InfoQ Homepage Culture Content on InfoQ
-
Making Agile Software Development Work for Multicultural Teams
While equality provides team members with the same opportunities and allowances, equity is about creating an environment where individual and unique needs can be met. According to ElMohanned Mohamed, communication in multicultural teams should be precise and clear with low dependence on the context.
-
How Technology Can Drive Culture Change in Software Organisations
Technological improvements like containers, VMs, infrastructure-as-code, software-defined-networking, collaborative version control, and CI/CD can make it possible to fix cultural issues around organisational dynamics and bad product delivery. According to Nigel Kersten, software leaders should leverage tech to create positive changes in organisational dynamics and relationships between teams.
-
Adopting Agile by Increasing Psychological Safety in a Software Team
To test the agile way of thinking, a software team worked on their psychological safety with kick-off exercises, sharing coffee breaks, celebrating wins, a stand-up question, and 1-on-1 talks. This helped them to increase psychological safety in their software team.
-
Fostering an Experimentation Culture in Software Development
An experimental culture is a way of thinking; it is about trying new things and learning together, solving complex software problems, and creating value together. According to Terhi Aho, an experimental culture in software organizations requires strong management support and psychological safety.
-
How to Develop a Culture of Quality in Software Organizations
According to Erika Chestnut, software organizations can develop a culture of quality with a clear commitment from leadership, not only to endorse quality efforts in software teams, but also to actively champion them. This commitment and advocacy should manifest in data-driven decision-making that strikes a balance between innovation and quality, ensuring that we maintain the highest quality.
-
The Challenges of Building Cyber-Physical Systems
There are several challenges in building hardware-reliant cyber-physical systems, such as hardware lead times, organisational structure, common language, system decomposition, cross-team communication, alignment, and culture. A solution to such challenges is to apply agile at the systems level, and to architect both hardware and software into modular components.
-
How Big Tech Lost its Way - Accountability and Leadership
Accountability in big tech companies seems to be lacking; it’s rare for people in senior positions to be held accountable. Engineers should be conscious of the culture they want to work in and watch out for their well-being, whereas companies should invest in their leaders to support people’s best work. Andy Walker gave a talk about how big tech lost its way at QCon London 2023.
-
How Resilience Can Help to Get Better at Resolving Incidents
Applying resilience throughout the incident lifecycle by taking a holistic look at the sociotechnical system can help to turn incidents into learning opportunities. Resilience can help folks get better at resolving incidents and improve collaboration. It can also give organizations time to realize their plans.
-
Embracing Complexity by Asking Questions, Listening, and Building a Shared Understanding
When dealing with an environment that feels complex, people commonly look for ways to reduce variability and increase control for dealing with complexity. An alternative approach is to embrace complexity by acknowledging that it exists, asking questions and listening, and constructing a shared understanding based on different perspectives. This lets us improve how we adapt on an ongoing basis.
-
How Big Tech Lost Its Way - Regulation and Freedom
Technology plays an ever increasing part in our lives, yet big tech seems to be running out of control, showing behavior that is at odds with its principles. Regulation is starting to develop, but laws are rarely applied. The leaders of big tech companies should realise their job is culture. At QCon London 2023, Andy Walker gave a talk about how big tech lost its way.
-
Avoid Being an "Ivory Tower" Architect: the Relationship between Architects and Their Organisation
In a recently published episode of Armchair Architects, the speakers discussed the relationship between software architects and the rest of the organisation. They detail how a successful architect can impact others by switching between going into the trenches and zooming into a tree and then being able to zoom out and estimate if that tree still fits into the forest.
-
Google 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report Finds Strong Culture Predictive of Strong Performance
Google has released their findings from the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report. This year's report focused on security with a specific emphasis on the software supply chain. The report found a broad adoption of the inspected practices with organizations that have a high-trust, low-blame culture leading the way in both security and operational practices.
-
Building an Effective Platform by Focusing on End-to-End Workflows
Platform engineering teams need to focus on building end-to-end workflows versus individual tools according to Naphat Sanguansin, CTO at Prodvana. A focus on workflows will help to abstract away the complexities of running services and allow for application engineers to focus on their product.
-
Trust-Driven Development: Building Cognitive and Emotional Pillars
Trust-driven development uses authenticity to build a safe environment for people to operate. To build trust we need to focus on two main pillars of trust – cognitive and emotional. We need to be brave, have courage, and give people access to our authentic selves.
-
Scaling Software Architecture via Conversations: the Advice Process
Andrew Harmel-Law recently published an article describing a decentralised, scalable software architecture process based on the "Advice Process". The Advice Process promotes software architecture by encouraging a series of conversations driven by an empowering, almost anarchistic, decision-making technique. It comprises one rule - anyone can make an architectural decision.