InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ
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Mental Wellbeing in the Tech Industry: QCon London Q&A
Businesses are losing a lot of money to mental ill-health. The pace at which the tech industry moves and the pressure to deliver can leave staff struggling to keep up. People have different sweet spots for pressure and performance, and they change over time; the way to know an individual’s sweet spot is by talking to people to find out how they work.
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Predicting the Future with Forecasting and Agile Metrics
Common estimation approaches often fail to give us the predictability we want. Forecasting provides a range of possible outcomes with the chance of outcomes becoming reality. It can answer questions like “When will it be done?” or “What can we deliver by xx?” with confidence.
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Volkswagen’s Journey towards a Software-Driven Company
Volkswagen is changing their working methods for software development, where they focus on regaining their own development skills and developing new products based on new technologies and methods. The technologies used are decided on by the teams independently.
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How Agile Can Work Together with Deadlines
Even with a hard deadline, you can still prioritise work in sprints, use daily stand ups to manage blockers, and run retrospectives to improve your ways of working. Stakeholder relationships are key when attempting to negotiate and soften arbitrary deadlines. Start conversations up front to set better expectations and ensure a smoother delivery, particularly when facing uncertainty.
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Predicting Failing Tests with Machine Learning
Machine learning can be used to predict how tests behave on changes in the code. These predictions reduce the feedback time to developers by providing information at check-in time. Marco Achtziger & Dr. Gregor Endler presented how they are using machine learning to learn from failures at OOP 2020.
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How to Debug Your Team: QCon London Q&A
Lisa van Gelder spoke about debugging your team at QCon London 2020, where she presented her toolkit for how to diagnose and address issues with a team’s pace of delivery. “It is all about ensuring they have mastery, autonomy, purpose and psychological safety”, she said. She uses that toolkit to introduce change to teams in a way that gets the buy-in from the team.
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How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams
A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.
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Avoiding Loneliness as a Servant Leader
Team success is often celebrated without recognizing or acknowledging the role the servant leader has played. A lot of what they do can go undocumented or is not always visible to others. To avoid loneliness, servant leaders can create support networks to share what they do, celebrate successes with peers, blog about how they do it, and give demos to management about their accomplishments.
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Collaborative Decision-Making in Self-Organizing Teams
Giving people the opportunity to express their full potential in self-organizing teams is the best way to make an organization thrive today, argued Lorenzo Massacci. At Agile Business Day 2019, he presented how teams that organize themselves can continuously make decisions effectively and efficiently.
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Making Remote Mob Testing Work
Remote mob testing can be done successfully, but requires suitable communication technology, a moderator who keeps everyone on board, and you need to frequently change the driver between local team members and remotes.
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Scaling Tech to Keep Building the Right Product During Hyper-Growth
When your organization is growing fast and steadily, change has to be part of your culture. People are recruited, people leave, and people change teams; you have to learn to adapt fast and keep tech and business synchronized. At FlowCon France 2019 Nicholas Suter and Nicolas Nallet spoke about scaling tech at Younited.
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Scaling Infrastructure as Code at Challenger Bank N26
To launch their banking platform globally in the US, Brazil, and beyond, the challenges bank N26 introduced a new layer for the configuration of regions in their architecture, where product development teams can add application needs. At FlowCon France, Kat Liu presented why and how they introduced this layer, the benefits that it brings, and the things they learned.
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How to Scale Pilots into a Global IT Organization
Scaling pilots into a global IT organization is doable, and if done right, it really works and can help to transform entire companies, said Clemens Utschig. At DevOpsCon Munich 2019 he presented how they go from starting with an idea to scaling it up into the global organization.
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The Importance of Fun in the Workplace
Things at work that make us smile or laugh can improve team cohesion, productivity and organisational performance. Fun can’t be forced, but it can be fostered, said Holly Cummins at FlowCon France 2019, where she spoke about the importance of fun in the workplace.
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Experiences from Mob Programming at an Insurance Startup
What do you do when two developers in your team mention that they have been stuck on a task for three days? At an insurance startup, the whole team decided to try-out mob programming. From the first day they started to mob, their knowledge of the codebase increased. Working together also helped them to get to know each other better and to be more efficient as a team.