InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Why Stable Software Teams Aren't Always Best: Self-Selection Reteaming at Redgate
There are advantages to having the same group of people stay together, especially in achieving a time-bound software development project. However, in a world where we increasingly see product or stream-aligned teams who own long-living software from creation through to delivery, operation, and ongoing improvements, then optimising for very stable teams is not the best idea, Chris Smith argues.
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Building a Dedicated Platform for Frontend Developers at the Norwegian Government
Recognizing the challenges faced by frontend developers, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration decided to build a dedicated platform to address their needs. It offers services like a CDN, an observability stack for monitoring and debugging, and feature management using Unleash. The platform is treated as a product to drive adoption and improve the developer experience.
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How Playing Games Enables Engaging Ways of Learning Agility
Games can help us create a collaborative, joyful, and fun experience in which we play to solve complex problems. According to Jakub Perlak, people can play games that have a meaningful purpose, and have fun in doing so. Games create space for intentional cognitive activity which helps us when learning something new and adapting to changes that are important for agility.
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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.
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Adopting Agile in Specific Business Domains Using Domain-Driven Agility
According to Nikola Bogdanov, the real challenge in agile transformations is adapting to business domain specifics and industry constraints; understanding agile is not the problem that needs to be solved. He presented domain-driven agility which utilizes design thinking to visualize agile adoption and make it empirical.
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The Value of Repaying Good Technical Debt
Bad technical debt is the stuff that has been lingering around; teams need to work around it or fix the fallout as a consequence of this bad technical debt. Good technical debt is intentional, enables benefits for the organisation, and is controlled. Teams can use a disciplined approach for managing and repaying technical debt, for instance by using the wall of technical debt.
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How to Become a High-Performing Software Team
The four major elements that enable high-performing software teams are purpose, decentralized decision-making, high trust with psychological safety, and embracing uncertainty. Teams can improve their performance by experimenting with their ways of working.
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Things We Tend to Overlook Going from Architecture to Release
People tend to overlook things when developing a new software product or service because they don’t have to think about them on a daily basis. Companies should create an environment where everyone can express their opinion and concerns and encourage bringing up questions to explore different angles and increase understanding.
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How Good Companies Can Leverage Agile to Fight Civilizational Debt
Growth, profit, and shareholder value are the cornerstones of today’s economic system, which according to Piotr Trojanowski have proven outdated, reductionistic and not sustainable. He proposes taking the cost of growth into account by using the concept of civilizational debt in agile transformations, and applying agile to realizing humankind's mission through our work.
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Sustainable Product Development Using Agile and Value Stream Mapping
Sustainable product development can be done by combining agile with concepts from the circular economy in our daily work. Value stream mapping can be extended to incorporate circular economy principles to optimize the flow of materials, information, and energy usage.
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GitHub Copilot Chat in Open Beta: Now Available for All Individuals in Visual Studio and VS Code
GitHub Copilot Chat is a chat interface that allows developers to ask and receive answers to coding-related questions directly within a supported IDE. It is currently in open beta and available for all GitHub Copilot individual users across Visual Studio and VS Code.
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A Collaborative Approach to Web Applications Accessibility
Developers and designers can work together to share knowledge and experience when working on creating accessible applications. Accessibility issues can be treated as any other bug, something that needs to be solved first. Accessibility should be embraced as something very serious and important to society, and approached as a business opportunity.
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A Ruthless Approach for Better Security by Identifying Key Risks and Ignoring Others
Risk management techniques can be used to decide which security and privacy aspects are important. You can simplify the risk impact calculations by identifying low, medium and high and critical losses, and by taking likelihoods from the industry to do likelihood calculations. This helps you to identify a few key risks, and ruthlessly ignore the rest.
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Building Cyber-Physical Systems with Agile: Learnings from QCon New York
In her QCon New York 2023 talk Success Patterns for building Cyber-Physical Systems with Agile, Robin Yeman explored how we can use agile practices at scale for large initiatives with multiple teams, building cyber-physical safety-critical systems with a scope that includes software, firmware, and hardware development.
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Sustainable Software Systems Using Circular Economy Principles
The circular economy is a framework that aims to keep products and materials in use for as long as possible, reducing waste and pollution, and regenerating natural systems. As practitioners or change enablers, we can support sustainable product development using concepts from the circular economy in our daily work.