InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Predictable Agile Delivery
Human teams are unique, non-linear and unpredictable, but given the right conditions, their output can become linear, scaled and predictable. Managers have an enabling role to play: encouraging the development of predictability; understanding the needs of their teams; and rolling-up their sleeves to clear the blockages themselves or by escalating the problem promptly and responsibly.
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How to Boost Your Skills to Become a Better Developer
Katas are great for learning new skills or to improve existing ones but don't address the intensity we face at work when there is a raging fire such as a deadline, release date, fixing a bug in huge legacy code, etc. This article covers the skills of good developers and highlights changing your training approach to improve your skills for high-intensity and challenging environments.
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Internal Tech Conferences - How and Why
Software engineering today is every bit as much about the people as it is about technology - empowered teams don’t appear overnight. We need to oil the wheels of collaboration so they roll smoothly. Here, Matthew Skelton and Victoria Morgan-Smith discuss how to use internal conferences to boost your organisation’s social capital, the currency by which relationships flourish and businesses thrive.
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Proper Usage of Metrics with Flow Debt as an Example
Flow Debt is a leading indicator that provides a view of what is happening inside a delivery system; an important metric for improving software development. This article provides an example how a metric like Flow Debt can be used improperly, i.e. out of their domain, or properly, i.e. context aware usage of Flow Debt with an IT operations team.
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Agile in the UK Government - An Insider Reveals All
The Government Digital Service (GDS) aims to transform the relationship between citizen and state, moving the UK towards becoming a world-leading digital-by-default government. Nick Tune explores what GDS has achieved with assessments, sharing agile practices and experiences, and open source software, and shares what isn’t working so well in government IT.
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Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of Your Agile Organisation
Communities of practice bring together people who share areas of interest or concerns. They have specific applications in agile organisations: scaling agile development and allowing individuals to connect with others who share similar concerns. Communities of practice bring people together to regain the benefits of regular contact while keeping the value of multidisciplinary agile teams.
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Adaptable or Predictable? Strive for Both – Be Predictably Adaptable!
Our efforts to improve software development face the question of what to focus on. Should we govern for predictability without concern of value, maximizing cost-efficiency without concern for end-to-end responsiveness? Or maybe do the opposite and govern for value over predictability, focus on responsiveness over cost efficiency? What we really need is to be predictably adaptable.
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Growing Agile… Not Scaling!
What makes an agile team successful is not the “process” nor the “tools” but rather the way people develop an effective level of interaction with each other. Growing agile means both focusing on culture, and on co-evolution of practices and tools.
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Exercises for Building Better Teams
Have you ever seen a team perform so great that you wanted to join it? If you examine the values of such a team, you may discover a perfect balance of orientation on people and results. If you are trying to discover how far away your own team is from this state, read this article and try the exercises to find your own state of perfection.
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DevOps Lessons Learned at Microsoft Engineering
Thiago Almeida from Microsoft shares how adopting DevOps practices resulted in better engineering and happier teams, and the lessons learned in that journey.
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Q&A with Dave Snowden on Leadership and Using Cynefin for Capturing Requirements
Dave Snowden gave a talk titled "Context is Everything" at the Scaling Agile for the Enterprise 2016 congress in Brussels, Belgium. InfoQ interviewed him about applying leadership models, the Cynefin model and how it can be used for capturing requirements, scaling agile, and sustainable change.
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A Focus on Agile Principles over Agile Rituals
When scaling agile principles through rituals it's important to constantly evaluate and evolve those rituals. This article provides examples of experiments that focus on the original intent when developing team behaviors. It shows how you can be aware of triggers that mean your team is not finding value in a ritual and what you can do to make things more visible.