InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ
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How Playing Games Enables Engaging Ways of Learning Agility
Games can help us create a collaborative, joyful, and fun experience in which we play to solve complex problems. According to Jakub Perlak, people can play games that have a meaningful purpose, and have fun in doing so. Games create space for intentional cognitive activity which helps us when learning something new and adapting to changes that are important for agility.
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The Challenges of Building Cyber-Physical Systems
There are several challenges in building hardware-reliant cyber-physical systems, such as hardware lead times, organisational structure, common language, system decomposition, cross-team communication, alignment, and culture. A solution to such challenges is to apply agile at the systems level, and to architect both hardware and software into modular components.
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The Upsides and Downsides of Open Source Adoption
Benefits of open source projects are supporting rapid innovation, the flexibility provided to customize and adapt tools, and transparency of the code which can enhance security efforts. The downsides are that security by obscurity doesn’t apply, open source is potentially prone to abuse, and when open source tools are not backed up by companies, it might result in a lower level of maintainability.
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Adopting Agile in Specific Business Domains Using Domain-Driven Agility
According to Nikola Bogdanov, the real challenge in agile transformations is adapting to business domain specifics and industry constraints; understanding agile is not the problem that needs to be solved. He presented domain-driven agility which utilizes design thinking to visualize agile adoption and make it empirical.
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Why Leading without Blame Matters to Leaders and Teams
According to Diana Larsen, a culture of blame is a waste of human potential. People cannot achieve their best and most creative work when their energy goes into avoiding shame and blame. To lead without blame requires a shift toward learning and curiosity, she argues. It begins by building or restoring a relationship of trust and trustworthiness with the people.
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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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Applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process for Tech Decisions
The analytic hierarchy process uses pairwise comparisons and scoring for criteria between the alternatives to give insights into what the best option is and why. John Riviello spoke about applying the analytic hierarchy process to decide what JavaScript framework to use at QCon New York 2023.
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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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Things We Tend to Overlook Going from Architecture to Release
People tend to overlook things when developing a new software product or service because they don’t have to think about them on a daily basis. Companies should create an environment where everyone can express their opinion and concerns and encourage bringing up questions to explore different angles and increase understanding.
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How Good Companies Can Leverage Agile to Fight Civilizational Debt
Growth, profit, and shareholder value are the cornerstones of today’s economic system, which according to Piotr Trojanowski have proven outdated, reductionistic and not sustainable. He proposes taking the cost of growth into account by using the concept of civilizational debt in agile transformations, and applying agile to realizing humankind's mission through our work.
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Ethical Machine Learning with Explainable AI and Impact Analysis
As more decisions are made or influenced by machines, there’s a growing need for a code of ethics for artificial intelligence. The main question is, “I can build it, but should I?” Explainable AI can provide checks and balances for fairness and explainability, and engineers can analyze the systems' impact on people's lives and mental health.
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Sustainable Product Development Using Agile and Value Stream Mapping
Sustainable product development can be done by combining agile with concepts from the circular economy in our daily work. Value stream mapping can be extended to incorporate circular economy principles to optimize the flow of materials, information, and energy usage.
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Benefits of Doing Remote Mob Programming in a High Stakes Environment
A new team that needed to work remotely in a high-stakes environment decided to try out mob programming. It helped them to quickly go through forming-storming-norming-performing. With mobbing, the team learned new technologies, found solutions for dealing with others in stressful situations, and discovered how to work effectively together remotely.
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The Challenges of Producing Quality Code When Using AI-Based Generalistic Models
Using AI with generalistic models to do very specific things like generating code can cause problems. Producing code with AI is like using code from someone else who you don’t know which may not match your standards and quality. Creating specialised or dedicated models can be a way out.
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A Collaborative Approach to Web Applications Accessibility
Developers and designers can work together to share knowledge and experience when working on creating accessible applications. Accessibility issues can be treated as any other bug, something that needs to be solved first. Accessibility should be embraced as something very serious and important to society, and approached as a business opportunity.