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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Developing Quality Software: Differentiating Factors

    The level of software quality attainable is a reflection of an organizational business decision. There are many factors that influence this decision, including development, build and testing environments effectiveness, resources and their associated skillset, integrity, motivations and experience levels, commercial agreements, and adopted processes and productivity tools.

  • Product Owner Raison d'Etre in an Agile Team

    Companies may claim they're implementing Scrum, but is the claim really valid? Do they uphold the philosophy of Scrum? It turns out it's not, as a lot of companies are still practicing a distorted version of Scrum. Part of the common dysfunction is the misunderstood role of the product owner: a role essential to success with Scrum. What then is the actual job of a good product owner?

  • Q&A on The Great ScrumMaster

    In The Great ScrumMaster Zuzana Šochová explores the ScrumMaster role and provides solutions for dealing with everyday and difficult situations. She describes the #ScrumMasterWay, a concept which defines three levels of operation of ScrumMasters.

  • Q&A on the Book Soul-Centered Leadership

    The book Soul-Centered Leadership by Michael Anderson provides ideas and exercises for developing skills to lead people while being in touch with your soul. It explores a leadership approach based on emotional intelligence, psychology, and spirituality.

  • Managing Cultural Differences in Your Distributed Team

    This article focuses on how cultural differences influence collaboration in distributed teams; it shares some virtues and practices which are helpful in bridging the cultural differences between team members. It defines culture and multicultural environment in distributed teams. It looks at questions teams can ask themselves to find out the impact of cultural differences in their day-to-day work.

  • Inclusive Collaboration and the Silence Experiment

    With highly collaborative approaches becoming the norm in the software industry, it is time to re-consider collaboration and provide workplaces and practices that embrace all kinds of thinkers. This article introduces Inclusive Collaboration and describes the Silence Experiment to help teams consider different aspects of collaboration and work more effectively with all types of minds.

  • Agile Sailors - A Journey from a Monolithic Approach to Microservices

    Over the last couple of years eSailors IT solutions has implemented big technological and organisational changes: from functional silos to cross-functional teams, from a work flow that looked like an assembly line to dynamic loops, from a monolithic platform to microservices, from hierarchical command-and-control to leadership as a team sport. This article provides a summary of their journey.

  • Teaching Modern Software Development Techniques at University

    We often hear how there is a skills shortage in the software industry, and about the apparent gap between what people are taught in university and the “real world”. This is how Imperial College London aims to bridge this gap, providing students with relevant skills for industrial software engineering careers, and teaching tools and techniques for professional developer working in a modern team.

  • Internal Tech Conferences - How and Why

    Software engineering today is every bit as much about the people as it is about technology - empowered teams don’t appear overnight. We need to oil the wheels of collaboration so they roll smoothly. Here, Matthew Skelton and Victoria Morgan-Smith discuss how to use internal conferences to boost your organisation’s social capital, the currency by which relationships flourish and businesses thrive.

  • The Top 5 Problems with Distributed Teams and How to Solve Them

    In this article, Hugo Messer shares the top 5 challenges distributed teams face along with practical solutions. They are based on his 6 books, many workshops and a decade of hands on experience. The top 5 challenges: 1. We're thinking 'us versus them'; 2. Keeping the team in the dark; 3. Culture is a mystery; 4. We stop communicating; 5. The black box.

  • Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of Your Agile Organisation

    Communities of practice bring together people who share areas of interest or concerns. They have specific applications in agile organisations: scaling agile development and allowing individuals to connect with others who share similar concerns. Communities of practice bring people together to regain the benefits of regular contact while keeping the value of multidisciplinary agile teams.

  • Q&A and Book Review on Liftoff, Second Edition

    The book Liftoff, Second Edition by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies, provides practices and insights for chartering teams by understanding their needs, building trust, and defining how they will interact in the team and align with other parts of the organization. It's a book for Agile coaches, Scrum masters or agile product and project managers to help teams to understand the why behind the work.

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