People & Teams
Articles
Agile Value Delivery: A Critical Component of Virtual Meetings The recent surge in virtual meetings necessitates an entirely new set of desirable behaviors. But how do you keep participants engaged and material useful and on topic remotely, when it's hard enough to do that with everyone in the same room? The key is keeping value delivery front and center. Here are some tips and best practices for virtual meetings that will help you continue to deliver value. |
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Solving 6 Major Challenges of Implementing Agile Implementing agile often means throwing out the rulebook when it comes to how teams work, how projects are organized, and even what the office floor plan looks like. This can be a difficult transition, but it's nothing to fear if you can anticipate the challenges and plan accordingly. Here are six of the greatest challenges teams face when implementing agile, along with some tips on how to avoid them. |
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Testing in Agile: How to Get Started There is a lot of interest in organizations around a transformation to agility. However, the focus is usually on agile development, so it may not be clear how software testing is done in agile. If you're responsible for leading your testing teams, don't let them be left behind. Here’s how you can make testers part of the transformation, too—step by step, because this is agile, after all. |
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6 Anti-Patterns Preventing Agile Teams from Self-Organizing People have different cultural backgrounds, habits, beliefs, interests, capabilities, knowledge, skills, and temperaments. When put together on a team, they can’t always be governed by a rulebook to become self-organized. The dynamics among them have to be understood to recognize the anti-patterns first. Here are six anti-patterns that must be avoided and remediated to help teams move toward self-organization. |
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Top 10 AgileConnection Articles of 2019 Agile isn't something you can adopt through tooling; you have to adhere to agile principles every step of the way. The top articles from 2019 show that people were looking to enhance and advance their agile practices, with popular topics including how to empower your team throughout agile adoption, using metrics to improve, refining Scrum practices, and scaling agile. Check out this roundup for ways to boost your agile operations. |
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Leveraging Agile in a Nearshore Software Development Environment Nearshore software development—or working with teams in similar time zones—have different challenges from teams that are collocated. They might find it easier to work in a traditional, hierarchical structure, but agile practices are actually still an ideal way to work through these challenges. Here's how an agile mindset can help nearshore development teams improve communication, organization, and processes. |
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Creating Time for Collaboration with Distributed Teams and Agile Approaches Many of us have horrible experiences with distributed teams where we can find no possibility of collaboration, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Even if a team is distributed, those team members need collaborative opportunities and space. What’s important is the team’s time for collaboration, not time zones. Here are some ways you can visualize when your team works and create more quality collaboration time. |
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Learning the Skills of a Professional Software Developer We hire for programming language skills or framework experience, but these are the kinds of things that any developer should be able to pick up quickly. David Bernstein says we should be hiring based on talent instead, and mentoring developers to write code that can be maintained and extended more easily. These critical skills are best learned on the job, which is why mentoring is so valuable. |
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It's Not Just Culture: When Teams Impede Agile Adoption Cultural norms can hamper successful agile transformation. Many of these habits and customs are started and perpetuated by senior leadership, but that’s not always the only source of resistance. Often, ingrained behaviors and thinking can occur within the team, including business partners, that also can hinder agility. Five of these barriers are explored here, as well as mindset antidotes to help get the team on the road to agile success. |
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7 Ways to Change the Culture for DevOps Success The hard part of successful DevOps isn’t implementing the technology; it's ensuring you have the right culture in your organization. You need to break down silos and align competing priorities and individual incentives to gain real benefits from DevOps. Move beyond thinking about technology alone and look at the people side of the equation. Here are seven ways to create a successful team that delivers the benefits of DevOps. |