InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
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Death of Hybrid Camry Chief Engineer is Ruled Overwork
Last month the Japanese labor board ruled that the death of the Chief Engineer on the Camry Hybrid project was ‘karoshi’ (death by over work). This story raised a number of interesting issues about what we can learn from Toyota, sustainable effort and why we develop software.
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Presentation: Mingle: Building a Rails-Based Product
Neal Ford talks about Mingle, Thoughtworks Studios' project management software. Besides Mingle's features, Neal also talks about the experience of building Mingle on both MRI and JRuby, and the plans for making use of JRuby specific features like AOT to improve future versions of Mingle.
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What Might Happen if You Asked a Powerful Question?
Too often leaders, pressed for time, throw the easiest question at a team. But a moment's reflection, followed by a wise open-ended question can generate new possibilities when a team is stuck. This centuries-old educational technique, sometimes called "Powerful Questions," is a great tool for all team members, to transform "stuck" situations into learning opportunities.
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The State of Enterprise Architecture
As organizations continue to grow their IT investments (bought, borrowed, or built) and concepts like Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture become more common, the role of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become more common. Recently, several people in the EA community have spoken about its current state.
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JavaOne 2008 Day 1 - JavaFX, OSGi, and Android Smoke and Mirrors
JavaOne kicked off Tuesday in San Francisco with a keynote largely centered on JavaFX. OSGi also made an appearance with the keynote highlighting of the new Glassfish micro-kernel being 98k in size.
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Article: Software Development Lessons Learned from Poker
There is no silver bullet. We know it, but don't act like it. Your language, tool or process is better, right? In this article, Jay Fields says: "It depends". The right choices varies with context, people, and more. This article touches upon how a lot of things must impact a choice; learning culture, skill levels, teamwork, incomplete information, metrics - and context.
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Does Your Team Have a Mission Statement?
Is your team juggling conflicting requests? Is your Product Owner struggling to decide which customer's to serve and which to ignore for now? Does it seem that everyone has a different agenda? Perhaps you need a mission statement
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Interview with Joseph Pelrine: Agile Works. But HOW?
Joseph Pelrine has come full circle: from university studies in Psychology, journeying through SmallTalk, XP and Scrum, and now back to broader questions: Why and how does Agile work? In this interview, Joseph talked about Complexity Science, and how story-telling, "sense-making," network analysis and speed-dating's gut-feel approach may prove more useful than our old toolkits for managing teams.
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Is Burnout Inevitable, while Facilitating Agile Projects?
Facilitation on Agile projects seems to involve much more than the primary responsibility of improving the effectiveness of the work that the teams are doing. The responsibility of a facilitator can become so broad that over-facilitating becomes common, thus leading to burnout. An interesting Group Facilitation newslist discussion takes a closer look.
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A Preview of Mingle 2.0
On April 15th Thoughtworks will release Mingle 2.0, nine months after the initial release of Mingle. InfoQ got some time with product manager Adam Monago to talk through the new functionality provided by Mingle 2.0.
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What is the Role of a Manager in an Agile Organization?
Your organization is adopting Agile Development and your Managers are trying to find their new role. Prior to the adoption Agile perhaps management was involved in the production specifications and assigned the tasks. Now that teams are self organizing and the stories (instead of specs) come from the product owner, what does management do?
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Managers: Help your Teams Learn Communication Skills
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm requires that team members develop strong interpersonal skills. Now management gains an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills without crushing a team’s growing self-organization, and suggests some sources of helpful material for developing new skills.
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Well Formed Teams: Helping Teams Thrive, not just Survive
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
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Interview: Ola Bini Discusses JRuby
In this interview, Ola Bini talks about various aspects of developing JRuby, such as the long struggle to get compatible Regular expressions to work. Other discussed topics include JRuby's chances in the enterprise, the future of both Ruby and JRuby and what role JRuby will take.
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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.