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InfoQ Homepage Complex Systems Content on InfoQ

  • Testing Challenges and Essential Skills for Testers

    Complex AI systems with non-deterministic outcomes pose challenges for testers and programmers. Such systems will increasingly become normal in high-impact, high-risk applications, argues Fiona Charles; testers should increase their capacity for thinking and learning and develop a number of personal strengths such as courage and good judgement.

  • Honeycomb - A Tool for Debugging Complex Systems

    Honeycomb is a tool for observing and correlating events in distributed systems. It provides a different approach from existing tools like Zipkin in that it moves away from the single-request-tracing model to a more free-form model of collecting and querying data across layers and dimensions.

  • Technologies and Trends in Developing Complex Software Systems

    The Software-Centric Systems Conference explored new technologies, trends, and experiences in developing complex software systems. InfoQ spoke with Rob Howe and Martijn Rutten, two members of the program committee, about the main challenges that software development is facing, technology developments, driving innovation, and deploying agile to improve process reliability and deliver value.

  • Technical Debt and Team Morale when Maintaining a Large System

    Thomas Bradford talked about his experience with maintaining a monolith Java based system with zero test coverage and large technical debt at the Agile Testing Days 2015. InfoQ interviewed him about the problems that they had maintaining the system and the technical debt that had been build up, why they decided to take a different approach and how they improved team morale.

  • To the Moon: Parallels Between Space Missions and Developing Software

    Russ Olsen did the opening keynote titled "To the Moon" at the GOTO Berlin 2015 conference. InfoQ interviewed him about drawbacks of doing all the things at the same time to meet the deadline, learning from things that went wrong and from things that went right, how little things can kill you in software development, and how to focus and deal with details when doing complex work.

  • Rebuild or Refactor?

    Should you rebuilding or refactoring software?An interview with Wouter Lagerweij about what it is that makes refactoring so difficult, if rebuilding software is less risky than refactoring, and how continuous delivery fits with rebuilding software.

  • Deploying Scrum and SAFe at Philips Lighting

    InfoQ interviewed Frank Penning, PMO manager from Philips Lighting, about the main challenges that Philips Lighting is facing in product development, why Scrum is not enough, how they apply SAFe, and the benefits that they have gained from deploying agile methods for product development.

  • Scaling Dilemmas and How to Deal with Them

    Making teams working together can be challenging, but it is often needed to develop and deliver large complex products. In her opening keynote about scaling dilemma's at the Agile Adria 2015 conference Mary Poppendieck presented ideas for organizations that want to scale agile.

  • Mary Poppendieck Discusses Containers, Microservices and Contract Tests

    At Craft Conference 2015 in Budapest, Mary Poppendieck discussed the ‘new software development game’ and offered advice on how best to utilise containers, microservices and consumer-based contract tests to lower friction and limit risk within software systems.

  • Experiment using Behavior Driven Development

    Behavior Driven Development (BDD) uses examples, preferably in conversations, to illustrate behavior. A lot of people focus on the tools if they are doing BDD but having the conversations is more important than writing down conversations and automating them said to Liz Keogh. An exploration of using BDD to do experiments to deal with complex problems and do discoveries.

  • Managing the Expectations from Agile

    InfoQ did an interview with Gil Zilberfeld about managing the expectations that organizations have of agile and how to prevent misconceptions, valuable ideas and practices from agile and what the future will bring for agile.

  • Systems Thinking for Safety Keynote @ Velocity Conf

    The starting keynote at Velocity Conference Europe 2014 was all about how human error is too often the easiest way to explain away a failure and how a different approach is needed. Steven Shorrock, European Safety Culture Programme Leader at Eurocontrol, explained why a Systems Thinking approach applied to safety is a better answer.

  • Mindfulness and Situational Awareness in Organizations

    To thoroughly remove waste in a process you need flow to deliver just in time, and mindfulness and situational awareness in organizations to handle problems with processes and built in human intelligence. Organizations apply concepts from flow to develop what is needed and when it is needed and use pull to prevent inventories. What they also need is “Jidoka”: mindfulness and situational awareness.

  • Using Complexity Measurements to Improve Software Quality

    Complexity is a direct indicator of software quality and costs: if the complexity for any code is high, the quality of that code will be lower and it will cost more to manage it. Complexity measurements can be used to estimate development and test activities and to decide where refactoring is needed to improve quality and prevent problems.

  • Testing Machine to Machine Systems

    Devices are becoming increasingly interconnected through the internet where they are communicating directly with each other. Testing such machine to machine (M2M) systems can be difficult due to their complexity and the usage of different platforms, as Peter Varhol explained in his talk about testing in the M2M world at the QA&Test 2014 conference.

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