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Linda Rising Talks About Incentives at GOTO Amsterdam 2013
The third annual GOTO Amsterdam conference covers Java, Mobile, Cloud, OpenSource, Lean/Agile, Architecture, New Languages & Process communities. The first day started with a keynote by Linda Rising, exploring research on incentives starting from the industrial age, and looked at how it is being doing in practice by managers with development teams. InfoQ interviewed Linda about her experiences.
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How Applied Psychology can help Software Engineers
On the 1st November software engineer and author John R. Fox has published his book “Digital Work in an Analog World”. According to its subtitle “Improving Software Engineering by Applied Psychology”, the book does not consider software engineering in practice. Rather, it is focusing on the psychological aspects relevant and practices relevant for engineers.
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Does Agile Limit Financial Rewards for an Individual?
Tom Reynolds mentioned an interesting comment, that he had heard about the reluctance of people to move to Scrum. The reason quoted was that Scrum would have a direct impact on their financial rewards as it places a lot of emphasis on teams and not the individual.
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Should the Best Scrum Team Be Rewarded?
Should one provide a reward to the single best team in a division each quarter? How is that team to be determined? What effects will that reward have?
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Computing Careers: the future is bright
Contrary to myth, the number of computing career opportunities in the US is increasing - far exceeding the supply. An indirect result of the imbalance is rising salaries in the IT field. This news article summarizes a report done by Joel Adams, a professor at Calvin College in Michigan.
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Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback
On Monday at the first day of Agile 2009 Liz Keogh ran a workshop and Effective Feedback.
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Agile Consultants and Trainers Help the Unemployed and Hard Up
Tobias Mayer, James Coplien, Dan Rawsthorne, Alan Cyment and David Schmaltz are all giving back to their communities in different ways. Tobias is offering free Scrum Training to those in need; James, Dan and Alan all travelled to Serbia to provide free Scrum Training and David helped a nonprofit when their budget fell apart.
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High-performance Teams – Avoiding Teamicide
High-performance teams constitute a mere 2% of the workforce, but Agile processes appear to stimulate the formation of these types of teams. This article discusses Steve Denning's perspective on how such teams can be nurtured in the workplace; it also looks at a recent talk by Ominlab Media's Stefan Gillard on how to select and employ for the formation of high-performance teams.
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Cost Justifying an Agile Migration
Show me the money - cost justification of Agile migration is a thorny issue. Agile approaches are more successful, deliver value sooner and produce better quality products, but how do we prove it? This article discusses measurements and presents results that help to justify adopting Agile methods.
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Opinions: Measuring Programmers' Productivity
In the field of software development, managers need measurable metrics to appreciate the performance of their programmers. Shahar Yair and Steve McConnell discuss common techniques focusing on source lines of code and function points. They highlight the limitations of these approaches and seek to define some principles that could guide the analysis of programmers’ performance.
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Seniority, Respect, Authority and an Agile Team
Senior members, who have been working in traditional teams, can face issues related to respect and authority when they come to an Agile team. An interesting discussion on Scrum Development group and Agile India group tries to uncover answers that Agile might have for the situation.
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Evaluating and Improving Architectural Competence - A New SEI Paper
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) recently published a paper entitled "Evaluating and Improving Architectural Competence", which looks at using four models of human behaviour to help assess and improve software architecture competence.
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Complaint-Free Iterations
No software project is perfect, nor is the organization in which the project takes place. When your software project goes wrong, do your team members complain, or do they take corrective action? The Complaint Free World project encourages people to take notice of how often they complain, and reduce the frequency of the complaints, aiming for a goal of twenty-one complaint-free days.
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Distributing Bonus to Agile Teams is Like Playing with Dynamite
Everyone is excited when bonus is declared. However, for Agile teams it could eventually become a make-or-break situation. The general consensus is that distributing bonus should be a 'well thought-out' strategy there is no 'one size fits all' here. In an interesting discussion on the Lean Development group, people share their thoughts to find the best way.
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Predictions: The Changing World of IT Work
In a recent Datamation article, James Maguire noted the challenge of staying employed in an environment in which the rules are continually rewritten. He spoke with Gartner analyst Diane Morello for 5 predictions for those of us thinking about career directions over the next five years.