QCon New York: Evaluating Machine Learning Models - A Case Study in Real Estate
Opendoor, a real estate company that helps customers with buying and selling homes, uses machine learning techniques to drive pricing models. Nelson Ray, data scientist at Opendoor, spoke at QCon New York 2017 Conference about how they developed a simulation-based framework for reasoning about machine learning models to assess the risk in reselling homes.
Doing Safe-to-Fail Experiments
Safe-to-fail experiments can be used in complex environments to probe, sense, and respond. You have to know what success and failure look like and need to be able to dampen or amplify the effect of probing to handle potential failures. Safe-to-fail experiments can help you to deal with risks and uncertainty, learn, and keep your options open.
Improving IT Performance with Continuous Delivery
The main benefit of continuous delivery is lower-risk releases; comprehensive test automation and continuous integration are practices that have the biggest impact on IT performance. Research of continuous delivery and IT performance tells us that implementing continuous delivery practices leads to higher IT performance and high performers achieve both higher tempo and higher levels of stability.
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.
Applying Supply Chain Management to Deliver Faster with Higher Quality
Supply chain management can raise the bar with continuous development, argues Joshua Corman, Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and co-founder of Rugged Software. Our dependence on IT and software is growing faster than our ability to secure it, and applying supply chain approaches to software development helps to address complexity which reduces risks and increases quality.
Building an Agile Organization Using Business Mapping
Dan North gave a talk about business mapping at the Scaling Agile for the Enterprise 2016 congress in Brussels. InfoQ interviewed him about the problems that he sees from a business perspective when the IT part of an organization adopts agile, and asked him what business mapping is and how it can help organizations to increase their agility.
Meeting Regulatory Demands with Agile Software Development
InfoQ interviewed Jan van Moll about regulatory demands for software in healthcare, satisfying these demands with waterfall project or with a mix of waterfall and agile, and introducing agile in an R&D organization that needs to fulfill regulatory demands.
Delivering Value on Time by Using #NoEstimates
Vasco Duarte suggests that people should experiment with #NoEstimates to learn and find ways in which it can help them to deliver value on time and under budget. He is writing a book on #NoEstimates in which he explains why estimation does not work and how you can use #NoEstimates to manage projects.
Docker Security Benchmark
Docker Inc have worked with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) to produce a benchmark document containing numerous recommendations for the security of Docker deployments. The benchmark was announced in a blog post ‘Understanding Docker Security and Best Practices’ by Diogo Mónica who was recently hired along with Nathan McCauley to lead the Docker Security team.
Exploring the Causes of Problems with the Analysis of Competing Hypothesis Method
The analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH) method can be used to evaluate multiple competing hypotheses when investigating problems. The method mitigates cognitive biases that humans experience when exploring the causes of problems.
Is Unhedged Call Options a Better Metaphor for Bad Code?
In a blog post on bad code and technical debt Steve Freeman described how Chris Matts came up with the metaphor of an unhedged call option for bad code. This post is being intensively discussed on Reddit and on Hacker News recently. InfoQ interviewed Steve and Chris about using metaphors for bad code and code smells, trade-offs and costs of low quality code, and responsibilities for code quality.
Building Agile Relationships with Customers and End-Users
Teams can become so focused that they forget the world around them and risk losing contact with stakeholders. This makes it difficult for them to know what their customers need and how end users will use their products. At the ASAS2014 conference Daisy Rasing-de Joode will show how successful agile teams create synergy by being interdependent and highly collaborative with their environment.
Nurturing a Culture for Continuous Learning
Continuous learning supports agile adoption in enterprises. A culture change can be needed to enable and support continuous learning. There are several things that managers and agile coaches can do to establish and nurture a continuous learning culture.
Node Security Project Aims at Making Node.js More Secure
Node Security Project has been quietly working at improving Node.js security for a few months now. The project has the goal of auditing Node.js existing module base to help "improve Node landscape and provide confidence to developers and enterprises about the state of security in Node.js land."
How to Do Just Enough Up-front Design
This article includes advice for doing enough up-front architectural design to provide the needed structure to start a project, aligning the team with the architect’s vision and assessing the possible risks.
