships with those who are different from themselves. The first step is to reflect on yourself and notice where and how you spend your time and resources.
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Engaging All Generations with Adaptable Reward and Recognition Systems
Reward and recognition systems should be adaptable, agile, and take contexts into consideration. All generations want three things - to be respected, rewarded and recognised for their work. The motivation and the form factor of the rewards are what differ for the generations. You need to be creative and keep reward and recognition systems fresh, and tailor them to teams.
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Characteristics of Agile Leaders
Agile leaders are passionate about agile practices. They look to instill trust in their people, create transparency and are open to constructive criticism so that great work can be achieved. They focus on the vision and customers. Understanding what agile means, they give autonomy to the people, support them, and encourage them to develop and grow through learning and experimentation.
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Meetings in a Time of Separation
Having many people in virtual meetings can lead to people who only partly attend and become disengaged. We should question who should be attending the meeting and make information from the meeting available for those who decide not to attend to decrease meeting FOMO.
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Maintaining Psychological Safety under Pressure
When leaders are under pressure they can fall into dark side behaviours that can cause deep and lasting harm to organisation culture and psychological safety. Leaders need to be very conscious about deliberately managing their reactions and responses to pressure situations in order to avoid allowing what are often character strengths to be overused and potentially become toxic.
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Building an Intentional Organisation: a Holistic Approach
Building an intentional organisation requires a mindset that considers all organisational building blocks holistically. Leadership is key; actions that managers take have organisational consequences which need to be aligned to design an organisation that can achieve its purpose.
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QCon Plus: Summary of the Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks Track
Qcon Plus ran in November 2020. Once of the tracks focused on Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks. Hosted by Randy Shoup of eBay, the track concentrated on some of the important people skills needed for effective communication and collaboration in and outside teams.
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Growing Personal and Organisational Courage
Courage is vital for organisations if they want to thrive in today’s complex world as it will create the right conditions for the highest possible levels of creativity, adaptability and productivity. We all have the power to lead with courage, no matter what our role is.