InfoQ Homepage Distributed Team Content on InfoQ
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Applying a Zero-Bug Policy at Redgate
A zero-bug policy is a simple yet effective bug management system that can help you avoid being buried deep in months or sometimes even years-old bugs. Any bugs you agree are serious enough for you to fix, you fix right away, and any other bug will not be fixed and closed. Tom Walsh spoke about how Redgate Software applied the zero-bug policy at Lean Agile Exchange 2020.
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Remote Working for Tech Workers is Here to Stay
Remote working is here to stay for tech workers, irrespective of what happens with COVID-19. Many tech companies are changing their long term planning and hiring practices to allow for remote working in the future, and benefits packages are being reworked to provide support for parents with child care and home schooling pressures.
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Chaos Conf Q&A: Adrian Cockcroft & Yury Niño Roa
In preparation for ChaosConf 2020, InfoQ sat down with Adrian Cockcroft and Yury Niño Roa to explore topics of interest in the chaos engineering community. Key takeaways included: there are clear benefits to running “game days” to develop psychological safety, and the future of chaos engineering points toward incorporating security and scaling up experiments to test larger failure modes.
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Growing Personal and Organisational Courage
Courage is vital for organisations if they want to thrive in today’s complex world as it will create the right conditions for the highest possible levels of creativity, adaptability and productivity. We all have the power to lead with courage, no matter what our role is.
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Microsoft Launches a New Communication Platform with Azure Communication Services
During its annual Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced Azure Communication Services (ACS), a fully-managed communication platform. The offering is currently in public preview.
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Deliver Faster by Killing the Test Column
Columns like "In test" often lead to teams having more work in progress and less work actually being finished. Removing such columns can increase collaboration between testers and developers and enable teams to deliver faster.
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Learnings from a Project That Went from Heaven to Hell
Maja Selmer Megard, project leader and department manager at Kantega, shares her experience from a project that at first sight seemed to be a perfect fit in all regards, but ended up as the most exhausting, conflict-ridden project she has been in.
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Using Measurement to Optimise Remote Work
Dave Longman of HeadForwards wrote about using data to demonstrate the effectiveness of remote work during lockdown. Michael Schrage of MIT’s School of Management also wrote about the importance of using data-driven insights to improve performance in the current climate. Laura Giurge of London Business School talked about how isolation is teaching individuals and firms to be remotely effective.
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Making Workplaces More Humanistic
Organizations are increasingly focusing on the humanization of workplaces and supporting professionals to perform better. Ways to make workplaces more humanistic are going off-script, experimenting with working hours, being vulnerable as leaders, and appreciating diversity.
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Incident Management During Remote Work
Michael Fisher, a technology enthusiast and group product manager at OpsRamp, recently blogged about how IT operations and DevOps teams can take a problem-first approach towards the incident management process. On the same lines, Dr. Laura Maguire and Nora Jones wrote about similar challenges as the world reacts to COVID-19.
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Trust and Safety in High Performing Teams: QCon London Q&A
People want to feel included in teams, and feel safe to learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo. The first thing for each of us to do is acknowledge that we have a partnership with each of our team members. Like all relationships, care and attention are needed to strengthen the bond and work together effectively.
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DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2020: a Diversity and Inclusion Q&A with Shaaron A Alvares
Shaaron A Alvares gave a talk at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 London Virtual titled ‘Accelerate Your DevOps Culture of Innovation with Everyday Inclusion and Belonging’. She began with presenting research data on the benefits of diverse teams, showing that diverse teams outperform their peers by 80%.
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Pandemic Programming Survey Results Show Negative Impact of COVID-19 Changes
The Pandemic Programming survey looked at the ways that developers' lives have been impacted by the lockdowns and changes caused by COVID-19. Over 2200 people from 52 countries answered the questionnaire to assess their wellbeing and productivity before and while working at home. The results show that wellbeing and productivity are suffering with some groups more impacted than others.
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Making Distributed Organizations More Effective
An autonomous team model with teams organized around geographical or time-zone proximity can make a distributed organization more effective. With the Reverse Conway Maneuver you can deliberately add or remove bottlenecks to better support the designs you are trying to build.
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Conflicting Reports on Remote Worker Productivity and Contentment
Remote working is becoming normal for the tech industry, with most tech employees working remotely due to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19. Studies and surveys are trying to measure the impact on productivity that organisations are seeing as a result of the shift. The results are conflicting and illustrate the complexity of the times we find ourselves in.