process improvement

Scrum team having a productive retrospective Are Your Retrospectives Adding Value to Your Scrum Team?

Sprint retrospectives are often skipped, compressed, or organized in a way that doesn't provide good feedback. This is unfortunate, as a well-planned retrospective is a great way to improve how you work. Good retrospectives enable engagement and safety, distill and prioritize ideas, and create concrete action items.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Stacy Kirk DevOps Transformations for QA Teams: A Slack Takeover with Stacy Kirk

Thought leaders from the software community are taking over the TechWell Hub to answer questions and engage in conversations. QA architect an agile coach Stacy Kirk, founder of QualityWorks Consulting Group LLC and nodeqa.io, hosted this Slack takeover and discussed improving teams by implementing DevOps practices.

Kelly McGee's picture
Kelly McGee
Software team member going down a list of process steps Don’t Become a Slave to Process

More mature organizations are usually very process-disciplined, especially when teams are distributed. However, it’s dangerous to become overly reliant on process. People can become too complacent, accepting a process just to avoid having to make decisions. Here are some ways to keep your processes fresh and valuable.

Richard Estra's picture
Richard Estra
Sign saying "Dead end" 4 DevOps Antipatterns to Avoid

While lots of organizations are making good progress with DevOps, there are others that have fallen prey to common DevOps antipatterns. Signs usually include a slowdown or stopping of progress toward a fully collaborative organization operating at a high velocity. Here are four DevOps antipatterns to watch out for.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne
Looking upward at trees in a forest Scrum Can Help You See the Forest and the Trees

In project management, it's easy to focus on details to the extent that you lose track of the larger goal. Scrum can help you identify flaws and gaps, and skipping or trivializing Scrum events will just hide the fact that there are things you need to improve. Finding problems is something to be celebrated, not hidden.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Train track going through the woods Get Your Defect-Tracking Database Back on Track

When defects are ignored or mismanaged, it can compromise the integrity of the defect-tracking database. When this happens, defects could go unfixed, or code fixes may not be verified by the production release. Before you can resolve a compromised defect-tracking database, you need to know how to recognize one.

Richard Estra's picture
Richard Estra
Laptop with colorful code on a black screen Is Everything Code?

As modern software processes become automated, one might argue that nearly everything in software development is code. Obviously, our software applications are comprised of code, but that’s only the start of it. Our tests, delivery orchestration, and someday even our software production could be automated.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne
A watch with the second hand moving fast The Agile Culture You Need for Faster Pull Requests

Is your process for pull requests compromising your team's agility? You can structure your changes in a way that facilitates more rapid feedback, but even then it is still possible to have a slow integration time if people don’t review pull requests promptly. Mechanics are part of it, but culture also matters.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk