Agile 2017 Keynote: Creating Leadership and Engagement at Every Level
At the recent Agile 2017 conference in Orlando, David Marquet, retired Navy captain and author of best selling book “Turn The Ship Around!” gave an entertaining keynote on intent-based leadership.
What a High Performing Team Looks Like and How to Create One
High performing is a team property, a temporary state which needs attention if teams want to keep on performing well. Things you can do to build a high performing team include creating safety, investing in developing collaboration skills, and giving peer-to-peer feedback.
First Annual Retrospective Report Published
The First Annual Retrospective Report provides a deeper understanding of how retrospectives are used in the real world. The results indicate that retrospectives lead to improved team communication and productivity and help to create an environment of trust. Major challenges are that topics discussed cannot be solved by the team and people do not feel comfortable speaking up.
Managing Crowdsourced Testing
Crowdsourced testing is a unique way of involving the crowd- meaning the real users/testers- into software testing under real world conditions. It helped Swisscom to find defects very early in the development process and increase the quality of products.
QCon New York – Optimizing Yourself Track
Day 3 of QCon New York had a track focused on how individuals can build non-technical competencies. Titled Optimizing Yourself, the track had five talks covering a wide range of personal skills from empathy to communication, remaining relevant as an older person in tech, deep listening and working remotely.
QCon New York Day 1 – High Velocity Development Teams Track Summary
QCon New York was heeled this week. This is a summary of the key messages from the opening keynote and from the High Velocity Development Teams track.
How the Financial Industry Is Doing DevOps
The second DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) Europe, once again held in London, brought together the DevOps enterprise community. The financial industry was well represented, giving the attendees a unique perspective on the challenges facing this heavily regulated industry and how DevOps is helping to address them.
How Testers Can Become More Technical
Testers who are able to successfully apply technical techniques of the testing craft during testing are more valuable; they increase both the quality and productivity of their teams. To become more technical, testers can learn something about code, and they should know how to manipulate and parse text files and how to use the most important analysis tools for their application platform.
How to Build Open Source Communities
Seeing programming as a social activity changes how we build communities around programming. We should focus on building a community, and not on building a codebase, argued Ash Furrow at Craft. He suggested using a code of conduct, moving long or heated discussions into a Skype call or Google Hangout, avoiding fixing easy issues yourself, and distributing power and responsibilities.
Fearless Feedback for Software Teams
Feedback builds trust, increases team cohesion, and helps individuals to improve their skills and grow in their craft. An effective feedback cycle is the best possible tool for improving team performance. With feedback, issues are addressed before they become toxic and mistakes can be course-corrected early on.
2017 Tech Leavers Study Report Released
The Kapor Center for Social Impact has released the results of a study that looked at the reasons people leave tech roles. The four key takeaways from the study are: unfairness drives turnover, experiences differ dramatically across groups, unfairness costs billions each year, and diversity and inclusion initiatives can improve culture and reduce turnover, if they are done right.
Exploring the Seven Principles of Sociocracy 3.0
Principles guide behaviour, and when made explicit can raise consciousness and help to evolve culture. The seven Sociocracy 3.0 principles support organizations that want to act in integrity with their environment, learn from experience, and generate a collaborative, adaptable and intelligent system to navigate complexity.
Atlassian Opens up Team Health Monitors and Team Playbook Blueprints
After introducing a tool-agnostic version of its Team Health Monitors at Summit 2016, Atlassian now also bundles Team Playbook blueprints with the recently released Confluence Server 6.1. A Health Monitor workshop is a team self-assessment aiming to identify pain points and formulate a plan to address weak spots by running low-ceremony "plays" that "can help improve a team's overall health".
Lean Organisations for the Digital Age
Lean IT should help to simplify and improve the way we create value for customers and develop better solutions for tomorrow. Organisations of the future will focus on horizontal product or service streams- and everything else, including experts and managers, is there to enable the front-line to do their work right-first-time-on-time, with no hassles.
Michael Nir on Conduct Objectives for High Team Performance
Michael Nir will give a talk at the upcoming Agile Games conference titled "Bring the Scrum Master a Glass of Water: Conduct Objectives for High Performance Team". InfoQ spoke to Nir about the goal of Conduct Objectives, the way to measure behavior, the common problem with the appreciation of personalities, how to use a Team Charter, and the link with Core Protocols.
