InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Creating Tight Cohesive Tech Teams for Women to Thrive
Women in tech need a dynamic, valuing team, stimulating work, push and support, local role models, nonjudgmental flexibility, and personal power. Tight cohesive teams can provide high-quality interactions, making people feel valued.
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Making On-Call Less Painful for Developers by Using High-Quality Alerts
On-call is an increasing reality for developers. Improving alerts to reduce noise, automation, and removing warnings can help to make on-call work more humane. A driving force behind automation is Infrastructure as Code. Over time you can abstract that code so that it fits other use cases, which helps propagate best practices.
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Fair Individual Compensation for Agile Teams with Team-Set Salaries
Team-set salaries can be used to set fair compensation for individuals in multiskilled, collaborative, autonomous teams. People don’t appraise themselves, only their colleagues. It gives everyone a direct say in salary settings.
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GitHub Codespaces Can Now Be Templated to Improve Performance
GitHub has introduced prebuilt Codespaces to reduce the time it takes to spin up a full development environment for large, complex projects.
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Increasing Collaboration at Ericsson: Hardware and Software Developers Learn Each Other's Language
You can integrate hardware and software development with a cross-border team setup, where it’s important that hardware and software developers speak each other’s languages. The suggestion is to focus on “us” instead of “we” and “them”, and on the technical competence that connects developers over agile or lean terminology.
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Scaling Software Architecture via Conversations: the Advice Process
Andrew Harmel-Law recently published an article describing a decentralised, scalable software architecture process based on the "Advice Process". The Advice Process promotes software architecture by encouraging a series of conversations driven by an empowering, almost anarchistic, decision-making technique. It comprises one rule - anyone can make an architectural decision.
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Shifting to Asynchronous Communication in Software Teams
As some companies begin to go back to the office and embrace hybrid working, they are at risk of alienating those who wish to remain remote, which is looking to be a considerable number of workers in our industry. James Stanier suggests using more asynchronous means of communication and spending more time writing to each other rather than speaking in meetings.
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How to Work Asynchronously as a Remote-First SRE
The core practices for remote work at Netlify are prioritising asynchronous communication, being intentional about our remote community building, and encouraging colleagues to protect their work-life balance. Sustainable remote work starts with sustainable working hours, which includes making yourself “almost” unreachable with clear boundaries and protocols for out of hours contact.
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Will the Hybrid Work’s Great Paradox Be the Decade’s Challenge?
The pandemic moved the office home, and while the medical system is trying to eradicate it allowing us to resume our lives as we know them, we also need to understand what the new normal will be. While some leaders will return to the office as soon as it is allowed, others adopt a fully remote approach as the main-approach. Probably a hybrid approach would be the new normal for most of us.
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Dealing with Cognitive Biases in Software Development
Cognitive biases help us to think faster, but they also make us less rational than we think we are. Being able to recognize and overcome biases can prevent problems and increase the performance of software teams.
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How Mob Programming Collective Habits Can be the Soil for Growing Technical Quality
Mob programming can support teams in changing old habits into new effective habits for creating products in an agile way. Collectively-developed habits are hard to forget when you have other people around. Mob programming forces individuals to put new habits into practice regularly, making them easier to adopt. Teams are intolerant of repetition, looking for better ways of doing their work.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.
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How a Safe-to-Fail Approach Can Enable Psychological Safety in Teams
Companies can establish a culture of psychological safety among their employees, a culture in which failing is not frowned upon but rather is accepted as something that can happen to anyone. Safe-to-fail should be part of the corporate culture. A shift in the way we envision success can lead to a better understanding of where failure lies and provide courage to overcome our fears.
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Four-Day Work Week Gaining Traction
A number of studies and reviews have recently been published which look at the changes needed and the impact of shifting to a four-day work week. The consensus is that, while there are some challenges to be overcome, generally shifting to a four-day work week results in happier, more engaged staff with increased productivity.
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The Future of Agile in Africa: Challenges and Progress
The African continent is trailing behind in the adoption of agile compared to other continents as it faces wicked challenges and setbacks. However, the next two decades seem to be promising to the young continent, as tech startups, SMEs and large corporations are recognizing that a collaborative approach to product development leads to more productive and value-driven results.