InfoQ Homepage Feedback Content on InfoQ
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The Importance of Fun in the Workplace
Things at work that make us smile or laugh can improve team cohesion, productivity and organisational performance. Fun can’t be forced, but it can be fostered, said Holly Cummins at FlowCon France 2019, where she spoke about the importance of fun in the workplace.
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How Deploying Every Feature Branch Enables Fast Product Feedback
Pushing the boundaries of continuous delivery, you can fundamentally change the way people collaborate while building software. Christian Uhl presented at DevOpsCon Munich 2019 how deploying every feature branch using GitLab and Kubernetes helps them to get fast feedback from product owners and stakeholders.
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Usability Testing and Testing APIs with Hallway Testing
Hallway testing can be used to enhance the usability of products and make your UX better. You can also use it to test APIs as Ewa Marchewka, head of software integration and test department at Nokia, presented at TestCon Europe 2019. It’s cheap, straightforward, there’s no need for complicated tools, and it’s fast, getting feedback from the end-user almost instantly.
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How Team Feedback Can Drive OKRs
Team feedback meetings can help teams to define their own goals. Such meetings increase focus and motivation within teams, and with proper transparency they enable alignment between the teams’ and organizational goals. In his talk at Agile Leadership Day 2019, Michael Sommerhalder presented how Digitec Galaxus combined quarterly team feedback meetings and team missions with OKRs.
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The Importance of Feedback for Skill Development and Careers
Feedback and continuous learning are crucial for personal and professional development. Non-technical skills like creative problem solving, critical thinking, and an entrepreneurial mindset are important to make progress in your career. You have to own your career direction and know what you ultimately want to be in order to decide on the next steps.
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Trunk Based Development as a Cornerstone for Continuous Delivery
Dave Farley, co-author of the pivotal Continuous Delivery book, recently wrote about push-back to the practice of trunk based development, despite evidence of its role in achieving the benefits of CI and high performing teams. Jez Humble, his co-author, also commented in a twitter-thread on the cultural aspects of the practice to understand its relation to programmer psyche.
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The Spotify Model is No "Agile Nirvana"
At Spotify, management and the way the organization works support teams and agile practices by growing people. But Spotify isn’t an “Agile Nirvana”, it’s hard to reach high performance with teams that are constantly growing, changing, and splitting into new teams.
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Fearless Feedback for Software Teams
Feedback builds trust, increases team cohesion, and helps individuals to improve their skills and grow in their craft. An effective feedback cycle is the best possible tool for improving team performance. With feedback, issues are addressed before they become toxic and mistakes can be course-corrected early on.
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Improving Work Life with Organizational Hacks
Visualize everything, pair up, open Friday, and no training budget; these are some of the "work hacks" that have improved work life at Sipgate, a telephone provider using Scrum.
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Doing Safe-to-Fail Experiments
Safe-to-fail experiments can be used in complex environments to probe, sense, and respond. You have to know what success and failure look like and need to be able to dampen or amplify the effect of probing to handle potential failures. Safe-to-fail experiments can help you to deal with risks and uncertainty, learn, and keep your options open.
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Making Distributed Development Work
Distributed development depends on effective communication: you need to look for ways to have robust and diverse communication, build empathy towards each other to encourage feedback, and keep an eye on motivation. Team members are more engaged and creative when there’s shared ownership and responsibility for complete delivery from idea to production in distributed teams.
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Experimenting with Peer Feedback in Tech Teams
Feedback can be used to build trust in teams and help individuals improve their skills and grow in their craft. Emily Page and Doug Talbot shared their experiences from experimenting with peer feedback at Ocado Technology at Spark the Change London 2016. An interview with Emily Page, Organizational Catalyst at Ocado Technology.
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Rethink Leadership: Being Ordinary to Accomplish Extraordinary Results
Ordinariness in leadership can help us to accomplish extraordinary results, argues agile/lean coach Katherine Kirk. Several more people have explored approaches that suggest to rethink leadership and go back to behaviour basics for leading people. Although these approaches are about small ordinary things, their effect may cause a revolution in the way organizations are being managed.
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Growing Agility
Andrea Tomasini will give a keynote talk titled "Stop Scaling, Start Growing an Agile Organization" at the Agile Eastern Europe 2016 Conference. InfoQ interviewed him about growing agility.
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Applying Feedback Techniques
Dan North talked about models and techniques for giving and receiving feedback and how to apply them effectively at the QCon London 2016 conference.