InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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A Leaner Start: Reducing Team Setup Times
How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.
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Book Review: The Responsibility Virus Helps Fear Undermine Collaboration
Do "empowered" organizations outperform their command-and-control competitors? Business school dean Roger Martin saw this promising approach fail too frequently. His diagnosis: he calls it the Responsibility Virus, and offers tools to help those who would treat the Virus in their own workplace. Reviewer Deborah Hartmann found this book a good explanation of why process is not enough.
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Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards
In the spirit of "information radiators and “big visible charts” Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to organize three viewpoints (Time, Task, and Team) so the whole team understands the current status of the project and can work in an autonomous, motivated and collaborative manner.
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The Secret Sauce of Highly Productive Software Development
When Agile teams get stuck in the just-average Norming stage, rather than continuting to the exciting, high Performing stage of teamwork, sometimes they're suffering from an invisible "learning bottleneck" that stunts team performance. Agile practices require us to take time to reflect and learn - and a team that learns quickly succeeds.
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Designing Collaborative Spaces for Productivity
The typical Agile team may work in a common "teamroom", but personal space is also needed. Teams find out fast enough that some of the creature comforts left behind in their former traditional spaces were there for good reasons. This article shares the collected wisdom of dozens of teams who created their own work spaces, as collected by several experienced Agile coaches.
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Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon London 2007
This article presents the main takeway points and further reading as seen by the many attendees who blogged about QCon. Comments are organized by tracks and sessions: Case studies (amazon, eBay, Yahoo!) Java, Agile, the Agile Open Space, Qualities in Architecture, Ajax and Browser Apps, .NET, Ruby, SOA, Usability, Banking Architectures followed by a summary of peoples over all opinions of QCon.
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Good Agile Karma
Agile relies heavily on discipline, rather than genius. We're told that average teams, even in the early stages, can achieve dramatic performance improvement if they are disciplined. As we do these things, the effects of our words and actions actively create, and re-create over time, the environment in which our teams and projects operate - for good or ill.
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Experience Report: Agile Development Apprenticeship at NMHU
During the 2004-2005 academic year, Pam Rostal and Dave West ran a unique work-study degree program at New Mexico Highlands University: 20 students using Agile practices to execute real world projects. This story shows what can happen when education goes beyond the ordinary: when people are encouraged to strive for mastery and taught the thinking tools to do so.
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Agile Business Rules
James Taylor looks at the challenge that arises when the new requirements are not really requirements at all, but new or changed business rules. Aren't business rules the same as requirements? Taylor says: no, not really; and looks at how to make an agile development processes work just as well for business rules as they do for other kinds of requirements.
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Book Excerpt: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. Traditionally held at the end of a project, they're actually too late to help - no wonder we call them "post-mortems". Agile teams need retrospectives that are iterative and incremental, to find problems and design solutions to help teams improve early on, when improvement yields the most benefit.
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Book Excerpt: Practices of an Agile Developer
This book collects the personal habits, ideas, and approaches of successful agile software developers and presents them in a series of short, easy-to-digest tips. Practical and focused, it offers proven and effective agile practices to make the reader a better developer. InfoQ.com brings you an excerpt, "Chapter 7: Agile Debugging," as a free pdf download.
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Book Review: Collaboration Explained: Facilitation skills for software project leaders
David Spann, himself an experienced facilitator, provides an insightful review of "Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders" by Jean Tabaka. Jean, an experienced teacher, consultant and coach, offers techniques to enhance group effectiveness, provides some templates to assure their first efforts are well planned, and tells some great stories along the way.