Articles
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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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Shifting Testing Left Is a Team Effort There is a lot of talk in the testing world about shifting left. Basically, “shift left” refers to moving the test process to an earlier point in the development process, independent of the development approach. This article explores a case in which shift-left has been applied, and the lesson is that shifting left cannot be achieved by testers alone—it must result from a team effort. |
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For Sustainable Test Automation, Look beyond the Surface When it comes to achieving sustainable test automation, having an appropriate test automation team structure in place is the most important first step to take. This article has some proven practices for a few different test automation adoption scenarios—led by an automation team or a regression team, and with agile adaptations—that have helped organizations enjoy long-term test automation success. |
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Rowing in the Same Direction: Use Value Streams to Align Work Ambiguity abounds about value streams, so it’s good to clarify what they are, why they matter, and how to exploit them. It's important to help employees understand the organization's definition of value, to provide visibility on how business value is created, and to focus on the fast flow of value through the value streams. If everyone understands which direction to row the boat, they can steer toward it together. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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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. |
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Scaling Agile Thinking through Empowered Teams Just because a software team adopts agility doesn’t mean they’ll see results. Being flexible has its benefits, but ensuring that the team is given total responsibility to make decisions may be more important. |
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Bridging the Bimodal Divide between Waterfall and Agile Most software developers are in either the agile or the waterfall camp. Agile is required to be competitive, but many enterprise processes still rely on waterfall practices for stability. They can coexist. |
Interviews
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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. |
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Agile Transformation 101: A Conversation with Adam Auerbach
Video
Adam Auerbach, VP of Quality Engineering at EPAM Systems, chats with TechWell Community Manager Owen Gotimer about how an inexperienced team can start its agile transformation, the value of stand-ups and retrospectives, and how to make remote teams feel more connected. |
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Finding Microefficiencies in Agile Practices: An Interview with Melissa Tondi Melissa Tondi discusses retuning your standard agile practices to better engage the project team, enabling them to write code that will pass testing and free testers to assume the role of user advocate. |
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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