Is Your Culture about Responsibility or Blame?When things go wrong, it can be helpful to understand what happened and who was involved. However, all too often organizations (and the managers within) confuse responsibility with assigning blame. The former is essential for improvement. The latter works against an effective, collaborative, productive culture.
Coaching Senior Management to Be AgileEmbracing an agile mindset isn’t always easy, and it can be especially difficult for senior managers who spent most of their careers working in more traditional development methodologies. By trying to speak the same language and demonstrating successful self-organization, teams can help senior management become agile.
Testers Must Use Team Connections to Enable QualityThe quality team has the greatest reach in its visibility and ability to connect with all other engineering and non-engineering teams. For a tester to realize their fullest potential, they need to acknowledge and leverage this reach by communicating and collaborating with all other teams to create the best product.
Understanding the ScrumMaster's Role in Team CommunicationSome agile teams believe the ScrumMaster is the sole point of communication between them and the product owner, so the team can abdicate any responsibility to communicate with stakeholders. That couldn't be more wrong. It's actually the ScrumMaster's job to enable communication and coach or guide the team to solutions.
Agile Dojo: Speed Up Delivery Using FocusAn Agile Dojo is an immersive learning experience where teams bring their work into a collocated space and work together to complete a project, using “hyper-iterations” of two-day sprints, over six weeks. Even distributed teams are able to collaborate, focus, and deliver projects on time and within budget. Here's how.
Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into AgilistsCoaching an agile-skeptical team demands a personalized approach. Agile introduces a different way of working and thinking, and leaders must find a way to overcome resistance and foster a collaborative culture. Take these three steps to move toward achieving an agile mindset and realizing the benefits of agile.
Maximizing Agile by Understanding Learning StylesTo be most agile with your communication, understand several models of learning styles, where you fit into them, and where your team fits into them. By tweaking the ways you communicate to fit the information and the situation, you are helping your team remain agile by valuing people and interactions over processes.
Smart Testers Adopt Smart AutomationAs technology continues to evolve, questions around the role of quality also continue. Is manual testing still required? What should the role of automation be? Where are we heading with quality? Smart testers hoping to develop their careers will have to brush up on their exposure and expertise and embrace automation.
