InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
-
The Benefits of Nostalgia: Q&A with Linda Rising
Remembering the past can bring about benefits; nostalgic reflection can make us more optimistic. Looking back leads us to feel there is meaning and purpose in our lives which enables us to better navigate the future and help us move forward.
-
Applying Lean and Accelerate to Deliver Value: QCon Plus Q&A
Understanding the science and math behind lean principles and practices can enable engineering leaders to advocate for and implement them in their workplace. This way they can directly impact employee engagement and morale, as well as the bottom line, as David Van Couvering explained in his talk about applying lean principles and practices for delivering value at QCon Plus 2020.
-
Using a Team Game for Richer Retrospectives
Games can bring freshness to retrospectives and enable rich discussions about how things are going. Patterns emerging from the discussions provide insight into the team’s strengths and weaknesses. Considerate coaching or facilitation can allow everyone to contribute.
-
Establishing Change Agents within Organisations Using Shu-Ha-Ri
Shu-Ha-Ri provides us with a learning path toward being agile by mastering the basics and understanding the fundamentals to gain incremental success. By having their own change agents, organisations can adapt quickly to changing market needs and get a competitive edge.
-
Optimizing for Speed with Continuous Organizational Transformation
A rapidly scaling company needs different structures at different sizes. You’re continuously reinventing yourself as your company grows by iterating on structures, processes, and roles. Continuous learning is critical for organizational transformations to succeed and it requires a high level of organizational agility.
-
Making Distributed Organizations More Effective
An autonomous team model with teams organized around geographical or time-zone proximity can make a distributed organization more effective. With the Reverse Conway Maneuver you can deliberately add or remove bottlenecks to better support the designs you are trying to build.
-
Applying Observability to Ship Faster
To get fast feedback, ship work often, as soon as it is ready, and use automated systems in Live to test the changes. Monitoring can be used to verify if things are good, and to raise an alarm if not. Shipping fast in this way can result in having fewer tests and can make you more resilient to problems.
-
GitLab Annual DevOps Survey Shows Emerging Trends and Changing Roles
Completed by over 3500 developers from 21 countries, GitLab's DevOps survey encompasses three major areas, development and release, security, and testing. The survey hints at faster release cycles and improved quality, with the more recent DevSecOps area requiring more organizational fine-tuning. InfoQ has taken the chance to speak with GitLab's senior developer evangelist, Brendan O'Leary.
-
How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams
A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.
-
What Will the Next 10 Years of Continuous Delivery Look Like?
Dave Farley and Jez Humble talked at the DeliveryConf about their expectations for the next ten years of Continous Delivery (CD). For CD to succeed, the IT industry needs to focus on three performance aspects: technical, organizational, and cultural–all profoundly interrelated. DORA's report has shown that technical practices can lead the change, but they alone aren't enough.
-
Simulating Agile Strategies with the Lazy Stopping Model
Simulation can be used to compare agile strategies and increase understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in different organisational and project contexts. The Lazy Stopping Model derived from the idea that we often fail to gather sufficient information to get an optimal result. Agile strategies can be simulated in the model as more or less effective defences against this “lazy stopping.”
-
The Importance of Fun in the Workplace
Things at work that make us smile or laugh can improve team cohesion, productivity and organisational performance. Fun can’t be forced, but it can be fostered, said Holly Cummins at FlowCon France 2019, where she spoke about the importance of fun in the workplace.
-
How Deploying Every Feature Branch Enables Fast Product Feedback
Pushing the boundaries of continuous delivery, you can fundamentally change the way people collaborate while building software. Christian Uhl presented at DevOpsCon Munich 2019 how deploying every feature branch using GitLab and Kubernetes helps them to get fast feedback from product owners and stakeholders.
-
Usability Testing and Testing APIs with Hallway Testing
Hallway testing can be used to enhance the usability of products and make your UX better. You can also use it to test APIs as Ewa Marchewka, head of software integration and test department at Nokia, presented at TestCon Europe 2019. It’s cheap, straightforward, there’s no need for complicated tools, and it’s fast, getting feedback from the end-user almost instantly.
-
How Lean Has Helped the IT Team Take Pride in Their Work
More teamwork, a better vision of daily work, a team that works in a concentrated way, and more pride in doing a job well; these are the benefits that Mélanie Noyel mentioned that their IT team at Acta gained from using Lean. At the Lean Digital Summit 2019 she presented on how they applied Lean to improve the IT team’s daily work.