Finding Talented People and Building Sustainable Teams
Meetups, hackathons and conferences are fantastic opportunities to promote your company's work and ethos and meet talented people. You can learn a lot more about a person if you let them drive the conversation initially in a job interview. Having room to grow professionally and psychological safety are key to building sustainable teams, and establish a collaborative, cohesive engineering culture.
Cultivating Psychological Safety
When we’re feeling stressed, threatened, or unsafe, it becomes harder to think creatively, work collaboratively, and solve problems. You can cultivate a culture of safety by letting folks know that it’s safe to make mistakes, by listening for real understanding, and by practicing mindfulness.
Jeff Patton on Fixing Agile Product Ownership
At the recent Agile India conference, Jeff Patton gave a keynote talk in which he challenged the way agile development approaches Product Ownership. He holds that product management is a discipline which was around before the Scrum term Product Owner was coined, and the way it has been applied in most agile organisations is, at best, a watered-down approach and real product management is needed.
Dealing with the Broken Human Machine: How to Create High-Performing Teams
To really progress in developing software and build anything at a scale, you have to examine your blind spots and learn to deal with people. The culture we build is important: the difference between a high performing engineering team and a low performing one is orders of magnitude in terms of productivity and quality. Focusing on how we do things is as important as what we’re doing.
Data-Driven Thinking for Continuous Improvement
Organizations need an objective way to measure performance and tie actions back to business outcomes to improve continuously. Avvo uses a data-driven decision framework with an autonomous team model and a practice of retrospectives to help people make better decisions and proposals for continuous improvement.
Pairing for Learning
Pairing can be used to learn new topics that you can take back to the workplace, and to make your accomplishments visible and celebrate success together. Learning partners can encourage each other to make bold statements, commit to do something, and gently push each other to make it happen.
Introversion, Ambiversion and Extroversion at Work
Introversion and extroversion are not binary personality types; people fall somewhere on the scale between the two types and the way someone behaves can change depending on the context they find themselves in at the moment. In fact, most of the population are ambiverts. Understanding these differences can make for more effective teamwork and communication.
The Relationship between Team Emotion and Delivery
AI firm Deep Affects studied Jira projects, presenting a relationships between emotional health and team productivity. Their findings are also supported by Gallup's 2017 State of the Workforce survey which indicates the cost of not having emotionally engaged teams.
How to Win a Solar Race Using Agile
The Nuon Solar team uses agile and Scrum to take the steps which add the most value to the project first, integrate different disciplines, ensure transparency and focus, and reflect to improve. Their goal is promote and educate the use of clean energy; the mission is to win the Sasol Solar Challenge in South Africa using the power of innovation.
GitHub Introduces Multiple Commit Authors
GitHub has started supporting multiple commit authors. The new feature is meant to improve collaboration from several developers on the same commits or pulls requests and ensures every author gets attribution of their commits in their profile contributions graph and the repository’s statistics.
Should Teams Decouple Cadences?
Recently a Twitter discussion took place about allowing teams to have multiple cadences, for instance by using a different rhythm for planning the work and for learning and improving. Decoupling cadences gives teams room to explore and learn what works best for them; it can lead to more adaptability and autonomy and better outcomes.
Using Agile Principles with Scrum Studio to Increase Organizational Responsiveness
Using a change approach based on agile principles with Scrum Studio helped a Dutch pension and investment management company to become more responsive at structurally lower costs. The change team practiced what they preached by applying transparent and iterative change with similar characteristics as the intended end result. They established a culture where people are taking responsibility.
GitHub Team Discussions Aim to Improve Collaboration
Announced at its last Universe conference, Team discussions aim to power processes like planning, analysis, design, and others directly from within GitHub.
Using Self-Selection to Create Teams
At one company, self-selection was applied to redistribute people over teams. It provided the opportunity for developers to get involved in strategic decisions and understand the needs of the business. Using self-selection, they learned that by giving people the power to take difficult and informed decisions, they will become motivated, no matter how tough the decision is.
Real-Time Collaboration Comes to Atom
At QCon San Francisco 2017, GitHub’s Nathan Sobo has unveiled Atom’s new real-time collaboration plugin, Teletype. Teletype aims to make it possible for two developers to code together with the same ease as coding alone.
