InfoQ Homepage Group Communication Content on InfoQ
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Why Stable Software Teams Aren't Always Best: Self-Selection Reteaming at Redgate
There are advantages to having the same group of people stay together, especially in achieving a time-bound software development project. However, in a world where we increasingly see product or stream-aligned teams who own long-living software from creation through to delivery, operation, and ongoing improvements, then optimising for very stable teams is not the best idea, Chris Smith argues.
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Kent Beck: Software Design is an Exercise in Human Relationships
In the closing keynote at QCon SF, Kent Beck spoke about how software design is an exercise in human relationships, why iterative and incremental development is the most cost effective way to build software, and how the overall cost of a software system is directly related to the cost of coupling and decoupling and the jackpot changes which result in cascaded coupling.
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Creating Tight Cohesive Tech Teams for Women to Thrive
Women in tech need a dynamic, valuing team, stimulating work, push and support, local role models, nonjudgmental flexibility, and personal power. Tight cohesive teams can provide high-quality interactions, making people feel valued.
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WhatsApp Adopts the Signal Protocol for Secure Multi-Device Communication
WhatsApp is testing its new architecture aimed to enable true multi-device message synchronization while preserving end-to-end cryptographic security. To this aim, WhatsApp is adopting the Signal protocol.
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Variations on New Normal for Workplaces
Over the last year office work has shifted to almost completely remote, and as vaccination programs roll out around the world it is shifting again. There is a lot of speculation around what the new normal will look like. Employee well-being, flexibility in working arrangements, availability creep, virtual and augmented reality are all factors impacting what work could look like going forward.
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The Post COVID Normal Will Be Hybrid Work Environments
The Microsoft Work Trend Report points to flexible, hybrid work being the new normal, leaders being out of touch with their employees, an exhausted workforce, innovation at risk, shrinking networks, the need for authenticity to spur productivity and well-being & a huge negative impact on GenZ. The report provides concrete advice for charting the way forward to overcome these and other challenges.
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QCon Plus: Summary of the Inclusion & Diversity in Tech Track
QCon Plus is running over three weeks in November. One of the tracks on the first day focused on Inclusion and Diversity in Tech. The track was designed to to change perceptions about DEI and advance the conversation. Three talks provided the audience with concrete tools, difficult questions and invited them to deep self exploration.
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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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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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Inclusive Leadership Supports Collaboration and Diversity In Teams
Research on Inclusive leadership shows it can provide gains in team performance, including being 29% more likely to show collaborative behaviour. Inclusive leadership showed it was effective at activating the value of diversity in a team. It required leaders to show humility, cultural intelligence and awareness of bias as key attributes.
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Why and How Etsy Embraces Differences at the Workplace
Etsy has deployed various tactics to drive diversity and greater inclusion. They recently included diversity and inclusion in their guiding principles, integrated inclusion at each step of their employees' lifecycle, and developed strategies not just to hire diversity, but to foster a culture of inclusion. They empowered their employee resource groups to lead change based on feedback.
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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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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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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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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.