InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Dev & UX: How Integrating UX Improves Engineering’s Efficiency and Sanity
User experience (UX) is often misunderstood. Many teams and workers believe it’s just sketching or laying out screens. Misunderstanding UX leads to problems in hiring, processes, team culture, product, and customer satisfaction. Today we’ll learn how to start improving all of these by seeing UX as it really is: engineering’s time and money saver.
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Q&A on the Book Office Optional
The book Office Optional by Larry English describes how employees from Centric work virtually within a culture that contributes to the business’s success and employee happiness. The stories in this book provide insights into how working remotely looks, building relationships and trust in a virtual environment, managing remote teams, and recruiting and hiring people for remote working.
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A Five-step Guide to Building Empathy That Can Boost Your Development Career
Empathy isn’t just a nice-to-have soft skill. It’s one of the top six skills required of employees in 2020 and beyond, according to Forbes. Learn why empathy is critical for developers in particular and explore these five steps you can take to cultivate empathy in your day-to-day: 1. Understand yourself, 2. Understand them, 3. Build comfort into conversations, 4. Learn how to listen, 5. Practice.
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How to Build a Strong Beta Testers Community
It is important to involve the real users at the early stages of your development cycle. A strong beta testers community not only improves your product, but also provides context, pain points and ideas while increasing loyalty and engagement. This article offers tips and tricks on how to build a beta testers program and a process of supporting the program with a modest allotment.
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Q&A on the Book Retrospectives for Everyone
The book Retrospectives for Everyone by Madhavi Ledalla explains how metaphors can be used to foster reflection and result in actions in agile retrospectives. The book provides examples of metaphors that can for instance be used to nurture teamwork, manage change, focus on objectives and personal reflection, and also provides recommendations for facilitating retrospectives beyond a single team.
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Q&A on the Book Dynamic Reteaming (2-ed)
In the 2nd edition of her book Dyanamic Reteaming, Heidi Helfand shows that having stable teams is generally unrealistic and that there are ways to effectively reform teams to achieve great outcomes. She explores different approaches to team formation and reformation and provides practical advice on how to create environments where team formation can adapt and evolve effectively.
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Q&A on the Book The Improv Mindset
The book The Improv Mindset by Bruce and Gail Montgomery provides the framework, activities, case stories, and data to help you apply improv in a business context. They show how you can deal with uncertainty by changing how your brain responds to change, as well as provide methods to systematically improve individual, team, and organization performance by leveraging the core principles of improv.
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Retrospectives for Management Teams
Engaging top management in a recurring retrospective approach can result in long-term value in organizations. Retrospectives can help management teams to explore how they collaborate and cooperate. They can find out whether they should change something and decide on action points that propel the team forward and make them more effective.
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Scaling Distributed Teams by Drawing Parallels from Distributed Systems
An effective distributed team’s characteristics are accountability, good communication, clear goals and expectations, a defined decision-making process, and autonomy with explicit norms. Ranganathan Balashanmugam spoke about scaling distributed teams around the world at QCon London 2020. In his talk he showed how we can apply distributed systems patterns for scaling distributed teams.
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Working Remotely: Good Practices and Useful Resources
As the impact of COVID-19 continues around the world, many people will be experiencing a sustained period of remote working for the first time. To help you, we’ve collated good remote working practices and resources and will continue to do so as more emerge. While remote working may appear straightforward, there are common issues that come up as you shift to this way of working.
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Q&A on the Book Think for Yourself
The book Think for Yourself by Vikram Mansharamani provides a balanced approach to working with experts to help us deal with uncertainty. Instead of outsourcing our thinking to experts, we should tap into appropriate expertise when needed. Multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches can be used to see the whole picture and stay on top of things.
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Q&A on the Book Agile Conversations
The book Agile Conversations by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick explores how productive conversations can change the way organizations develop software. It provides techniques and exercises that can help you gain insight into communication and collaboration issues and improve your day-to-day conversations, achieving valuable business results from your agile team.