InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ
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How to Prepare an Agile Business Game
To make playing games "interesting" from the business owner's perspective, we need to ensure that they are aligned with the business needs. There are four steps in preparing a game: exploring the context, knowing your target group, defining the focus, and deciding how to facilitate it.
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How Software Affects Climate Change, and What Software Engineers Can Do about It
There are huge amounts of software running everywhere on the planet - and this software consumes energy when it is running. Unfortunately most of the energy world-wide is still being produced by burning fossil fuels. Software engineers can improve the software so that it uses less energy to do its job, then less energy needs to be produced by burning fossil fuels, which is better for the climate.
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Improving Software Quality with Gamification
Bingo Bongo sessions for bug hunting and playing risk storming games can improve quality. Gamification supports learning, can make everyday work interesting, and strengthen team spirit. Playing games should be part of the daily work at the office and seen as an effective work time. In gamification, a real value is created by the creative process.
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Infinite Representations: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Developers can face impossible things in their daily work. It’s impossible to directly represent infinity or to hold infinite precision on a discrete physical computer. Storage and representations are bounded. Ignoring or being unaware of this impossibility can lead to bugs or systems behaving differently than expected. Kevlin Henney gave the keynote Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022.
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Creating Tight Cohesive Tech Teams for Women to Thrive
Women in tech need a dynamic, valuing team, stimulating work, push and support, local role models, nonjudgmental flexibility, and personal power. Tight cohesive teams can provide high-quality interactions, making people feel valued.
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Measuring the Environmental Impact of Software and Cloud Services
Software has an influence on the limitation of the service life or the increased energy consumption. It’s possible to measure the environmental impacts that are caused by cloud services. The design of the software architecture determines how much hardware and electrical power is required. Software can be economical or wasteful with hardware resources.
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Making On-Call Less Painful for Developers by Using High-Quality Alerts
On-call is an increasing reality for developers. Improving alerts to reduce noise, automation, and removing warnings can help to make on-call work more humane. A driving force behind automation is Infrastructure as Code. Over time you can abstract that code so that it fits other use cases, which helps propagate best practices.
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How Security by Design Helped to Manage Risks in a Cloud Migration
When a company migrated to the cloud, security issues arose due to difficulties in getting stakeholders on board and involving security from the start. Embedding security assessments as part of the continuous cloud DevOps process and adopting an agile strategy for security risk management throughout the lifecycle of the project helped to increase the governance of security during the migration.
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Fair Individual Compensation for Agile Teams with Team-Set Salaries
Team-set salaries can be used to set fair compensation for individuals in multiskilled, collaborative, autonomous teams. People don’t appraise themselves, only their colleagues. It gives everyone a direct say in salary settings.
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How Measuring Defect Mass Helps to Test Critical Product Areas
Introducing a measurement called “defect mass” helped a project to find the most impacted areas by developments and decide how many tests should be run for each impacted area. Using this measurement together with other KPIs helped them focus their testing. They managed to decrease the number of customer incidents.
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Increasing Collaboration at Ericsson: Hardware and Software Developers Learn Each Other's Language
You can integrate hardware and software development with a cross-border team setup, where it’s important that hardware and software developers speak each other’s languages. The suggestion is to focus on “us” instead of “we” and “them”, and on the technical competence that connects developers over agile or lean terminology.
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Moldable Development: How Custom Tools Make Systems Explainable
Moldable Development is a way of programming through which we construct custom tools for every software development problem. Glamorous Toolkit is a moldable development environment that can be used to mold custom tools.
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How AI Supports IT Operators to Resolve Issues Faster and Keep Systems Running
AIOps is all about equipping IT teams with algorithms that can help in quicker evaluation, remediation or actionable insights based on their historical data without the need to solicit feedback from users directly. AI can help IT operators to work smart, resolve issues faster and keep the systems up and running to deliver great end-user experience.
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Implementing Remote Software Verification and Validation Using a Real Vehicle
Bosch is doing automated regression testing and user testing using a real car instead of a simulated one. Their aim is to test the software as quickly as possible, both from the test engineer's and user's perspectives. The car can be accessed remotely, and team members can work without being in the car.
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Becoming a Better Tech Leader with Coaching
Coaching, both personal and professional, can help to understand your potential and discover ways to exercise that potential in your daily work. For Maryam Umar, coaching has proved to be highly useful in her tech work of leading testers and engineers.