InfoQ Homepage Distributed Team Content on InfoQ
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Perspectives on Mob Programming and Mob Testing
Maaret Pyhäjärvi, author of the Mob Programming Guidebook, wrote about her experience with mob testing, and how it contributed to her team's journey to recognising improved cross-functionality. Woody Zuill also recently spoke to the Agile Uprising podcast about discussing how mob programming provides an effective collaboration model for delivering software in small releasable increments.
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Q&A with Marisa Fagan on Security Championship
Security lead Marisa Fagan recently spoke at QConLondon 2018 about upskilling and elevating engineering team members into the role of Security Champions. We catch up with Fagen and report on her efforts to address contention caused by a scarcity of security professionals.
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Great Engineering Cultures and Organizations - Afternoon Sessions from QCon London
The Building Great Engineering Cultures and Organizations track at QCon London 2018 contained talks from practitioners representing digital leaders of the consumer internet as well as transformational corporates from “traditional” sectors. Previously InfoQ published a summary of the morning sessions; this is the summary of the afternoon sessions of this track.
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Q&A with Laura Bell on Continuous Security at QCon London
Q&A with Laura Bell at QCon London. We discuss her keynote, continuous security and her own professional security journey.
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Dealing with the Broken Human Machine: How to Create High-Performing Teams
To really progress in developing software and build anything at a scale, you have to examine your blind spots and learn to deal with people. The culture we build is important: the difference between a high performing engineering team and a low performing one is orders of magnitude in terms of productivity and quality. Focusing on how we do things is as important as what we’re doing.
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Introversion, Ambiversion and Extroversion at Work
Introversion and extroversion are not binary personality types; people fall somewhere on the scale between the two types and the way someone behaves can change depending on the context they find themselves in at the moment. In fact, most of the population are ambiverts. Understanding these differences can make for more effective teamwork and communication.
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The Relationship between Team Emotion and Delivery
AI firm Deep Affects studied Jira projects, presenting a relationships between emotional health and team productivity. Their findings are also supported by Gallup's 2017 State of the Workforce survey which indicates the cost of not having emotionally engaged teams.
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Real-Time Collaboration Comes to Atom
At QCon San Francisco 2017, GitHub’s Nathan Sobo has unveiled Atom’s new real-time collaboration plugin, Teletype. Teletype aims to make it possible for two developers to code together with the same ease as coding alone.
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Making Our Language and Behaviour More Inclusive
To avoid excluding people, we need to gain more awareness when we are in the wrong and be introspective to find out why someone is upset or offended by what we have said or done. By being excluded, people will eventually leave their jobs, communities or profession, which is something that we need to prevent. Peter Aitken suggested taking a positive approach when addressing inclusion issues.
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The Industry Just Can't Decide about DevOps Teams
The incidence of DevOps teams is on the rise according to reports, but the industry remains divided on whether a DevOps team should even exist. Some are wary of creating additional silos, or are of the opinion that DevOps is a methodology that everyone should subscribe to in an organisation; others point to DevOps teams as an effective way of transitioning to a new way of working.
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How Blogging Empowers Agile Teams
Moving the thinking and decisions a team makes from people’s inboxes onto a blog can make it accessible to all, findable in the future, and referenceable by everyone. Instead of writing documentation, you can use blogumentation to transfer knowledge and document the history of projects that provide context to the code.
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Q&A with Aurynn Shaw on Sharing Her Personal DevOps Journey at DevOpsDays NZ
Raf Gemmail speaks with Aurynn Shaw about her upcoming DevOpsDays NZ talk and the humanist side of DevOps.
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Tackling Technical Debt at Meetup
Continuous product health can be realized by regularly prioritizing the highest impact technical debt items and knocking those off systemically. You need to continuously iterate how you're tackling technical debt to drive more and more impactful results. Going for maximum impact items first and communicating the impact of paying down technical debt is what Yvette Pasqua, CTO of Meetup, recommends.
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First Annual Retrospective Report Published
The First Annual Retrospective Report provides a deeper understanding of how retrospectives are used in the real world. The results indicate that retrospectives lead to improved team communication and productivity and help to create an environment of trust. Major challenges are that topics discussed cannot be solved by the team and people do not feel comfortable speaking up.
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Better Engineering via Better Discourse
Killing opposition with kindness is a real strategy in online discussions; there is power to disarm in acting as if the other party did not intend to be insulting or condescending. Accept that there will be bias in online communication, use facts and reason to deal with it, and practice awareness of bias and attempt to compensate.