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  • 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.

  • Why Agile Is Critical for Attracting Millennial Engineers

    More and more companies are realizing that having an Agile organization is critical to attracting and retaining the latest generation of millennial engineers. Millennials demand the context, flat organization/decentralized power and emphasis on collaboration that Agile offers – and companies of all sizes and verticals are responding.

  • Christine Doig on Data Science as a Team Discipline

    Christine Doig spoke at this year's OSCON Conference about data science as a team discipline and how to navigate the data science Python ecosystem. InfoQ spoke with Christine about challenges data science teams need to address to be more effective.

  • Q&A with Jurgen Appelo on Managing for Happiness

    The book Managing for Happiness by Jurgen Appelo provides practices, games and tools to manage organizations and make work fun. It contains tips and suggestions for applying the practices to achieve organizational greatness and maximize learning in organizations.

  • Don't Break Your Silos - Push Out the Silo Mentality

    Organizational silos are a serious hurdle for many companies out there. They may cause a wide variety of problems if not dealt with accordingly. Silos may not need to be broken if you manage to push out the mentality that comes with them by creating ventilators. The first step towards dealing with the silos is to learn more about them and familiarize yourself with the best practices against them.

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