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The Problem with the People-Management Bell Curve Conforming team performance evaluations to a tidy bell curve is a simple, quantitative solution to the challenging problem of rating employee performance. However, it doesn’t work. It’s unrealistic (not to mention counterproductive) to force-fit employee evaluations to the curve when that doesn't reflect their work. |
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Does Agile Have Too Many Meetings? Because agile favors lots of short meetings, it may seem like they take up a lot more time. But when you compare it to time spent meeting in the pre-agile days, it's usually actually less. However, this doesn’t mean all meetings you attend are useful. Here are a few tips for deciding if all your meetings are necessary. |
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One-on-Ones: A Framework for Feedback Regular one-on-one meetings between a manager and employee are a forum to provide safe, timely feedback. They can be short or longer, but you should discuss successes, challenges, and how to improve. Having a framework for the conversation helps you make sure that the meetings don’t routinely become chat sessions. |
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Defect Reporting: The Next Steps When a software defect is identified, best practices usually only pertain to the initial writing of the defect, not the tasks required to close it. Many factors can influence the tester's work. The solution is to add a “Next Steps” section that identifies the work remaining and the person responsible for completing it. |
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3 Common Scrum Anti-Patterns and How to Fix Them For a Scrum team to operate successfully, the entire team must honor the Scrum values of commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. But it's easy to fall into practices that can erode trust and collaboration. Here are three common anti-patterns that emerge in Scrum, as well as the solutions to overcome them. |
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3 Reasons Managers Struggle to Build Compatible Tech Teams Managers should try to find candidates who not only have the right technical skills, but also will ideally complement each other and be able to collaborate. But that’s not easy. Here are three main aspects managers struggle with when building compatible tech teams, so you can try to mitigate them and achieve harmony. |
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Softer Testing Skills to Focus On in 2020 Although technical skills will always be essential for testers, this should be the year we also have a collective responsibility to focus on two softer aspects: being realistic about goals for quality, and bringing back simplicity into the software engineering discipline. Here's how these goals can bring value in 2020. |
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2 Simple Ways to Improve Developer-Tester Relationships Supposedly there is a constant tension between developers and testers, like the roles of artist and art critic. They can’t exist without each other, and yet they can’t get along. It doesn't have to be that way! Here are two ways testers can reduce that feeling so that developers and testers can work better together. |