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Culture & Methods

Why is Everything So Slow? Measuring and Optimising How Engineering Teams Deliver

As teams grow, they will slow down, but it should not mean that teams stop delivering value that can power future business growth. Avoiding excessive technical debt and ensuring systems are secure and performant becomes increasingly important. As an engineering leader, you can do things to be confident that your team is moving at the fastest and most sustainable pace.

Steve Janaway
on Oct 10, 2022
Culture & Methods

Value Stream Mapping and Value Stream Management: How They Can Work for You

Value stream mapping is a largely qualitative tool that creates visibility into the waste in a system while also creating alignment around ways to improve. Value stream management codifies the system, allowing for continual monitoring and management.

Peter Maddison
on Aug 30, 2021
Culture & Methods

Signs You’re in a Death Spiral (and How to Turn It around before It’s Too Late)

Don’t let feature work blind you. Enterprises are ramping up their software delivery to compete in the digital-first world. But more features and faster time-to-market can lead your business into a death spiral if you neglect technical debt and risk work. Learn how to use value stream metrics to identify whether your business is in danger and how to reverse the trajectory before it’s too late.

Lee Reid Patrick Anderson
on Apr 13, 2021
Culture & Methods

Applying Stoicism in Testing

Agility stands for being aware of your environment. There is a specific set of values for a tester that you should stick to; they set limits to what you can deliver as a tester, and within those limits, you can keep your agility. But your values can cause a “collision” with agile people around you, because they don’t have to be perfectly in line with how people apply the agile principles.

Ard Kramer
on Mar 23, 2021
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Team Topologies

The book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais shows how to arrange teams within an organization to enable effective software delivery. It describes four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns, and dives into the responsibility boundaries of teams and how teams can communicate or interact with other teams.

Ben Linders Manuel Pais Matthew Skelton
on Nov 11, 2019
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Managing Technical Debt

The book Managing Technical Debt by Philippe Kruchten, Robert Nord, and Ipek Ozkaya provides principles and practices that help you gain control of technical debt throughout the software development process and life of the software product.

Ben Linders Philippe Kruchten Robert Nord Ipek Ozkaya
on Sep 30, 2019
Culture & Methods

Q&A on The Manager‘s Path with Camille Fournier

In the book The Manager’s Path, Camille Fournier explores managing engineers and what it takes to be a technical manager. She describes the different roles which form the path from mentors and tech leads to senior engineering management, discusses the challenges of technical leadership and provides advice on how to deal with them.

Ben Linders
on Apr 18, 2017
Culture & Methods

Predictable Agile Delivery: The Executive Challenge

As agile grows-out of its years of self-obsession and teenage petulance into a post-agile state, ‘Predictable Agile Delivery’ feels like a realistic goal that advantages both the business sponsor and their development stakeholders. This article shares some ‘good, bad and ugly’ examples of practices that often work and some that always fail at improving large organizations.

Russ Lewis
on Mar 27, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Scrum Field Guide - 2nd Edition

The Scrum Field Guide - 2nd Edition by Mitch Lacey is a "what to expect" book for organizations transitioning to agile, which aims to help teams to deal with issues that occur and fine-tune their own implementation. An interview about the essentials of Scrum, sprint length, full time Scrum masters, making time available for solving defects, preventing bad hires, and increasing benefits from Scrum.

Ben Linders
on Apr 07, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A on The Agile Mind-Set

Gil Broza explores agile values, beliefs and principles, and explains how they can be used to drive agile adoption in his book The Agile Mind-set. The book provides ideas, examples, and anecdotes that organizations can use to make a shift to agile.

Ben Linders
on Nov 15, 2015
Culture & Methods

Q&A on Kanban Change Leadership

In the book Kanban Change Leadership Klaus Leopold and Sigi Kaltenecker explore how Kanban can be deployed to get change done in organizations and to build a culture of continuous improvement. An interview on doing change in small steps, solving problems, using WIP limits, priorities and classes of service in Kanban, using the Theory of Constraints with Kanban, and getting results with Kanban.

Ben Linders
on Aug 27, 2015
Author Q&A on Agile Value Delivery - Beyond the Numbers

Larry Cooper and Jen Stone have written a book which provides advice and techniques for blending agile practices with portfolio, program and project management, taking a value focused approach to managing the outcomes of initiatives rather than focusing on the activities and practices which are the center of many methodologies. They spoke to InfoQ about the book and the ideas behind it.

Shane Hastie
on Aug 05, 2015