InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
-
Open Office Layout is Bad for Brain !
Open office layout is usually considered the default layout for Agile teams. Cubicle farms are boring and a thing of the past. Open office is known to improve communication, collaboration and build stronger teams. Is it all as good as it sounds?
-
Aspects of Staffing Agile Teams
Blog posts by Esther Derby and Mike Cohn focus on two different aspects of the staffing of Agile teams
-
Scrum Project Estimation Beyond the Near-Term?
How can you estimate the effort required for an entire Scrum project when Scrum only recommends doing task breakdowns for the next one or two sprints? Should we even try to estimate project effort in the mid- to long-term?
-
Tips for Release Planning with Distributed Scrum
With teams in the US and India, how does one make release planning work? What if the team isn't even able to do their planning at the same time because of the time difference?
-
Sociology and Scrum
The Scrum Master job requires skills in diplomacy-- and effective communication. Team members must also communicate effectively. Tools for accomplishing these "soft-skill" tasks are now freely available. A detailed book about one of these useful tools entitled SOFTWARE FOR YOUR HEAD, is over 400 pages in total, and is now available-- free to the world in PDF format.
-
10 Suggestions for the Architect of an Agile Team
Tom Hollander, a Solutions Architect at Microsoft Australia, held a presentation entitled The Role of an Architect in an Agile Team at TechEd Australia where he discussed what he does as an architect leading an agile team.
-
Cost of Cross Functional Teams
Cross functional teams are the teams in which all members work on delivery of the same business value. It could potentially be the same feature or the same product. Though, Agile recommends cross functional teams due to a lot of inherent advantages, there are some caveats that organizations need to be aware of.
-
Handling Team Changes
Change is constant, yet people fear change. It is mostly the fear of unknown and loss of comfort zones that makes the perception of a change painful. Though Agile teams are well prepared for change, however most of them are not comfortable when the change affects the team.
-
Touch and Intimacy in Agile Teams
If the consolidation and integration of elementary Agile practice is ending, that means something new is starting. Does a new phase of innovation lie just ahead? Where is the edge of the new Agile frontier? InfoQ looked at the research of Michael de la Maza, an agile coach and trainer who is researching controversial topics such as intimacy in teams and organizations, to learn more.
-
Organizing Self-organizing Teams
Rashina Hoda is a PhD researcher who has been examining how self-organization actually happens on teams. She has studied teams in New Zealand and India and identified six distinct roles that emerge when teams effectively self-organize. She spoke to InfoQ about her research, which will be published at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2010) to be held in Cape Town in May.
-
Agile Team Spaces: Do's and Don'ts
Many of us, who are new to Agile, would believe that putting an Agile team together in a room gets the job done. A few of us would actually pay attention to what makes a room a team room which can enhance productivity and motivation. Many Agile teams have already shared their perspective on what would make an ideal team room. Here are a few recent ones.
-
Git# Offers Git Access for .NET and Mono Projects
Git# is a .NET and Mono version of the popular source code management system, Git, obtained by porting JGit to C#. Other related projects are: msysgit and gitextensions.
-
Key Elements of a Successful Agile Retrospective: Preparation and Participation
Agile retrospective helps the team examine what went well during the past sprint and identify the areas of improvement for the future sprints. However, sometimes the exercise of conducting a retrospective ends up as a futile effort due to lack of preparation. Moreover, key members of the team end up either not attending or not participating in the meeting.
-
Agile Addresses "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team"
Tathagat Varma, general manager with a large provider of IT management solutions, wondered whether Agile's productivity improvements could be linked to how it improves teamwork. His article analyses Agile values and practices by mapping them against Patrick Lencioni's business fable "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."
-
ScrumMaster Interview Tips
The ScrumMaster or Iteration Manager is a crucial role on Agile teams, and selecting which organisation/team to work with is important – when considering taking on a new project it’s important to set the environment up for success. This article provides interviewing advice for ScrumMasters considering taking on a project or team.