People & Teams
Articles
The Values Essential to a Scrum Software Development Practice The Scrum Guide was updated recently to make values an explicit part of the framework: commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. When these values are embodied and lived by the team, the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life and build trust for everyone. Is your team practicing them? |
||
4 Secrets to Successfully Scaling Agile Tech Teams There comes a time for every successful tech team to expand. But how do you scale in an agile way without losing productivity? Here are four secrets to successfully managing this transition, from deliberately choosing an incremental growth process to hiring new team members and retaining efficient communication. |
||
Learn Agile Techniques to Become a More Valuable Tester Agile is still on the rise, with many organizations that have been successful at the team level looking to scale their adoption. Consequently, it's important for testers to have practical application of agile techniques. You should know how to create tests to optimize maximum test coverage, have interpersonal skills, and successfully build relationships within the team. |
||
Speak Up: The Key to Agile Success You can learn all the theoretical agile principles and best practices, but you still may not be agile. To be truly agile, you must also communicate and collaborate with your team—and this means speaking up. Even if you're not a natural extrovert, there are plenty of ways you can contribute during planning, sprints, and retrospectives to make your product and process better. |
||
When Postmortems Meet Retrospectives: Improving Your Agile Process If you want secure, reliable systems, you need all stakeholders actively communicating. This means involving both IT operations and developers in discussions after deployments, to ascertain if anything went wrong and can be avoided, and what went well or could be refined. Integrating your postmortems and retrospectives facilitates collaboration and improves processes. |
||
Transitioning to Enterprise Agility—and Bringing Outsourced Delivery Partners Along When companies adopt agile internally, they often forget to extend the concepts and values to their partners. You have to look at your outsourced delivery components as part of the process that needs to be included as an extended team. Collaboration, reflection, and improvement is at the heart of agile, and it should look that way from the perspective of all elements in the delivery chain. |
||
Code Factories: Making Agile Work in Large Organizational Teams Making the transition to agile can be difficult for teams that are used to working in large groups and reporting to a single manager. Kris Hatcher suggests a new way to work: in smaller teams called code factories, which are created to stick with a specific product throughout its lifetime. |
||
5 Steps to Successful Process Management in Mergers and Acquisitions When going through a merger or acquisition, capturing the critical processes of both parties is a key to success. Including everyone in the planning helps ease the impacts of change and develop ideas for the future. Here are five steps to assist with process management and create a new organization that is greater than the sum of its parts. |
||
Is Your Product Owner an Overloaded Operator? Overloaded operators exist when an operator or operation has different meanings in different contexts. This usually applies to variables and sets, but it can be true for people, too. These people try to do the work of many different roles—and usually fail. If you have an overloaded people operator, analyze the work and try to divide it up. |
||
Discovering Your Leadership Drive Some people are born with the traits most suited to becoming an effective leader. Others may find that they have to work a lot harder to achieve success in a leadership role. But each of us has some innate potential to step up and take charge. If your team needs direction, don't be afraid to discover whether you could be the one to provide it. |