InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ

Articles

RSS Feed

Newer Older

Culture & Methods

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.

Ryan Thomas Vasudha Prabhala
on Sep 11, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Lilia Gorbachik
on Sep 04, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Madhavi Ledalla
on Aug 30, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Heidi Helfand Shane Hastie
on Aug 22, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Bruce Montgomery Gail Montgomery
on Aug 11, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Kamil Puk
on Aug 05, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Ranganathan Balashanmugam
on Jul 31, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Shane Hastie Charles Humble
on Jul 23, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Vikram Mansharamani
on Jul 21, 2020
Culture & Methods

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.

Ben Linders Douglas Squirrel Jeffrey Fredrick
on Jul 14, 2020
Culture & Methods

Silos, Politics and Delivering Software Products

Technical teams tend to be unprepared for politics. This leads to political problems being either accepted as tragically inevitable or written off as due to the incompetence of others. Politics in business emerges when direction is not set with sufficient clarity. Better understanding the causes of politics helps understand how best to either resolve or navigate politics in software projects.

Ryan Dawson Laura Edwards
on Jun 25, 2020
Culture & Methods

Working Together in the Same Direction with Obeya

Obeya1 is a proven approach that facilitates teamwork and the alignment of activities around seven panels to deliver IT or manufacturing products. It accelerates the regular resolution of good problems by breaking down barriers between teams and it also benefits from the support of the management. The purpose of this article describes the first Obeya panel: vision

Edmond Nguyen Reynald Debaut-Henocque
on Jun 14, 2020

Newer Articles

Older Articles

InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter

Articles