InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Handling Your Team's "Rotten Apple"
Recently there has been an active discussion in the Scrum Development Yahoo Group about handling an "under-performing" team member. In the 130+ response thread, "Rotten apple in Scrum team", talk ranged from advice for the primary question, to talk of team morale and who manages it, to the classic debate of measuring individuals, to distinguishing whether a team is really a "team", and more.
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Scrum of Scrums - Issues and Value
The Scrum of Scrums meeting "is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration." Allan Shalloway asked for people's experience "on Scrum-of-Scrums for coordinating teams vs scaling Scrum to the enterprise" he sees problems in with large groups (350 people).
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Team Foundation Server for Telecommuters
Back when Visual SourceSafe was the de facto version control for Windows developers, remote access was a major problem. Products like SourceOffSite were a necessity for anyone working remotely. While globalization and unstable fuel prices continue to drive increases in telecommuting, Microsoft is still neglecting this sector, leaving opportunities for smaller companies like Teamprise.
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Presentation: Jim McCarthy and 11 Commitments For a Shared Vision
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jim McCarthy talks about 11 commitments team members should adhere to if they want to achieve a state of shared vision. Such a state empowers a team to reach their full potential and ultimately attain greatness.
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Agility Means Truthfulness
Talk about agile can often tend toward the tangible things that people do day-to-day, toward the "process of agile", but true agility is really less about process and more about principle. Travis Birch presents his perspective about some of these more intangible aspects of agile, namely "truthfulness".
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Handling Absence in Scrum Teams
Absence of a team member whether planned or unplanned can potentially affect the velocity of an Agile team. A discussion on the Scrum Development group tries to find ways to deal with absence.
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Making Retrospective Changes Stick
Agile teams may find it easy to talk about change during their retrospectives, but not so easy to make that change actually happen. Esther Derby, well-known thought-leader on the human aspects of software development, recounts an experience from her personal improvement efforts to illustrate this and offer a few suggestions on how to succeed with making change actually happen.
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Card Game Teaches Distributed Project Communication Lessons
Charles Suscheck presented how he uses a variation of the card game Rummy to teach the importance of communication, planning, and collaboration on projects at Agile2008. The game explores the effects of various levels of distribution on a team, as well as the impact of adding or removing experts on the team during a project.
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Coaching Self Organizing Teams
Joseph Pelrine promised to teach us “how to be a manipulative bastard” with respect to coaching teams. Joseph feels that coaching as a discipline lacks the scientific background and rigor that it needs: "Air guitar and attitude" won't do - Allan Kay. His goal to is to supply that rigor.
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Agile 2008: The Wisdom of Crowds and Agile Teams
James Surowiecki, author of the Wisdom of Crowds, gave the keynote speech that opened Agile 2008 on Tuesday, August 5. The thesis behind the wisdom of crowds is simple: given the right circumstances, a group of people can make a decision that is better than the best answer of most (if not all) of the group's members.
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Interview: Jean Tabaka About Team Collaboration and RAPID Management
In this interview made by Deborah Hartmann of InfoQ, Jean Tabaka talks about team collaboration as a key ingredient of the Agile development, but she also mentions RAPID management as a solution for the product owners who found themselves in an Agile environment.
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Presentation: Developing Expertise: Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep
In this presentation made during QCon London 2007, Dave Thomas talks about expanding people's expertise in their domains of interest by not treating them uniformly as they had the same amount of knowledge and level of experience.
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Renowned Orchestra Embraces Scrum-like Practices
A Scrum team has no designated leader; the team is expected to self-organize. Similarly, one of the world's most renowned orchestras has dispensed entirely with the role of conductor in favor of a process where leadership is shared and decisions are made by the team. Along the way, they have learned lessons and ways of working together that any Scrum team can benefit from.
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Agile Coaches Attend First AgileCoachCamp
An Agile Coach is someone who helps a team, or an entire organization, adopt and improve their agile practices. AgileCoachCamp, held this spring in Ann Arbor Michigan, was the first ever conference specifically for agile coaches. The participants, who came from as far away as India, Sweden, and Ukraine, self-organized to put on more than 60 sessions during the open space conference.
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How to Evaluate a Good Fit for XP?
XP might not be for everyone. An interesting discussion on the Extreme Programming group, tries to find the factors, on which, an individual should be evaluated, to determine, whether he is fit to be on an XP team.