leadership

Hand holding a light bulb Rethink Your Strategy to Innovate Inexpensively

Many companies avoid genuine innovation for fear of making potentially complex changes without producing measurable results. But you can start small with internal changes that have limited scope and that deliver prompt solutions, so there's less upfront investment—and less risk. Here's how to innovate inexpensively.

Giancarlo Di Vece's picture
Giancarlo Di Vece
Cocoon and a butterfly 3 Steps to Transformational Leadership for Business Agility

Building your agile organization only starts with developing software in an agile way. The next step is transforming your business with a customer-focused embrace of agile across the entire enterprise. Managers who want a truly agile organization must lead with focus, steer from the edges, and change the system.

Sanjiv Augustine's picture
Sanjiv Augustine
A mentor and mentee talking and looking at a laptop 5 Tips for Mentoring Future Mentors

Being a mentor is a big responsibility. It becomes a greater one when the person you're mentoring is set to become a mentor to someone else. What advice would you impart to your mentee? What do you wish you'd thought of when you were starting out as a mentor? Payson Hall distilled his experience into five principles.

Payson Hall's picture
Payson Hall
Training class with people's hands raised, photo by Nicole Honeywill If You Want Training to Take, Explore Experiential Learning

People typically think of training classes as passive activities, where the instructor talks and the others listen. But experiential learning, where you learn through hands-on activities and then reflect on the experience, often gets the lesson to stick in people's brains better. Consider using interactive lessons.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Gerald Weinberg, photo by Corey Grusden The Importance of People in Software: A Tribute to Jerry Weinberg

Gerald Weinberg's work inspired many to be better engineers and better leaders. Although he’s no longer with us, his message about the role of people in building quality software lives on in his writings and in those who have learned from him. Here, Steve Berczuk recalls some of Jerry Weinberg's most influential books.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Sign indicating twisting roads ahead 16 Questions to Assess Your Response to Major Change

If your responsibilities include guiding others through major change, you might find it instructive to assess your own behaviors and response to change. The sixteen questions here can help you do just that. You can also use these questions to facilitate a discussion with your team about a current or upcoming change.

Naomi Karten's picture
Naomi Karten
A woman holding a white mug reading “Like a boss,” photo by Brooke Lark 4 Common Mistakes New Managers Make

Making the transition into a management role is a huge step—but also one fraught with opportunities to make mistakes. Having an inkling of some of the more common mistakes new managers make might help in avoiding them. Here are four mistakes to be on the lookout for so you don't make them as a new manager.

Naomi Karten's picture
Naomi Karten
Cover of the Summer 2018 issue of Better Software magazine What's in the Summer 2018 Issue of Better Software Magazine

For twenty years now, Better Software magazine has published articles offering helpful tips and techniques for those in the software industry. The new issue celebrates those two decades of knowledge-sharing—and, of course, gives you more ideas. Articles this issue focus on leadership and software quality.

Ken Whitaker's picture
Ken Whitaker