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Culture & Methods

Test Management Revisited

The concept of test management sits awkwardly in agile, mostly because it’s a construct derived from the time when testing was a post-development phase, performed by independent testing teams. Agile, with its focus on cross functional teams, has sounded the death knell for many test managers. While test management is largely irrelevant in agile, there is still a desperate need for test leadership.

Anne-Marie Charrett
on Apr 03, 2016
Culture & Methods

Voys Learns to Play the Holacracy Game

Holacracy removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across teams that have a clear set of roles, responsibilities, and expectations. This new organizational system with no managers or titles is often misunderstood. Learn about holacracy from the Dutch telecom company Voys who implemented this new way of running organizations.

Yanto Hesseling
on Mar 27, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A on Creating Great Teams

The book “Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel” by Sandy Mamoli and David Mole explores the concepts of teams that pick themselves and provides step-by-step instructions on how you can use self-selection to establish teams.

Ben Linders
on Feb 20, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the book Visualization Examples

The book Toolbox for the Agile Coach - Visualization Examples by Jimmy Janlén can be used by agile software development teams to visualize and improve their collaboration and communication. InfoQ interviewed Janlén about the strengths of visualizations and how teams can use them to track progress, deal with blockers, celebrate successes and improve.

Ben Linders
on Feb 07, 2016
Culture & Methods

Self Leadership for Agility

Christopher Avery will give a talk about leading yourself at the Scaling Agile for the Enterprise congress. InfoQ interviewed him about applying self leadership with the responsibility process, his view on self-organizing teams, the role for leadership in agile, and how top leadership differs in a small organization with only a few agile teams and in large organizations with many agile teams.

Ben Linders
on Feb 02, 2016
Culture & Methods

Lee Thomas and Nick Cahill on Self Organizing Organizations

At the recent Agile New Zealand conference Lee Thomas and Nick Cahill gave a talk titled the Self Organizing Organization in which they explained the journey that Fraedom has undertaken to empower teams and support true self organization rather than following an imposed agile method. Afterwards they spoke to InfoQ about the talk and their involvement in the transition.

Shane Hastie
on Jan 29, 2016
Culture & Methods

Foundations of Self-Organization

The idea of self-organizing teams has been called the secret sauce of agile development. This article describes a model with three layers to systematically develop healthy self-organization. The layer called Foundations describes the required organizational infrastructure; The layer called People deals with teams and the individuals in the teams while the third layer is about the outcomes.

Svante Lidman
on Jan 06, 2016
Culture & Methods

Connect Agile Teams to Organizational Hierarchy: A Sociocratic Solution

Many agile teams suffer from the mismatch of agile and organizational leadership with the latter being reflected by the organizational hierarchy. This article suggests using sociocracy as a solution that leaves the hierarchies in place yet still allows teams to act in an agile way.

Pieter van der Meché Jutta Eckstein
on Dec 27, 2015
Culture & Methods

How Project Managers can be a Positive Agent for Agile

An interview with Graham Dick about how agile impacts the role of project managers, if there is a need for project managers in agile, dealing with project managers that oppose to agile, applying agile principles to project management, what self-organized teams expect from project managers, how project managers can be a positive agent for change, and what to do to make collaboration work in agile.

Ben Linders
on Dec 03, 2015
Culture & Methods

Building Flat Organizations with Cross-functional Teams and Fewer Managers

Hierarchical organizations can't react to new market opportunities and changes fast enough, this impedes the company’s survival in the long run. An interview with Michael Dubakov on how agile transformations impact the role of managers, how to change the culture to increase agility, how to flatten an organization using cross-functional teams, and benefits from increasing agility.

Ben Linders
on Nov 30, 2015
Culture & Methods

The First Few Months of a New Team

Last January, the OutSystems R&D group introduced a new team, called DevOps. Now that the team has been working together for a few months, we thought it would be a good time to reflect on the journey so far and share it with the community. The article explains how we organized ourselves, shares some data from our first project and presents some of the major lessons we learned along the way.

João Miranda
on Oct 30, 2015
Culture & Methods

Peer Feedback Loops: Why Metrics and Meetings Are Not Enough

This is the first in a series of articles that will show how to build peer feedback loops, an effective means to encourage a culture of continuous improvement. Starting with a problem statement and some background on feedback, followed by explaining why metrics and meetings are not enough, the article describes the first three methods on how to design and facilitate peer feedback sessions.

Siegfried Kaltenecker
on Oct 07, 2015