InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ
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Building High-Quality Products with Distributed Teams
To ensure the quality of the products and services, Intermedia uses a common test & pre-production environment for all distributed teams. Lilia Gorbachik, product manager at Intermedia, mentioned at European Women in Tech that having a mature testing process, working with risks, and making daily decisions from a high-quality product perspective are key aspects to build high-quality products.
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Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey
After having seen and evidenced the tangible benefit of lean at Mashreq Bank, agile was seen as a natural progression, an evolutionary step. Agile and lean are well-linked; you still need to identify waste, and remove non-value add activities so you can spend more time doing what the customer needs, argued Steve Snowdon. Together with Ed Capaldi he spoke about Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey.
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Agile in Higher Education: Experiences from The Open University
Universities need to embrace an agile and product mindset, as they are grappling with hypothesis-driven development of new kinds of products and services of which they understand very little, for users whose behaviours and needs they little understand, said Matthew Moran. He presented applying the agile mindset, principles and practices for online course development at Aginext 2019.
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Design and Security in Agile: QCon London Q&A
Reviews of design diagrams by domain experts can detect potential security breaches not found by vulnerability scans or security automation. Such reviews should focus on critical functions like issuing and managing access tokens, transferring data to external services, and running untrusted code, said Kevin Gilpin, enterprise software engineer and co-founder of AppLand, at QCon London 2019.
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Observability in Testing with ElasTest
In a distributed application it is difficult to use debugging techniques common in developing non-distributed applications. Bringing production observability to your testing environment helps to find bugs, argued Francisco Gortázar at the European Testing Conference 2019. He presented ElasTest, a tool for developers to test and validate complex distributed systems using observability.
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Applying Artificial Intelligence in the Agile World
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems with the agile world is having a disruptive effect on how we build software and the types of products that we build, said Aidan Casey. By combining machine learning and deep learning we can build applications that truly learn like humans. AI bias is a very serious concern, as AI systems are only as good as the data sets used to train them.
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How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A
Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.
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Portia Tung on Playful Leadership
Playful leadership is a serious topic - play is the most effective and efficient way of enabling individuals to learn, lead and work together. It fosters a growth-oriented approach that enables people to change with relative ease and even joy instead of resistance and anguish. Play is important to well being and creativity in the workplace.
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Using Contract Testing for Applications with Microservices
When using microservices, integration points between services are a hotbed for bugs. With consumer-driven contract testing, the consumer defines the contract and verifications are made against it within the providers build/test lifecycle. Contract testing fits well into a microservice workflow and kills your integration bugs, argued Maarten Groeneweg at the European Testing Conference 2019.
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How to Avoid Failing at Mobile Test Automation
Test automation in mobile development should be done by the Scrum team; don’t set up separate test automation teams, said Nadya Denisenko. She advised obeying the testing pyramid for mobile testing and involve testers from the start. Testers are quality-oriented developers who can guide and assist other developers in delivering high-quality software; manual testing will disappear in the future.
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Testing Complex Distributed Systems at FT.com: Sarah Wells Shares Lessons Learned
The complexity in complex distributed systems isn’t in the code, it’s between the services or functions. Testing implies balancing finding problems versus delivering value, said Sarah Wells at the European Testing Conference. Testers often have the best understanding of what the system does; they have a good hypothesis about what went wrong, and are able to validate it pretty quickly.
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Q&A with Susanne Birgersdotter about Entrepreneurship and Thriving in Tech
Make sure that as an entrepreneur you are extremely well-informed before a presentation, about your own topic and also about the investors and their company. When your first idea or company fails, don’t quit, don’t play safe, and get back up as fast as you can. Female entrepreneurs who want to thrive in tech can join a women in tech group where members empower, connect and support each other.
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Experiences from Remote Mob Programming: Q&A with Sal Freudenberg
At Cucumber, mob programming is done remotely by using a cycle in which the driver pulls down the latest code and then shares their screen, the team mobs for 10 minutes or so and commits the code. Next, the driver’s role rotates. “Remote mobbing works really well for me”, says Sal Freudenberg, “because it lets me tailor my working environment and work in a spot where I feel comfortable.”
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Learning to Code Better with Lean Coding
Lean coding aims to provide insight into the actual coding activity, helping developers to detect that things are not going as expected at the 10 minute-level and enabling them to call for help immediately. Developers can use it to improve their technical skills to become better in writing code.
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Experiments with Blockchain at Dutch Railways
Testers will sooner or later be asked to test IT-solutions that incorporate blockchain technology. Software development is different for blockchain-based applications; blockchain impacts the way we are used to working, said Sanne Visser, a software tester at Dutch Railways. She spoke about how professionals can deal with blockchain-based software at European Women in Tech.