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Exploring Your Beliefs about Your Customers Have you and your coworkers ever discussed your beliefs about your customers? Or questioned those beliefs? You may surprised at the discrepancy between what you think your customers want and what they actually want. It's a good idea to reconsider every now and then and shake up the status quo. |
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Meetings: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Meetings are a crucial part of the communication process, but they endure a lot of ridicule. You can’t do away with them entirely—meetings are essential to an agile process like Scrum. Rather than avoiding all meetings, it’s better to work at making the times you meet with people more effective. |
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The Value of Checklists in Our Software Testing Work Some may see checklists as unnecessary, but consider the growing complexity of many of our software development and testing tasks. Ignoring the use of a tool such as checklists (when appropriate) can increase the risk in our already risky world of software testing. Sometimes, simpler is better. |
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Managers Are Still Good for Self-Organizing Agile Teams When teams self-organize to deliver software and solve problems, they can be more robust, effective, and directed. But this begs the question: If agile teams self-organize, do they really need managers? Yes, they do. Managers help create conditions that help teams thrive. Read on to find out how. |
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Creating High-Performance, Cross-Functional DevOps Teams DevOps provides strategies to automate and streamline your application build, package, and deployment. Excellent tools and technology are imperative, but even more essential is leading your team to work together effectively. Read on to learn what makes a high-performance, cross-functional team. |
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“So, How’s It Going?” Thoughts on Reporting Project Progress People near the top of your org chart often want project status updates to be short and sweet. But oversimplified measures risk miscommunication. Be thoughtful when someone asks, “So, how’s it going?” If you summarize too much, you can lose context, and these managers may feel misled later. |
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A Quicker, More Effective Hiring Solution Is on the Way Given the increasing demand for software talent, hiring is a big task in the IT world. But a startup has an idea for a platform that would help bring objectivity to the entire hiring process, from data collection to skill assessment to prospect evaluation. Would you trust your hiring to the cloud? |
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The Abstraction Problem As technical people, when we give too much information in a project status meeting, we can overwhelm managers. Worse, if we don’t answer the implied question ("When is this thing going to be done?"), the managers will get answers elsewhere. Read on for ideas to get you speaking the same language. |