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Distributed DevOps Teams: Supporting Digitally Connected Teams
To establish a digital connection within a globally distributed team, an organization provided the team members with both collaboration tools and supplied an extra monitor with a visualization board. Collaboration using the online chat and white board initially posed challenges, as the board was tweaked towards the teams’ needs.
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How Testers Can Contribute to Product Definition
Utilizing the tester’s feedback during product definition and design is valuable for the business. Listening to the organization's needs, understanding the business goals, and customizing the test process by incorporating different skills and practices is one way testing can begin while the product is still "on paper".
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Experiences from Having Developers Write E2E Tests
Developers writing e2e tests can make code testable, provide fast feedback, and prevent bugs. Wix worked with their product managers, developers, and QA engineers to transition from QA-only testing, to having developers write e2e tests to shift QA left and deliver faster.
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Adding Security to Testing to Enable Continuous Security Testing
Teams can be trained by security experts to become able to identify areas to add security testing in the test process and add security checks as part of functional test automation. This can lead to continuous security testing where security defects can be spotted at an early stage with higher security testing coverage in every release.
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Shifting Quality Left with the Test Pyramid
Shifting quality left means building in quality much earlier in the software development cycle, rather than testing for quality after completion of development. Using the test pyramid model, a project was able to move testing towards earlier stages, thereby finding defects that caused integration issues earlier in development.
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The Importance of Psychological Safety for Agile Transformations in Africa
The absence of psychological safety in the world of work limits the agile transformation journeys of organisations in Africa. Psychological safety is an enabler, not an act of weakness. Organisations that do not understand or foster it might find it difficult to survive in these VUCA times.
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Engaging All Generations with Adaptable Reward and Recognition Systems
Reward and recognition systems should be adaptable, agile, and take contexts into consideration. All generations want three things - to be respected, rewarded and recognised for their work. The motivation and the form factor of the rewards are what differ for the generations. You need to be creative and keep reward and recognition systems fresh, and tailor them to teams.
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Developing Testing Skills outside of Working Hours
Gamifying your way of testing, joining online testing communities of practice, and virtual traveling; these are examples of activities you can do outside of working hours that can make you a better tester. You can practice continuous learning with other testers in the world, and then implement things you learned at your workplace and share them with your team to improve ways of testing.
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Using Machine Learning in Testing and Maintenance
With machine learning, we can reduce maintenance efforts and improve the quality of products. It can be used in various stages of the software testing life-cycle, including bug management, which is an important part of the chain. We can analyze large amounts of data for classifying, triaging, and prioritizing bugs in a more efficient way by means of machine learning algorithms.
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Sustainable Internet: Reducing the Environmental Impact
To be sustainable, the internet needs to assess, mitigate, and live up to its responsibilities for a healthy environment. By understanding the environmental impact, we can point to avenues where progress is possible and identify aspects of our digital infrastructures that come with unintended consequences that are too severe to look the other way.
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Characteristics of Agile Leaders
Agile leaders are passionate about agile practices. They look to instill trust in their people, create transparency and are open to constructive criticism so that great work can be achieved. They focus on the vision and customers. Understanding what agile means, they give autonomy to the people, support them, and encourage them to develop and grow through learning and experimentation.
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Agile Approaches for Building in Quality
Built-in quality is a core pillar in agile. However, if we want to build in quality at scale, we need to look at the whole development life cycle. Quality awareness needs to be increased at multiple layers of the organization; agile coaches can help by boosting quality thinking by embracing an agile way of working.
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Meetings in a Time of Separation
Having many people in virtual meetings can lead to people who only partly attend and become disengaged. We should question who should be attending the meeting and make information from the meeting available for those who decide not to attend to decrease meeting FOMO.
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Becoming Personally Agile for Mental Health
Feeling the need to be constantly producing high-quality deliverables with a high sense of perfection can lead to stress and can cause burnout. You have to first accept that you have a problem to find your way out of burnout. Applying agile on a personal level can help you to achieve high goals while reducing stress and lowering the chance of getting burnout.
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Building an Intentional Organisation: a Holistic Approach
Building an intentional organisation requires a mindset that considers all organisational building blocks holistically. Leadership is key; actions that managers take have organisational consequences which need to be aligned to design an organisation that can achieve its purpose.