InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Truthfulness - an Agile Value?
Declan Whelan wrote a thought-provoking blog citing an idea he learned from Mishkin Berteig about an (unspoken) principle behind successful Agile teams: truthfulness. The idea is simple: without individuals being honest and open, most agile practices will not work.
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Voting Someone Off the Island on an Agile Team
On Agile teams there is a definite possibility of having a team member who is not a good fit. Members of the Agile community discuss the reasons and possible ways of voting someone off the island.
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Do Specialists Outperform Generalists on an Agile Team?
An Agile team is mostly a cross functional team comprising of generalists and specialists. Jurgen Appelo, challenges this concept and suggests that having just specialists on an Agile team adds more value. The post tries to correlate various view points on team composition by other members of the Agile community.
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What Might Happen if You Asked a Powerful Question?
Too often leaders, pressed for time, throw the easiest question at a team. But a moment's reflection, followed by a wise open-ended question can generate new possibilities when a team is stuck. This centuries-old educational technique, sometimes called "Powerful Questions," is a great tool for all team members, to transform "stuck" situations into learning opportunities.
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Article: Distributed Version Control Systems - a guide
Since Linus Torvalds presentation at Google about git in May 2007, the adoption and interest for Distributed Version Control Systems has been constantly rising. In this article, Sebastien Auvray introduces the concept of Distributed Version Control, see when to use it, why it may be better than what you're currently using, and have a look at three actors in the area: git, Mercurial and Bazaar.
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Evaluating and Improving Architectural Competence - A New SEI Paper
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) recently published a paper entitled "Evaluating and Improving Architectural Competence", which looks at using four models of human behaviour to help assess and improve software architecture competence.
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Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools Released
Microsoft has released the March 2008 version of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools.
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Complaint-Free Iterations
No software project is perfect, nor is the organization in which the project takes place. When your software project goes wrong, do your team members complain, or do they take corrective action? The Complaint Free World project encourages people to take notice of how often they complain, and reduce the frequency of the complaints, aiming for a goal of twenty-one complaint-free days.
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Is Burnout Inevitable, while Facilitating Agile Projects?
Facilitation on Agile projects seems to involve much more than the primary responsibility of improving the effectiveness of the work that the teams are doing. The responsibility of a facilitator can become so broad that over-facilitating becomes common, thus leading to burnout. An interesting Group Facilitation newslist discussion takes a closer look.
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Well Formed Teams: Helping Teams Thrive, not just Survive
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
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Improving Productivity without Formal Metrics
Ron Jeffries has started writing a series of fictional stories based on his observation of real teams. The first story (Kate Oneal: Productivity) focuses on the character Kate O'Neal (CTO) and one of her teams "Rimshot". In this episode Ron explores achieving and measuring Productivity improvements without formal metrics.
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Ideal Architecture is not always about Ideal Technology or Techniques
The ideal architecture is not always the one based on choices that technically would be the best. It should indeed take into account requirements of different stakeholders, which may limit the scope of choice. Phillip Calçado argues that the development team counts among these stakeholders and that constraints resulting from development environment cannot be ignored by the architect.
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Leading Troubled Projects: Secure Your Own Oxygen Mask First
Fiona Charles' recent StickyMinds article looked at leading troubled projects. Stressing that "this is not the time for rigid process over progress," she provided valuable insights to help a team turn around a troubled project. She also reminded us to watch out for improvement: if there is none it could be a Death March, and time to leave.
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Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive
The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is commonly used in retrospectives to encourage deep learning without recriminations. But what do you do when you *can't* agree that you "understand and truly believe" that everyone did their best? In this InfoQ article, a group of senior practitioners discusses the benefits and difficulties of using this practice.
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Communicating Intent through Idiom and Paradigm Selection
What about using idioms and programming conventions as signals to achieve more readability and expressiveness? This is what Reg Braithwaite advocates for, suggesting that syntax or even paradigm choices can be a means to communicate the intent.