InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Transforming Software Product Teams into Tech Investors
The key responsibility of an organisation lies in balancing user value with profitability. In a product organisation, software product teams invest their own time. According to Fabrice des Mazery, software developers are much more than stakeholders; they are the main investors as they are part of the product teams.
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Transitioning from a Software Engineering Role into a Management Role
Software engineers who want to become good at leading engineers can use everyday opportunities to practice management. Peter Gillard-Moss gave a talk at QCon London where he shared his experience with becoming a manager, and provided tips and ideas for engineers aiming to become a manager.
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Fostering Healthy Tech Teams in a DevOps World
Building healthy DevOps tech teams that are responsible for a broad area can be challenging. To measure the success of your team, several frameworks provide metrics indicating team health. Psychological safety matters for healthy teams to ensure each software engineer brings their own lived experiences to build better products and that they feel safe to do so.
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Adopting Agile by Increasing Psychological Safety in a Software Team
To test the agile way of thinking, a software team worked on their psychological safety with kick-off exercises, sharing coffee breaks, celebrating wins, a stand-up question, and 1-on-1 talks. This helped them to increase psychological safety in their software team.
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The Impact of Testing in Software Teams
Communicating quality gaps, holding space for good testing, and writing automation are some of the ways that testers contribute to software teams. According to Maaret Pyhäjärvi, we need to think about testing, not testers. Collaboration and having conversations between team members can result in valuable impact that changes the product and the experiences of our users.
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Why Stable Software Teams Aren't Always Best: Self-Selection Reteaming at Redgate
There are advantages to having the same group of people stay together, especially in achieving a time-bound software development project. However, in a world where we increasingly see product or stream-aligned teams who own long-living software from creation through to delivery, operation, and ongoing improvements, then optimising for very stable teams is not the best idea, Chris Smith argues.
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The Value of Repaying Good Technical Debt
Bad technical debt is the stuff that has been lingering around; teams need to work around it or fix the fallout as a consequence of this bad technical debt. Good technical debt is intentional, enables benefits for the organisation, and is controlled. Teams can use a disciplined approach for managing and repaying technical debt, for instance by using the wall of technical debt.
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How to Become a High-Performing Software Team
The four major elements that enable high-performing software teams are purpose, decentralized decision-making, high trust with psychological safety, and embracing uncertainty. Teams can improve their performance by experimenting with their ways of working.
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Handling Conflicts by Dealing with Emotions
Emotions are at the heart of conflicts, influencing their initiation, escalation and dynamics. Effectively managing your own emotions and understanding those of others can greatly impact the outcome of a conflict. Two steps to be taken are to label emotions, and take control and determine which emotion you want to focus on.
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Approaches and Techniques to Break Down Silos: Learnings from QCon New York
At QCon New York 2023, Emily Webber presented Bridging Silos and Overcoming Collaboration Antipatterns in Multidisciplinary Organisations, where she showed a worrying trend in the industry of specialisation and silos at the expense of collaboration, shared responsibility, and valuable outcomes. She shared some approaches and techniques to break silos down to work together better.
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Considering Remote Mob Programming in a High Stakes Environment
Remote mob programming helped a team in a high-stakes environment to be resilient, work under pressure, and deliver successfully. Setting expectations on the first call and being serious about the reasons for doing mob programming ensured that the team kept doing it.
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Improving Developer Experience in a Small Organization
A way to improve developer experience is by removing time-consuming tasks and bottlenecks from developers and from the platform team that supports them. How you introduce changes matters; creating an understanding of the “why” before performing a change can smoothen the rollout.
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Debugging Difficult Conversations as a Pathway to Happy and Productive Teams
Any time we talk to someone or to a group when there are high stakes and/or high emotions, difficult conversations can happen. If we ignore difficult conversations they typically don’t resolve themselves, in fact, they often get worse. Handling difficult conversations involves thinking about the logistics, having the proper mindset, and preparing yourselves.
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Curiosity and Self-Awareness are Must-Haves for Handling Conflict
When you're in a team, collaborating with others, it's crucial to embrace diverse opinions and dissent; you need to have good conflicts. Conflicts have bad reputations, but with curiosity you can harvest more positive outcomes and build trust and psychological safety. Self-awareness of your emotions and reactions can help prevent saying or doing something that you might regret later.
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Learnings from Measuring Psychological Safety
Asking people how they feel about taking certain types of risks can give insight into the level of psychological safety and help uncover issues. Discussing the answers can strengthen the level of safety of more mature teams and help less mature teams to understand how they could improve.