Growing Generalized Specialists on an Agile TeamA generalized specialist is not a jack of all trades. It is an individual with deep knowledge in a particular specialization who also has learned to be productive in other team roles. Here are some tips on how to grow generalized specialists on your team in order to maximize your team's productivity potential.
Designing an Office to Nurture Innovative Agile Development TeamsAgile software development is a collaborative activity in many ways, but it also requires quiet time. While open office spaces foster communication and collaboration, it's still important for a workspace to have areas where people can buckle down and work. What is the best office configuration to nurture innovation?
To Improve Agile Teamwork, Think about the IndividualsGiven the emphasis on teams, it can be easy to forget that agile has the value of individuals and interactions as a central principle. As much as an effective team dynamic is what makes Scrum work, teams are composed of individual people, and it’s important to acknowledge each person's role and to express appreciation.
Can Remote Workers Ever Really Make Effective Agile Teams?As the Agile Manifesto states, agile teams should value individuals and interactions, and traditionally, this implies being in the same room. While technology makes collaboration at a distance more viable, some feel that collocation helps with delivering quickly. Can remote workers ever make effective agile teams?
How to Communicate to Build Trust on a Scrum TeamTrust among the ScrumMaster, product owner, and development team is essential to making the process work. Transparency, inspection, and adaptation are the three pillars of Scrum, and you can't commit to these actions if everyone doesn’t have openness and respect for each other. Communication is the best way to do that.
How to Edit Someone Else’s WritingIf colleagues ask you to edit their work, don’t take on the task unless you’re willing to be honest with your comments. You can do that without being harsh, though. Be sure to find out what it is about their work your coworkers would like help with, look at the pieces in multiple formats, and deliver criticism kindly.
Finding the Bottlenecks in the Agile and DevOps Delivery CycleTo achieve incremental software development and continuous feedback, you need to eliminate the tasks that create bottlenecks, which hinder the flow of development. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and identifying these “weak links” is a critical step toward achieving agility and increasing efficiency.
Tester Contributions to Scrum ConversationsScrum is one of the most popular paths to agile, but testers sometimes join this framework as an afterthought and aren’t quite sure how they fit into the development flow. Scrum is more than answering three daily questions, and testers are in a position to understand the project better than anyone else on the team.
