People & Teams
Articles
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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. |
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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AWS Lambda: Best Practices and Common Mistakes
Slideshow
AWS Lambda is a serverless architecture that relieves you of hardware and scaling setup concerns. AWS Lambda functions are used by many organizations for serverless application development and automating DevOps tasks. |
Derek Ashmore
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Using Lean XP to Supercharge Your Agile Delivery
Slideshow
Most teams that do agile development start with Scrum. And why not? Scrum is a proven method for focusing your team, ensuring that work adds value, and minimizing the risk with release. Then, after awhile, Scrum becomes stagnant. |
Jim Collins
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Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into Agilists
Slideshow
Teams can hesitate to adopt agile practices, even when there’s a clear desire for transformation at the executive level. But there are strategies for coaching agile-skeptical teams into an agile mindset. |
Scott Weiner
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Agile Assessment: Helpful Remedy or Harmful Toxin?
Slideshow
Agile is a set of values and a mindset. As such, it can be hard to answer questions that leaders often ask, like: How agile are we? Are we getting more agile? What are the growth opportunities for our team? |
Dan Neumann
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