Articles

How Scrum Helps Developers Build Technical Skills and Flexible Architecture

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Developers who tried to build at least one product for an end-user know how many things are essential in a product: thoughtful UX, friendly UI, good performance and stability, security and data consistency, logging and maintenance, etc.
Multiply this to the number of platforms that you have to support. Add marketings and licensing, client support and bug reports, new feature requests, and competitive product pressure.

It’s hard to track everything in one head, and it is even harder to be perfect at every job. That’s why we work in teams. That’s why we use project management processes.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Neutral Quality metrics for your code

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Disclaimer – I am not in any ways affiliated with Sonar Source, I just happen to be using their product(s), and the stuff I’ve seen so far, is simply amazing as far as I am concerned!

As software developers, we are non-stop fighting the never ending recurring battle against "code rot". Code rot often implies that our Program Manager asks us for a feature, and we sneak in an additional "if" statement in one method, and a couple of "while" statements in another method, and our program manager is pleased with the effect. Slowly over time of course, the effect this approach has on our code, is less cohesion, clarity, and readability, in our classes, methods, and modules – And our code slowly mutates over time to become "a big ball of mud", until it reaches that point where it’s no longer possible to maintain.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Being Open-Minded Is the Key to Scrum

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With an open-mind, anything is possible. Even Scrum.
Photo credit by Unsplash/Artem Beliaikin

As a Scrum Master, I know that encouraging the development team, product owner, and organization in the adoption of Scrum is anything but not easy. It takes time (a lot of it) and patience.

And during that long journey, it’s vitally important that the Scrum Master never stops improving. In fact, it’s this commitment to continuous learning that helps me perform my responsibilities and enables my team to maximize the values of Scrum.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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What I Learned About IT From Rocking My Son

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This adorable child has clearly taken a nap today.

In April, my wife Nicole ended up having shoulder surgery to repair a torn labrum, frozen shoulder, and a nearly detached bicept. As a result of this procedure and recovery, she currently isn’t able to rock our son before his naps. Since I work from home a majority of the time, this task has fallen to me each afternoon.

From my experience, toddlers maintain the urge to fight nap time, regardless of their level of fatigue. In fact, the more exhausted they are, the worse the struggle. After some amount of time, though, the resistance gives way to acceptance. He is not in tears or upset, just resisting taking a much needed break from an already long day.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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How I Built an Agile Team

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Implementing an Agile methodology was a critical success factor for the solutions developed by our team and for continuous customer satisfaction increase — indicated by the increase in satisfaction surveys, as well as the resulting customer comments congratulating the products and us. We develop solutions for a particular and crowded niche in the aviation industry.

Before introducing how Agile was implemented in our team, let me describe how our work environment was to contextualize it. In many articles about this subject, the authors state that Agile is not a silver bullet. I will also agree that this is true if you don’t receive the support from upper management. In our case, the need to go Agile was identified by the team, and the whole implementation process was bottom-up. We were lucky to have support from the upper management.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Digital Transformation Is Tougher Than You Think. Here’s What Can Help.

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How hard is it to digitally transform an enterprise? A lot harder than you might imagine. That’s the message delivered by a recent survey, the “MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report 2018.” MuleSoft surveyed 650 IT decision makers around the world and found how important they believe digital transformation is. The report also highlights how difficult it has been for them to digitally transform their enterprises and far they are from achieving their goals.

The report starts out warning, “To put it bluntly, those organizations that fail to digitally transform will start to lose revenue, and fast…But for many organizations, there are still huge barriers to digital transformation like integration, lack of resources, and misalignment between IT and the rest of the business.”

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Taking Your Company Private?

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[Recently Elon Musk (Tesla CEO) talked about taking his company private. Read how a Zone Leader recalls a situation where a publicly traded company considered going private in an effort to avoid SOx compliance.]

In early August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk indicated he had secured the financial means to take his company from a public traded company to a private corporation. This was around the stock price had plummeted from just under $371 a share down to right above $290 a share a week earlier. Certainly, the memories of the yearly low price of $252.48 were still on his mind as well — not to mention some unfavorable press releases regarding their underlying technology.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

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Solving Impediments as a Team

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Solving Impediments as a Team

The main message of the retrospective was clear: there are too many interruptions by stakeholders and the senior management. The interruptions impeded the flow of work through the team. Consequently, achieving the sprint goal had been at risk several times in the past. Moreover, the team missed the sprint goal twice recently. Solving impediments as a team has become a necessity.

Learn more on how to tackle impediments as a team by running experiments and iterating on the solution.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

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My Job Search Checklist

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Not too long after I started my career, in the 1990s, I found myself on the other side of the interview table. Part of my responsibilities were to evaluate and interview candidates for the summer internships. This was quite an interesting challenge for me, since I was sitting on the other side of the interview table just months before I was given the task.

Over the last twenty-seven years, I have been involved with the new hire process — scanning through piles of resumes, interviewing candidates and even making the decision on who to hire and to not hire for a given position. During this time, I have built my own top-ten list of things to keep in mind when submitting your credentials for an open opportunity.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

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Agile Adoption and the Survival of the Fittest

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We are living in 21st century and have evolved a lot, from transportation, communication, entertainment and everything which is around us today. We all might have read Darwin’s theory of evolution. The gist of this theory is the humans are the most adaptable species among all due to which it survived all the calamities of nature. The process of adaptation is still in progress. Darwin has rightly stated, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Today humans are living in every corner of the globe in varied rigid climatic conditions. Some regions are too hot and some are too cold for survival, but humans have adapted those conditions for their need to survive. As time passed, new things evolved and humans adapted everything for their survival and evolved as the strongest.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

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