InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Building Stronger Human Teams by Managing the Inner Lizards
Each of us has an inner lizard that frets constantly about our safety. People come with brains that are pre-configured to scan everything you say for threats to their safety. Learning to recognize when you're operating under reptilian influence is a great start. This article introduces some techniques to help you manage the lizard within you along with those around you.
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Preventing Transformational Burnout through Collaboration, Transparency, Feedback, and Coaching
Burnout is not only an individual issue; it happens in teams and organizations. This article explores probable sources of mental breakdowns, lack of motivation and confidence, along with types of burnout, and describes the role agile coaches and organizational leaders can therefore play in addressing burnout.
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Building Your Own Agile Team Maturity Assessment
An agile maturity assessment can help teams come to a common understanding of what agile maturity looks like and what steps they can take to get there. In this article, we are going to dive into the value of assessing things, with concrete examples you can use, and will help you learn how to build an assessment for your teams and/or organization that is fit-for-purpose.
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Leveraging Small Teams to Scale Agility - a Red Hat Case Study
This article gives you a sneak peek into the adoption of Agile methodology at Red Hat. It shows how they have split the existing large subsystem team into smaller durable Scrum teams. Small teams scale well. They can more easily clarify dependencies and increase focus, leading to an increase in the ability to complete work, can mature faster, and can learn from a “fail fast” mentality more easily.
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How Workplace Culture Affects Workplace Performance
The culture of an organisation has a direct impact on the performance of the people in it. We have identified six drivers of culture in and provide advice on nurturing and improving them. The six drivers are: Perceived Value of People, Perceived Nature of Time, Safety and Security, Navigation by Grownups, The Bond of Collective Confidence, Perceived Value of Excellence and Beneficence.
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Virtual Group Coaching: How to Improve Group Relationships in Remote Work Settings
Due to the pandemic, many software development teams will work remotely longer or permanently or work in blended venues such as some team members working in an office, some working from home, some working from other venues. Virtual coaching can help to improve group interaction or social dynamics in virtual settings where people work together remotely as a group or team.
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Software Engineering at Google: Practices, Tools, Values, and Culture
The book Software Engineering at Google provides insights into the practices and tools used at Google to develop and maintain software with respect to time, scale, and the tradeoffs that all engineers make in development. It also explores the engineering values and the culture that’s based on them, emphasizing the main differences between programming and software engineering.
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Evolutionary Architecture from an Organizational Perspective
Creating an architecture that can evolve over time is not simply a technical challenge, and requires collaboration with non-technical people in an organization to ensure the software adapts as needed.
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Keeping Technology Change Human
When we are at the forefront of so much change, it's easy to forget that other people around us find change more challenging. This article is a reminder to look beyond the code and processes, to consider how tech team actions can affect our users in emotional ways. It seeks to establish a few ways of thinking to help bring others along with us when working through technology change.
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The Flow System: Leadership for Solving Complex Problems
The Flow System elevates Lean Thinking in an age of complexity by combining complexity thinking, distributed leadership, and team science into the Triple Helix of Flow, which organizations can use to become more innovative, adaptive, and resilient. This second article on The Flow System dives into the three helixes of complexity thinking, distributed leadership, and team science.
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Increasing Developer Effectiveness by Optimizing Feedback Loops
We can think of engineering as a series of feedback loops: simple tasks that developers do and then validate to get feedback, which might be by a colleague, a system (i.e. an automation) or an end user. Using a framework of feedback loops we have a way of measuring and prioritizing the improvements we need to do to optimize developer effectiveness.
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The Rise of Asynchronous Collaboration and What It Means for Development Teams
Drew Falkman from @modus-create shares his perspective on Zoom fatigue and the rise of asynchronous collaboration tools. He offers tips for how to get the most out of the tools his team uses -- like Miro, a virtual whiteboard platform, and Trello, a project management tool. He explores the pros and cons of different tools and approaches.