InfoQ Homepage Distributed Team Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Q&A with Jeff Smith on His DevOpsDays NZ Keynote on DevOps Transformations
InfoQ catches up with Jeff Smith on Centro transformation to a DevOps culture, which will feature in his forthcoming keynote at DevOpsDays NZ. Smith also discusses his recent DevOpsDays Indianapolis talk on the misalignment which can arise due to the different lenses through which collaborators see the world.
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How Continuous Delivery Impacts Testing
With continuous delivery we need to focus on quality as we write the code. Not every team will have testers, but if there are testers then they will work closely with developers, writing code to automate the small number of tests that cannot be covered by unit tests while helping developers creating unit tests.
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Readable Code - Why, How and When You Should Write It
Most people would say they want readable code, and may even prefer readability over functionality. But when it comes down to asking people to define readability, opinions will start to diverge. At Explore DDD 2018 , Laura Savino covered why we want readable code, what it really means to be readable, and when readability absolutely must take priority over other considerations.
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Atlassian Announces Solutions for Incident Management
Atlassian announced on September 4 that they have launched a new product called Jira Ops and that they will acquire OpsGenie. Organizations can use Jira Ops for resolving incidents and doing post-mortems to learn from them. OpsGenie adds prompt and reliable alerting to Jira Ops.
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Leading within: Evolving into Agility
Adaptive organizations rely on horizontal leadership where awareness is a fundamental quality for leadership. When we are able to really listen with curiosity, empathy and courage, then our listening changes our perceptions, our relationships, and therefore, our environment.
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How to Work Effectively with Agile in a Remote Team: Trust, Accountability and Communication
In a session titled Being Agile in a Remote Team at the recent Agile2018 conference, Shane Hastie and Shannon Ewan addressed the topic of distributed agile teams and what makes them work. They discussed qualities of high performing teams, myths of remote teams and strategies to make remote teams work while sharing their story of how they work at ICAgile (a fully remote team and organization).
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Psychological Safety in Post-Mortems
Emotions often come to the fore when there is an incident; psychological safety in blameless post-mortems is essential for the learning process to happen. The post-mortem session must be fairly moderated, preferably by an outsider, giving everyone a turn to speak without criticism. Don’t start the analysis of the incident before there is a clear and common understanding of what actually happened.