InfoQ Homepage Distributed Team Content on InfoQ
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Experiences from Working with Distributed Agile Teams
Not being able to frequently connect with your colleagues face-to-face makes successful communication more difficult in distributed teams, said Shabi Shafei, Scrum Master at ABN AMRO Bank. A Q&A about how distributed teams can transform into great agile teams.
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Lynne Cazaly on Making Sense Using Hand-Drawn Images
At the recent Agile on the Beach New Zealand conference, author and graphic facilitator Lynne Cazalay presented a masterclass on sensemaking; some techniques to clarify ideas through graphical images - simple diagrams which can help identify the important elements of any narrative and represent them in a style that makes content meaningful.
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Tuckman Was Wrong! Doc Norton on Reteaming Models
At Agile India 2019, Doc Norton shared why the Tuckman team formation model doesn’t work and described new reteaming models that are more applicable to current agile teams. Norton shared reteaming models that foster organizational innovation and learning and identified 4 criteria leading to better teams’ performance: autonomy, connection, excellence and diversity.
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Building High-Quality Products with Distributed Teams
To ensure the quality of the products and services, Intermedia uses a common test & pre-production environment for all distributed teams. Lilia Gorbachik, product manager at Intermedia, mentioned at European Women in Tech that having a mature testing process, working with risks, and making daily decisions from a high-quality product perspective are key aspects to build high-quality products.
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How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A
Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.
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Katherine Kirk on Dealing with Teamwork Hell
Dysfunction in teams can truly feel like being in hell, confined within an endless loop of unhappiness, and there are ways to approach the challenges through actively managing your own response to stressful situations, maintain your own integrity and ethical standards and diligently take small steps rather than trying to address every aspect of the situation at one time.
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Effective Mob Programming Patterns
Lisi Hocke spoke at the Testing United conference in Bratislava about how she helped shape a collaborative environment through the use of mob-programming. Hocke described how her team effectively used a strong-pairing style. Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Jeff Langr have both recently written about their own patterns for maximising the benefits of mob programming. We survey their experiences.
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Retrospective 3.0 at Ocado Technology
Toni Tassani identifies retrospective pitfalls, such as stale and repetitive activities and raises risks: the retrospective as an excuse for not solving issues on the spot, identifying an experiment but not driving the impediment to resolution, Post-it theater. He suggests looking at retrospectives radically differently, leveraging continuous improvement techniques borrowed from Kanban.
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The Five Principles of Very Fast Organizational Transformations (VFOT)
The five principles of Very Fast Organizational Transformations (VFOT) are principled, time-boxed, whole-system, inviting and everyone at once. They are based on open source and open space foundational and proven theories and practices. Combined to form a cohesive transformative strategy, they guaranty the speed of any transformation because they are inclusive, empowering and transparent.
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Experiences from Remote Mob Programming: Q&A with Sal Freudenberg
At Cucumber, mob programming is done remotely by using a cycle in which the driver pulls down the latest code and then shares their screen, the team mobs for 10 minutes or so and commits the code. Next, the driver’s role rotates. “Remote mobbing works really well for me”, says Sal Freudenberg, “because it lets me tailor my working environment and work in a spot where I feel comfortable.”
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Boosting Team Inclusion at the Workplace Using Artificial Intelligence Technologies
Boosting Team Inclusion at the Workplace using Technologies establishes that active inclusion enables diverse teams to exceed their performance goals. Gartner suggests leveraging new artificial intelligence powered applications in three areas: sourcing inclusive-ready candidates, analyzing teams' interaction, and training team leaders.
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Reflections on Technical Leading: Q&A with Julia Hayward at Agile in the City Bristol
Employers need to adopt fluid structures for people to find balance in their role, technical and managerial paths should lie side by side, you can’t have genuine effective growth without psychological safety, and a good mentor to talk about problems and scenarios is invaluable; these are some of the reflections on technical leading brought up by Julia Hayward, technical lead at Redgate Software.
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The Human Side of Microservices
A microservices architecture is a game changer for team communication, not a purely technical solution. If different teams don’t have stable, direct communication channels, the software they produce will suffer. The five key properties crucial for a successful microservices implementation are zero-configuration, auto-discovery, high redundancy, self-healing, and fault tolerance.
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A Brief History of High-Performing Teams by Jessica Kerr
If you're looking for an early example of a high-performing, agile team, then study the Florentine Camerata, a group formed in Florence, Italy, around 1580 that reformed their contemporary music with the creation of opera. The lessons of the camerata, and similar teams throughout history, were the subject of Jessica Kerr's keynote presentation at Explore DDD 2018.
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Organizational Refactoring at Mango
To increase agility, companies can descale themselves into value centers in charge of a business strategic initiative, with end-to-end responsibility and with full access to the information regarding customer needs. You need to create spaces where people can cross-collaborate and learn, using for instance self-organized improvement circles, Communities of Practice or an internal Open Source model.