InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Agile Testers can be a Harlequin
Agile testers can signal and question the (testing) process. Marnix van den Ent gave a talk at the Agile Testing Days 2015 in which he explained how he views testers as a harlequin: "a servant to the team and its process, like the Italian Harlequin he is there to help to understand what is happening". An interview about developing an art of questioning, XP practices and retrospectives.
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Human Refactoring: Applying Refactoring to Your Life
Bryan Beecham gave a keynote about Human Refactoring at the Agile Testing Days 2015. InfoQ interviewed him about how Human Refactoring can help us to improve our lives, how it relates to refactoring code, why he considers eating healthy food to be important, how agile teams can benefit from human refactoring, and where people can find more information about self improvement and individual growth.
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Role of Autonomy in Agility
Autonomy is one of the core guiding principles at Spotify. It enables employees to make decisions as close to the works that is being done as possible. At the Agile Greece Summit 2015 Kristian Lindwall and Cliff Hazell from Spotify explained why autonomy is at the heart of agility.
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Defining and Managing Requirements with Interactive Prototypes
An interview about recent developments in requirement definition and management, how agile teams handle requirements and which problems they face in their daily work, using interactive diagrams and prototypes for conveying requirements, how interactive prototyping can be used with a lean startup approach, and what the future will bring us in requirements definition and management.
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Agile and Lean Adoption in Greece
Small and medium sized companies have adopted the agile way of working in Greece and there are few examples of agile in larger organizations, interest in agile from the local industry is growing. Among the topic discussed in agile meetups are whether companies should implement Scrum or Kanban, Scrum for startups, dealing with fixed price and scope contracts, productivity, and happiness in teams.
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Key Takeaways from the 'Agile on the Beach' Conference: Day One
At the fifth ‘Agile on the Beach’ conference, held in Cornwall, UK, several leading practitioners of agile software delivery presented the state-of-the-art and emerging trends within this domain. Key messages included the need for the more rigorous use of the scientific method throughout the software delivery lifecycle, and the benefits provided by applying agile principles to product development.
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Innovation at AXA's Digital Agency
The AXA Digital Agency deploys the Lean Startup approach, using design thinking, minimum viable product development and growth hacking, to innovate and support the digital transformation at AXA. An interview with Yves Caseau about the importance of innovation, adopting a lean startup approach, learnings from minimum viable products and growth hacking and advice for starting an innovation journey.
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Driving Transformational Behavior with Core Work Systems
Mike Orzen will talk about using core work systems to drive transformational behavior at the Lean IT Summit 2015. An interview on the benefits that organizations aim for with lean IT, why adopting and reinforcing new behaviors is essential to create sustained change, core work systems and work processes for IT organizations, and common missteps in lean IT transformations and how to prevent them.
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Implementing a Peer-to-Peer Bonus System
This post talks about peer-to-peer bonus system. Thoughts are shared by Jurgen Appelo, Google and Zappos.
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Getting Actions Done to Make Change Happen
Even with best intentions it can be challenging for people to follow up on actions that they agreed to do. They can start to doubt if they can do the actions and become afraid to fail. Several authors have recognized this and came up with suggestions for dealing with it and making change happen.
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Why Scrum is Not Enough
When developing large complex systems and dealing with legacy code, organizations need to have systems in place to support integration and delivery. Modularization can help when agile is scaled with multiple teams that are working in parallel. It's not the framework or method that will do the job, but how your people will make it work to solve your problems says Hans Dekkers.
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How to Facilitate an Agile Retrospective Using "Rory Story Cubes"
How to use Rory Story Cubes for sprint retrospective.
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Jurgen Appelo Proposes the Chunking Productivity Technique
Jurgen Appelo proposes a new technique of work management called the chunking technique intended to increase productivity.
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Anti-patterns for Handling Failure
Oliver Hankeln shares the anti-patterns he found for handling failure in organizations: hiding mistakes, engaging in blame game, the arc of escalation and cowardice. He then suggests corrective actions for each of them.
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Improving Quality and Delivery Speed with DevOps Teams
You can increase the quality of products by constantly increasing the level of automation of the delivery process and working with DevOps teams who constantly deliver small features to get quick customer feedback. A case story from ING Lease explaining the problems they had, experiences from the first steps of their agile and DevOps journey and exploring what they want to achieve in the future.