InfoQ Homepage Stories & Case Studies Content on InfoQ
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Building the Roadmap for Portfolio for Jira
When your product backlog is a prioritized list of problems instead of a list of features, it becomes easier to respond to change; you don’t have to commit early to delivering features and can use new technology when it becomes available. Visualizing your roadmap and regularly taking in new information and using it to reassess your roadmap helps to keep you agile.
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Getting More Work Done in Fewer Working Hours
When Jason Lengstorf’s body was actively falling apart due of the way he was working, he decided to limit his computer usage and create pockets of high-focus effort. Working fewer hours prevents you from becoming overtired or unfocused. We need to treat downtime with the same level of care as we treat our uptime, using breaks to make creative connections, recharge, and to remember why we work.
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Sustainable Software with Agile
Sustainable software enables you to deliver changes to the customer more quickly with a lower likelihood of bugs, decrease of the total cost of ownership of applications, and increase business agility. It’s possible to verify the sustainability of software using a combination of automated analysis of source code, expert review of technical artifacts, and comparison with benchmark data.
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Becoming an Agile Company
Organizations have to give up much of their hierarchy and micro-management to become an agile company: totally changing the management model instead of doing small incremental changes which drown in the traditional bureaucratic structure. They need to stop doing things that inhibit agility, and focus on customer orientation, intrinsic motivation; leadership based on trust and less formal planning.
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Agile and the Use of Paradoxes
Paradoxes support agile transformations; they make you stop, think, and discuss by using a shared language. They also help to show empathy and provide a way forward. VIVAT, a Dutch insurance company, uses paradoxes in training and everyday work to drive their agile transformation.
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Supporting Digital Leadership with Agile
Digitization can no longer be stopped; with customers who increasingly act digitally and mobile it is important to show digital leadership. IT is taking over traditional services and is leading the way for new digital connected products. An organization applied agile to change the way teams are funded and to establish teams of owners who take responsibility to put good products in the market.
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Using Agile Principles with Scrum Studio to Increase Organizational Responsiveness
Using a change approach based on agile principles with Scrum Studio helped a Dutch pension and investment management company to become more responsive at structurally lower costs. The change team practiced what they preached by applying transparent and iterative change with similar characteristics as the intended end result. They established a culture where people are taking responsibility.
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Agile at LEGO
Agile has been part of LEGO for more than a decade, but it is still spreading seeds and finding applications in business areas outside digital and IT. Some of LEGO's core values are play and learning which resonate very well with the agile principle of iterations, experimentation, and retrospectives.
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How the Financial Industry Is Doing DevOps
The second DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) Europe, once again held in London, brought together the DevOps enterprise community. The financial industry was well represented, giving the attendees a unique perspective on the challenges facing this heavily regulated industry and how DevOps is helping to address them.
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Dead Code Must Be Removed
Dead code needs to be found and removed; leaving dead code in is an obstacle to programmer understanding and action, and there's the risk that the code is awakened which can cause significant problems. Deleting dead code is not a technical problem; it is a problem of mindset and culture.
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Applying the Teal Paradigm
Applying the teal paradigm helps organizations increase team members' engagement and allows teams to grow. Teal oriented organizations think of themselves as "living organisms"; they are human centric and liberating towards their employees, and look for the resourcefulness in humans rather than looking at humans as resources.
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Experimenting with Peer Feedback in Tech Teams
Feedback can be used to build trust in teams and help individuals improve their skills and grow in their craft. Emily Page and Doug Talbot shared their experiences from experimenting with peer feedback at Ocado Technology at Spark the Change London 2016. An interview with Emily Page, Organizational Catalyst at Ocado Technology.
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Scaling Scrum to Build a New-Technology Printer
When developing a high speed printer based on a new print technology things change often; you need an effective and flexible solution for managing a large project with many different disciplines. Océ Printing Systems decided to customize Scrum and scale it to enable collaboration and make progress transparent.
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How to Study and Apply Ideas from Successful Organisations
Studying successful organisations can inspire you and provide ideas to improve your own organisation. Helena Moore explains how reading case studies about high performance leadership and culture from organisations like Netflix, Zappos, and Virgin, and visiting organisations like Timpson has helped to understand what makes these organisations successful and to find ways to apply them.
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Anti-Patterns of Agile Leaders
Regina Martins talked about anti-patterns of agile leaders at the Agile Practitioners 2016 conference. InfoQ interviewed her about what makes leadership important for agile, the key attributes that can make somebody a great leader, examples of leadership behaviour that hinder agile teams and how to deal with them, and asked her to share stories of great leadership.