InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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How Psychological Safety at Work Creates Effective Software Tech Teams That Learn and Grow
This article provides the foundations of psychological safety and shows how it has been applied for team effectiveness. It explores how psychological safety supports learning and improvement and how we can foster a psychologically safe culture in tech teams.
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Using Machine Learning for Fast Test Feedback to Developers and Test Suite Optimization
Software testing, especially in large scale projects, is a time intensive process. Test suites may be computationally expensive, compete with each other for available hardware, or simply be so large as to cause considerable delay until their results are available. The article explores optimizing test execution, saving machine resources, and reducing feedback time to developers.
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Embracing Agile Values as a Tech and People Lead
Having worked as a software developer, the agile community has been a great source of inspiration to me to find better ways of working. In my first leadership role, I incorporated the agile mindset which helped me to get everyone working towards a joint goal: refactoring an inherited codebase for scalability, while enabling cross functional teams to work as autonomously as possible.
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Five Things to Remember When Upgrading Your Legacy Solution
Legacy software is still employed, even though it frequently fails to meet critical demands and core business operations. By choosing the right modernization strategy and software development teams, you can easily cut down on high legacy software maintenance costs and increase productivity.
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Engineering Digital Transformation for Continuous Improvement
Engineering The Digital transformation leverages manufacturing's successful track record of improving productivity and quality and organizational change management principles. It's a training program designed to reduce the barriers to change, enable teams to understand good design patterns, and ultimately allow organizations to create a systematic approach to continuous improvement.
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The Three Symptoms of Toxic Leadership and How to Get out of It
None of us are born toxic leaders, but anyone can easily become one. In the past several years, workplaces have started to feel the effects of “toxic leadership.” Now is the time to educate everyone on the importance of speaking right, doing right, treating each other right in the workplace, and above all, being a non-toxic leader.
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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.
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Facilitating Feedback That's Psychologically Safe
This article focuses on feedback with regards to a plan or proposal - ways to make it easier to give and receive feedback, so the psychological safety of the team can increase. The aim is to give you insights, models, structures and practical things to try, in order to facilitate feedback that boosts psychological safety in your team(s).
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Preventing Transformational Burnout through Collaboration, Transparency, Feedback, and Coaching
Burnout is not only an individual issue; it happens in teams and organizations. This article explores probable sources of mental breakdowns, lack of motivation and confidence, along with types of burnout, and describes the role agile coaches and organizational leaders can therefore play in addressing burnout.
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Building Your Own Agile Team Maturity Assessment
An agile maturity assessment can help teams come to a common understanding of what agile maturity looks like and what steps they can take to get there. In this article, we are going to dive into the value of assessing things, with concrete examples you can use, and will help you learn how to build an assessment for your teams and/or organization that is fit-for-purpose.
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Using the Plan-Do-Check-Act Framework to Produce Performant and Highly Available Systems
The PDCA (plan-do-check-act) framework can be used to outline the performance, availability, and monitoring to enable teams to ensure performant and highly available applications. These include infrastructure design and setup, application architecture and design, coding, performance testing, and application monitoring.
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Inspect & Adapt – Digging into Our Foundations of Agility
Inspecting and adapting are fundamentals in agile practices. Yet, there are wide interpretations of how either is done well. It is a matter of our heart and soul – but the answer lies between our ears. In this article, we invite you to dip your toe into the deep waters of the internal inspect & adapt mechanisms. This article can be summarised in four words: Think. And think again.