Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But this effectiveness is, oftentimes, hard to attain.
In their book “Team Topologies,” Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais present a “practical, step-by-step adaptive model for organization design and team interaction, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve together with technological and organizational maturity.”
So, you are a middle developer. Moving from the status of a junior developer to the middle was not difficult. However, it seems as if no matter how much you try, you cannot become a senior developer. Moreover, you frequently feel that the projects aren’t as attractive as they used to be, and the joy from completing even the most challenging task has gone.
Why so?
In a conventional organization, multiple departments are dedicated to specific functions — marketing, finance, human resources, operations, and so on. A lot of the time, they work separately, only sharing information when it concerns more than one department.
However, the modern demands of building and delivering software require an ability to solve numerous problems at a high speed. With that comes a need to have an entire team that reflects the variety of expertise that goes into providing solutions. This is where cross-functional teams come in.
Every software development method has its own rules your team is supposed to adhere to, but how flexible are these rules and what’s best for your team?
Chris Downard, VP of Engineering at GigSmart, doesn’t let Agile or any other methodology define what’s right for his team. In this episode of Dev Interrupted, we discuss how dev processes are changing in a remote world, why Chris got rid of dev teams altogether, and how to create your very own dev methodology.
It's been a few months since I was thinking about writing "What's a New Enterprise Data Platform?" In the last few years, I've been working as a Data Solution Architect and Product Owner for a new data platform; I've learned a lot and I would like to share my experiences with the community.
I'm not going to write about the Data-Driven approach, but how to build a platform that allows a company to implement it. When we design and build a Data Platform, we are working on providing the capacities and tools that others teams need to develop their projects. I am not forgetting the data but I think the data should be a service, not a product.
When we developed our startup, agile was a must-do. We are a tech and data driver startup working as a marketplace for the moving industry. The funny thing is that nobody on our team has ever had anything to do with this industry; this means there was a lot each member had to learn and master from the start. Agile was, in my opinion, the greatest tool for us. It calls for continuous development — it welcomes change and tweaks, and it's a bridge between business-focused founders and development-focused founders.
These are some of the tips I have to give from this journey.
All companies struggle with hiring the right hands (and minds) from time to time. But the challenge is particularly hard for the tech industry, where the demand is high and the supply…well, leaves much to be desired. So, if you’re serious about recruiting qualified candidates for your vacancy, you need to have a well-laid-out hiring process in place.
Being an outsource recruitment partner for multiple tech companies, we’re here to share the hiring process steps we take when searching for candidates. You’re more than welcome to adopt them in your tech company as they’re sure to improve your hiring process, keep you organized, and focused.
All businesses, including large and small, take advantage of both a well-defined organizational structure and a perfect team.
For a company to achieve its planned mission and reach its objectives, it needs to create an effectual structure. If a company doesn't have an organizational structure, it can still fail even with strong leadership and hard-working employees.
I was once responsible for coaching a Product Owner called Jac. It was the product owner for an "enterprise product" - a product sold to big companies to use internally. Sprint to sprint, Jac got to decide what got done. In my book, Product Owner authority went further: what was to be done in future sprints, what kind of things would be done in months to come, and the "roadmap" where the product was going. But... Jac seldom met customers, Jac might talk to them on the phone when they had a problem but Jac didn't talk to the more senior people who signed the purchase orders.
Being an enterprise product, there were consultants in the mix too: installing the product on-site, configure the product, train customers, and hold their hands. They went to customer sites and they met all sorts of people. Naturally, the consultants had a view on what the product should do, what should be developed next, and what should be done in the coming months.
Scrum. Kanban. Lean. XP. SAFe. RUP. Scrum of Scrums. There are many frameworks available to organizations that are maturing their agile software development process.
However, the use of some frameworks can help reinforce agile behaviors, while others can be degenerative and actually drive an organization to revert to more waterfall-like software development.
The choice of agile framework should be a collaborative discussion between teams, organizational leadership, and any stakeholders. Every part of the team should have input into what key features they will need from the framework. The "correct choice" will depend on many variables, including the nature of the work, the experiences of the organization, cultural factors, and changes desired to meet the work objectives.
The DevTeam Project is a library of stories from successful engineering managers around the world about growing, managing, and motivating excellent dev teams. Our mission is to help dev teams learn from the top global engineering leaders about trends today and what’s shaping their industry. To achieve this we’re going to release a podcast episode and a blog post with highlights from the conversation every other week. In each episode we’re traveling to meet a prominent engineering leader and talk about their unique perspective and insights.
There are lots of good practices that people will tell you aren’t agile. Usually, this comes from people who have read a book on Scrum or Extreme Programming and take it literally. They often don’t understand that agile is a set of values and principles, not methods and tools associated with a particular methodology. As long as you follow the agile principles, anything is fair game.
Here are two practices I’ve found useful that many will tell you aren’t agile.
What parallels can we draw between football and software development? You can hire stellar players that cost a fortune, but they will most likely lose as a team if they do not have a shared vision and strategy.
Before hiring new team members for your existing team or building a new team from the ground up, you must define your goals clearly.
Agile is about self-organizing teams, isn’t it? As a Manager, what does that mean for me? Should I fear for my job? As a Manager or Director, Agile transformation can be disconcerting because you want to trust your teams and let them be self-organizing, but at the end of the day, it’s still your organization and your responsibility.
Let’s start with a proper view of the term “self-organizing”. Many leaders and teams incorrectly think that self-organizing teams don’t need leadership. Agile is about flexibility, not anarchy. Esther Derby explains it well: “Self-organizing is a characteristic of a team, not something that is done once and for all. Self-organizing teams experiment, create new approaches and adapt to meet new challenges within the boundaries of the organization.” Mike Cohn says: “Self-organizing encourages teams to fully own the problems they encounter.” Empowerment is the key to self-organizing. Management must empower Agile teams to experiment, fail and learn, which in turn gives team members higher personal investment in outcomes. Agile pays people to think, rather than to blindly follow instructions.
The main problem that DevOps solves is how to give businesses the ability to respond to market changes as quickly as possible.
Many companies mistakenly believe, that by trying to get in developers and administrators and implementing a couple of useful tools, they get DevOps. When we consult companies, some of them believe that they are already actively using DevOps.