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Creating a More Equal Workplace
Women are leaving the tech industry because they are unhappy, don't feel valued or lack access to opportunities. We need to create environments that retain and grow employees, regardless of what they look like on the outside, argued Kate Heddleston. During her QCon London talk she suggested a process that organizations can use if they want to create equal access opportunities.
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Organizing Improvements with Lean Leadership at ING Bank
It’s the manager’s job to organize improvements and to make sure that real learnings take place. For real learnings you must accept the unknown and move outside of your knowledge boundary. Agile, lean and continuous delivery help to boost your learning capabilities.
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Testers Should Think Like Marketeers
Testers should be sharing stories and talking about the things they care about, to get people interested in what they are doing. The future of testing needs testers to think like marketeers. They can start by making or writing something such as a blog, article, talk, or video, and share it.
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Making Distributed Development Work
Distributed development depends on effective communication: you need to look for ways to have robust and diverse communication, build empathy towards each other to encourage feedback, and keep an eye on motivation. Team members are more engaged and creative when there’s shared ownership and responsibility for complete delivery from idea to production in distributed teams.
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Organizing over Organization
In the coming years we will see less organizations, but not less organizing. Organizing is a daily activity to get things done, but we don't necessarily need organizations to do things. When individuals are subordinate to the organization, it's an inhibitor for adopting modern management approaches.
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Courage to Become Agile
Being brave is about doing what is necessary, even when you are afraid. The single most important thing in agile is to inspect and dare to change things which aren't working. You can start with small experiments to find solutions, and if it turns they do not work, then you can stop them.
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Overcoming Self-Imposed Limitations
People can feel limited when challenged, which slows them down or keeps them from trying. It can be a real problem, but their fear might actually be in their imagination. Sometimes the only thing that's holding you back is yourself. Survival rules can hinder us- sometimes you have to break them.
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Practical Tips for Automated Acceptance Tests
Testing techniques like Equivalence Partitioning, Boundary Value Analysis, and Risk-based Testing can help you decide what to test and when to automate a test. InfoQ spoke with Adrian Bolboacă about different types of tests, writing sufficient and good acceptance tests, criteria to decide to automate a test, and how to apply test automation to create executable specifications.
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Approval Testing with TextTest
Approval testing is a test technique which compares the current output of your code with an 'approved' version. The approved version is created by initially examining the test output and approving the result. You can revisit the approved version and easily update it when the requirements change. Approval testing is supported by TextTest, an open source tool for text-based functional testing.
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Dead Code Must Be Removed
Dead code needs to be found and removed; leaving dead code in is an obstacle to programmer understanding and action, and there's the risk that the code is awakened which can cause significant problems. Deleting dead code is not a technical problem; it is a problem of mindset and culture.
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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.
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Writing Good Unit Tests
Try to keep units small, use appropriate tools, and pair-up programmers and tester; these are suggestions for writing good unit tests. Unit testing is a mixture of programming and testing; programmers can work together with testers to learn from each other and broaden their knowledge horizons.
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Cultivating Attention and Awareness in Teams
Technology makes it easier to collaborate, but also distracts us and can have negative consequences on the quality and content of our personal interactions. The mere presence of a cell phone can pull you away from a task and reduce your focus. An interview with Jeffery Hackert on cultivating attention, awareness and empathy when working in teams, and giving and receiving uninterrupted attention.
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Experimenting with Peer Feedback in Tech Teams
Feedback can be used to build trust in teams and help individuals improve their skills and grow in their craft. Emily Page and Doug Talbot shared their experiences from experimenting with peer feedback at Ocado Technology at Spark the Change London 2016. An interview with Emily Page, Organizational Catalyst at Ocado Technology.
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Managing in the Networked Society
More and more now value is created through connected organizations and individuals using seamless collaboration across boundaries. At the same time however, many companies are still influenced by management practices invented in 19th century. A paradigm shift is needed to successfully manage in the networked society.