People & Teams
Articles
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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. |
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Successful Agile Requires a New Kind of Leadership In an agile world, team members are empowered to make important decisions within the context of the behavioral architecture, without having to ask permission from supervisors or managers. But these supervisors and managers are coming from a lifetime of learning how to succeed in a hierarchical world, so they will need to leave behind those ingrained lessons. In order for agile to be successful at scale, leaders will need to change. |
Interviews
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Motivating a Millennial Workforce: An Interview with Nikki Henry Nikki Henry, founder and CEO of Ladies Leading Ladies, talks about where to find great millennial employees to hire and how to keep them motivated. Nikki says millennials are very passionate and purpose-focused, and treating them as individuals will help keep them at your company for the long term. She shares tips for attracting, retaining, and working effectively with the millennial workforce. |
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Becoming Agile Leaders: A Conversation with Bob Galen and Mary Thorn
Video
Bob Galen, principal agile coach at Vaco, and Mary Thorn, Vaco's agile practices lead, chat with TechWell community manager Owen Gotimer about the challenges of growing new leaders, the impact leaders can have on people’s lives, and how vulnerability can help leaders build trust. |
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8 Ways to Ruin Your One-on-Ones: An Interview with Jason Wick
Video
In this interview, Jason Wick, senior manager at MakeMusic, discusses his STAREAST presentation about eight ways you could be making your one-on-one meetings completely useless. He discusses in depth what he feels is the number one way to ruin these meetings: holding back on feedback. He also offers advice on how you can educate your team leader to avoid the pitfalls that lead to ineffective one-on-ones. |
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Embracing Tools and Technology in QA: An Interview with Melissa Tondi
Video
In this interview, Melissa Tondi, senior QA strategist at Rainforest, discusses the foundation you need in order to have a positive introduction for new tools and technologies. She explains why the team leader has to understand what motivates each individual and how to get them excited about their job. Melissa says team members also have to realize that if they are in any way involved in testing software, they are a technologist, so they have to embrace the tools and technology that will continuously improve and streamline repetitive tasks. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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All Customers Are Not Created Equal Software developers may not think they have much to do with customers, but it is wise to consider the customer in all you do, from collecting requirements to design and implementation. |
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Scrum: Back to Basics So you think you know Scrum? Using the whimsical notion of farm animals and light-hearted visuals, take a refreshing review of the entire Scrum lifecycle as an intuitive set of roles, responsibilities, and handoffs. Particular attention is placed on what the ScrumMaster and product owner are expected to do at each handoff. |
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5 Ways to Pair Developers with Testers Some agile practices stress the importance of pairing team members together to achieve better team performance. Try these five suggestions for pairing key resources. |
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Building Autonomous DevOps Capability in Delivery Teams After setting up a DevOps team and adopting continuous delivery practices, product releases may not be as smooth as they could be. The missing ingredient requires empowerment and autonomy. |
Conference Presentations
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Minimum Viable Product: Deliver with Vision, Simplicity and Focus
Slideshow
To build good software, teams (and businesses) need to have a laser focus on all three of these items. It is virtually impossible to keep the effort focused on building to the needs of the customer if you don't start with a solid vision from the product owner/sponsor. When the focus isn't on just what is needed by the customer, that leads scope creep and feature bloat tends to set in and impact the products ROI. Whether you are focusing on a minimum viable product, minimum viable prototype, or a minimally viable package of code; leveraging the few simple principles allows teams to keep things simple, meet the vision and needs of the customer, while building in smaller batch sizes. In this presentation, we will review case studies, hands-on exercises, and real-life examples to cover some simple techniques to lock in a vision, focus on customer needs and drive to a simple, minimal viable product. |
Brian Watson
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Leading in an Era of Constant Change
Slideshow
Change is a good thing. Being a leader in an era of constant change can be frustrating. Putting a company through a significant transformation is a serious process that takes a lot of people, time, and money. However, if your organization doesn't innovate and change by market-driven needs and demands, it will fail—it's just that simple. So, how do you do it? This interactive workshop will introduce five key factors to successful change management. You will experience techniques to get everybody actively involved in transformation, from top-level executives and stakeholders to the team level, clients, and partners. You'll be able to go back to your organization with tools and techniques to manage change and truly lead a successful agile transformation. Come learn how change can be invigorating instead of exhausting. |
Kim Brainard
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Lean Leadership and Systems Thinking in Agile Adoptions
Slideshow
When teams self-organize, they need an effective ecosystem that enables them to collaborate, communicate, and work effectively. Creating such an ecosystem is management’s responsibility. Lean thinking tells us to focus on these systems where people are operating. We can do because we trust our teams to be motivated and do their best. Lean thinking provides a holistic view for the work done in an organization, which is even more important when a company doesn’t already have an agile culture. In this case, management must consider that it’s easier for people to work their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of working. Join Al Shalloway as he discusses the critical role that managers have in agile adoptions. |
Al Shalloway
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ScrumMasters: The Struggle Is Real
Slideshow
Are you a new ScrumMaster who is trying to figure out what the heck to do each day? Or have you been a ScrumMaster for a little while now but still find it difficult to set aside time to continue to grow your team’s knowledge of agile best practices? Do you struggle to improve the team dynamic or the relationship with your product owner because you are too busy removing roadblocks all day? These situations have become all too familiar. Courtney Wilkinson knows because she has successfully overcome many herself. As a former ScrumMaster and current agile coach, Courtney can tell you the struggle is real. Regardless of what you have been told, you don’t have to solve every roadblock alone. Join Courtney as she shares some tactical techniques, including a list of four specific questions you can teach your team, to combat these roadblocks in your day-to-day work. |
Courtney Wilkinson
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