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Culture & Methods

Creating Psychological Safety in Your Teams

Psychological safety is a work climate where employees feel free to express their questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes. We cannot have high-performing teams without psychological safety. In this article, you will learn practical ideas, interesting stories, and powerful approaches to boost psychological safety in your team.

Mehmet Baha
on Jan 17, 2022
Culture & Methods

How Space Shapes Collaboration: Using Anthropology to Break Silos

Software companies strive to keep innovating and changing the rules of the market. These companies are made of people who, unlike smartphones, personal computers or smart watches, have not evolved as much in recent years. This article proposes an analysis of workspaces from anthropology to solve one of the most common problems: the appearance of silos instead of a culture of collaboration.

Patricia Salgado
on Dec 27, 2021
Culture & Methods

Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt

Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. What we observe and label “technical debt” is the by-product of a dysfunctional process. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.

Einar Høst
on Dec 24, 2021
Culture & Methods

Remote Ensemble Testing - How an Experiment Shaped the Way We Work

This article shares how an experiment evolved into a common practice at the workplace, using an experimental approach with remote ensemble testing to get teammates on our cross-functional team more involved in the testing activities of the jointly created product. This all started in the times of a global pandemic where the entire team was working from home.

Andrea Jensen
on Dec 23, 2021
Culture & Methods

Growing an Experiment-Driven Quality Culture in Software Development

Have you ever faced a challenge at work that you weren’t sure how to tackle? Experiments to the rescue! In a complex environment like software development, no one can tell what might work, so we have to try things out. Read this article to learn about key challenges, insights and lessons, and get inspired for your own path to experimentation.

Lisi Hocke
on Dec 15, 2021
Culture & Methods

Thriving in the Complexity of Software Development Using Open Sociotechnical Systems Design

The amazing progress made in technology has led to blindly following the technical imperative at the cost of the social and human dimension. Social sciences can help us create a work environment where people feel more at home and proud of what they produce. An organisation designed using open sociotechnical systems theory will be a more humane one where people are more engaged.

Trond Hjorteland
on Nov 11, 2021
Culture & Methods

How to Reduce Burnout in IT Security Teams

Burnout isn't a selfcare problem. The information security industry needs to take a deeper examination and create changes to allow for workers to have more flexibility and the ability to have balanced personal and work life. This article serves as a starting point by breaking down why burnout exists in InfoSec, why past solutions don’t work anymore, and how to actually reduce burnout in teams.

Chloé Messdaghi
on Nov 05, 2021
Culture & Methods

People, Not Screens: Why Soul-Based Leadership Will Change the Nature of Remote and Hybrid Work

Virtual, remote, or hybrid work is the main leadership challenge of our time. Leaders should focus on bringing out humaneness and people's desire to be seen and heard in respectful and appreciative ways. Soul-based leadership is built on neuroscience and other ways of knowing inspired by eastern philosophies in which aliveness is at the heart of awareness, stillness and calm.

Karen Sobel Lojeski
on Oct 25, 2021
Culture & Methods

How to Decide in Self-Managed Projects - a Lean Approach to Governance

Whether self-managed or self-governed as a project, the power still needs to be distributed internally. If the project is open to decide how things are done, how do we decide? A solid but flexible set of tools and practices like sociocracy is a great starting point for projects to have clear but lean processes that can grow as we grow.

Ted Rau
on Sep 30, 2021
Culture & Methods

Hybrid Work is Here to Stay, and Software Teams Need to Adapt

In a post-pandemic workplace, face-to-face conversation is no longer the de facto collaboration method. As hybrid and distributed software development teams emerge, we look at ways that tools and processes can foster collaboration no matter where the team is located. Asynchronous work, a single source of truth, clear documentation and owners, and automation will empower hybrid development teams.

Aaron Upright
on Sep 20, 2021
Culture & Methods

Resetting a Struggling Scrum Team Using Sprint 0

Sprint 0 can be a great mechanism in Agile transformations to reset existing teams which are not delivering value, exhibiting a lack of accountability, or struggling with direct collaboration with customers. This article shares the experiences from doing a Sprint 0 with an existing team which was struggling to deliver, helping them to align to a new product vision and become a stronger team.

Carly Richmond
on Sep 16, 2021
Culture & Methods

Essential Soft Skills for IT leaders in a Remote World

Leading teams is always challenging, especially when your team is remote; it requires more effort and more skills to be developed. This article describes the skills needed if you would like to become not just a good team leader, but a great one. To start, here are three essential soft skills: be vulnerable and authentic, build a collaborative and safe environment, and provide candid feedback.

Anastasiia Tymoshchuk
on Sep 14, 2021