InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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InfoQ Article: Lean Kanban Boards for Agile Tracking
"Big Visible Charts" aren't unique to Agile - Lean manufacturing also has its Kanban Boards. "Kanban" roughly means "card or sign," and each Kanban card is "pulled" onto the board only when the work represented by an "in progress" card is retired. In this InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to track Agile project status (Time, Task, and Team) to enhance collaboration.
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The Role Of Leadership - Agile 2007
Mary Poppendieck spoke at Agile 2007 providing an insight into the adaptation of manufacturing management principles in the software development arena.
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Failure to Learn Stifles Productivity
Amr Elssamadisy and Deborah Hartmann have written an article asking us to consider that there may be one common attribute to all software development projects that, if focused upon and improved, can make productivity soar.
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Using SSIS in a Team Setting
Jamie Tomson talks about his experiences trying to use SQL Server Integration Services in a team environment.
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Does Hosted Team Foundation Server Make Sense?
Hosted infrastructure often makes sense for companies, especially small ones with modest needs. For less than $20/month, one can get an ASP.NET or Apache co-hosting complete with a MySQL or SQL Server database. But does it make sense for other services like source control?
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InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker
In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.
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Agile Team Size
Using Agile methods with large teams is a reality - the old Agile = Small Team equation is no longer valid. Nonetheless, team size is still an issue. How important is team size and what, if anything, should we do about it?
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InfoQ Article: Creating a Collaborative Workspace
We may imagine an extremely Agile team as working in a minimalist teamroom, surrounded by whiteboards. But that isn't enough - some of the comforts left behind in our traditional spaces were there for good reasons. In this InfoQ article several experienced coaches offer advice from experience, on creating collaborative team spaces that work.
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Frequent Retrospectives Accelerate Learning and Improvement
When we seek process improvement by discarding traditional SDLC rules, how should we work? Retrospectives are a tool teams can use to reflect on their process and improve it gradually over time. In this article, Rachel Davies offers help for teams who have ideas for improvements but are not sure how to get them off the ground.
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Promising Your Way to Agility
In Harvard Business Online this week, Donald L Sull and Charles Spinosa wrote about the practice Promise Based Management - using promised commitments in the organisation to enable organisational agiity, encourage entrepreneurship and stimulate collaboration.
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Interview: Linda Rising on Collaboration, Bonobos and the Brain
Seasoned practitioners packed a small room at Agile2006 to hear Linda Rising's "Are Agilists the Bonobos of the Software Community?" where she shared her thoughts on the evolutionary roots of teamwork. In this InfoQ interview, Linda talked with editor Deborah Hartmann about how writing her book "Fearless Change" led her to read on the science of the human brain and the social rituals of apes.
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Kent Beck: Be Yourself - Create More Value
Recent discussions on the extremeprogramming list keep returning to "telling the truth". Why do we bite off more than we can chew? Why the overtime heroics? Kent Beck's one-hour talk "Ease at Work" explored how to get off what he called the "genius-shithead rollercoaster" and just be yourself at work. Question: Would you rather spend energy on maintaining an image, or doing more cool stuff?
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Offshore Outsourcing with Scrum
Swedish consulting firm Softhouse recently published the second part of an interview with Jeff Sutherland, in which he describes how one company used Scrum to integrate with an offshore development team.
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InfoQ Article: Reflecting on Success: Good Agile Karma
Agile relies heavily on discipline, rather than genius. We're told that average teams, even in the early stages, can achieve dramatic performance improvement if they are disciplined. As we do these things, the effects of our words and actions actively create, and re-create over time, the environment in which our teams and projects operate - for good or ill.
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Gender Gap Continues to Increase in IT: Gartner
A recent Gartner report on the gender gap in IT states that although many feel that women are "innately better suited than men" to navigate the new global economy, they are not choosing to enter IT - and some are leaving. Gartner predicts that by 2012, 40% of women in the IT workforce will leave traditional IT career paths.