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Culture & Methods

Five Tips on Managing a Remote-First Development Team

Most software development teams have gone remote during the pandemic - and may stay remote even after the lockdowns. Managing remote-first teams is a challenge. Knowing how to do it right can make or break the experience for everyone. Here are five things you can do to succeed as an engineering manager.

Marcelo Wiermann
on Mar 08, 2022
Culture & Methods

Talking Like a Suit - Communicating the Importance of Engineering Work in Business Terms

This article explores how to construct engineering work as a story, including clearly presenting a problem, offering a solution, and showing the business a path to success that solves their problem and avoids failure. By presenting your case in this way, you significantly increase your chances of getting these engineering problems addressed, while also becoming a better partner for the business.

David Van Couvering
on Feb 08, 2022
Culture & Methods

Better Metrics for Building High Performance Teams

There is no agreed way to build and measure high performing engineering teams, let alone to track the success of software engineers. This article explores ways to support individuals and teams right from onboarding and identifies useful metrics which can help make performance factors visible and actionable. Developer onboarding, dynamic documentation, and asynchronous communication are key.

Kristen Buchanan
on Feb 01, 2022
Culture & Methods

Hybrid & Remote Work in 2022 and Beyond

Moving into 2022, ways of working and interacting are continuing to evolve as organisations adapt to the ongoing changes brought about by a wide range of factors influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Making remote work sustainable, flexible, hybrid and asynchronous working, recognising the importance of employee experience and supporting mental wellness are important trends in the future of work.

Shane Hastie
on Jan 25, 2022
Culture & Methods

Creating Psychological Safety in Your Teams

Psychological safety is a work climate where employees feel free to express their questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes. We cannot have high-performing teams without psychological safety. In this article, you will learn practical ideas, interesting stories, and powerful approaches to boost psychological safety in your team.

Mehmet Baha
on Jan 17, 2022
Culture & Methods

How Space Shapes Collaboration: Using Anthropology to Break Silos

Software companies strive to keep innovating and changing the rules of the market. These companies are made of people who, unlike smartphones, personal computers or smart watches, have not evolved as much in recent years. This article proposes an analysis of workspaces from anthropology to solve one of the most common problems: the appearance of silos instead of a culture of collaboration.

Patricia Salgado
on Dec 27, 2021
Culture & Methods

Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt

Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. What we observe and label “technical debt” is the by-product of a dysfunctional process. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.

Einar Høst
on Dec 24, 2021
Culture & Methods

Remote Ensemble Testing - How an Experiment Shaped the Way We Work

This article shares how an experiment evolved into a common practice at the workplace, using an experimental approach with remote ensemble testing to get teammates on our cross-functional team more involved in the testing activities of the jointly created product. This all started in the times of a global pandemic where the entire team was working from home.

Andrea Jensen
on Dec 23, 2021
Culture & Methods

Growing an Experiment-Driven Quality Culture in Software Development

Have you ever faced a challenge at work that you weren’t sure how to tackle? Experiments to the rescue! In a complex environment like software development, no one can tell what might work, so we have to try things out. Read this article to learn about key challenges, insights and lessons, and get inspired for your own path to experimentation.

Lisi Hocke
on Dec 15, 2021
Culture & Methods

How to Decide in Self-Managed Projects - a Lean Approach to Governance

Whether self-managed or self-governed as a project, the power still needs to be distributed internally. If the project is open to decide how things are done, how do we decide? A solid but flexible set of tools and practices like sociocracy is a great starting point for projects to have clear but lean processes that can grow as we grow.

Ted Rau
on Sep 30, 2021
Culture & Methods

Best Practices for Letting Go of a Remote Team Member

At Doist, letting go of a team member is a last resort. Over 14 years, the remote-first pioneer has parted ways with approximately 25 team members, which has evolved the way they handle remote terminations. Today, Doist employs 100 people in 35+ countries with a 90+% employee retention rate. Here COO Allan Christensen offers his lessons learned on letting go of a remote team member.

Allan Christensen
on Sep 29, 2021
Culture & Methods

Hybrid Work is Here to Stay, and Software Teams Need to Adapt

In a post-pandemic workplace, face-to-face conversation is no longer the de facto collaboration method. As hybrid and distributed software development teams emerge, we look at ways that tools and processes can foster collaboration no matter where the team is located. Asynchronous work, a single source of truth, clear documentation and owners, and automation will empower hybrid development teams.

Aaron Upright
on Sep 20, 2021