InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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How Continuous Discovery Helps Software Teams to Take Product Decisions
Continuous discovery for product development is regular research that involves the entire software product team, and that can actively inform product decisions. Equating continuous discovery to weekly conversations with one or more customers can be misleading. Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods can help software teams gather data and understand what is behind the data.
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McDonald's Streamlines CI with GitHub Actions and Reusable Workflows
Recently McDonald’s talked about how they leveraged GitHub Actions to emphasize readability, maintainability, and reduce code duplication. Their goals included establishing a streamlined CI process, enhancing developer productivity, and implementing pipeline observability and monitoring.
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Enhanced Protection for Large Language Models (LLMs) against Cyber Threats with Cloudflare for AI
Cloudflare recently announced a new capability called Firewall for AI in its Web Application Firewall (WAF) offering. The capability adds a new layer of protection that will identify abuse and attacks before they reach and tamper with Large Language Models (LLMs).
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Making Software Development Boring to Deliver Business Value
Given there’s a limit to our cognitive abilities and our comprehension of complex systems, Corstian Boerman argues that software development should become boring. He suggests moving infrastructure out of the way so that it does not burden the day-to-day development process, and focusing on delivering business value in a predictable and repeatable way.
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Slack Conquers Deployment Fears with Z-score Monitoring
An engineer at team communication platform Slack has written about confronting their fear of deployments and successfully implementing a bot to monitor them instead. Describing a seemingly scary delegation of responsibility, Sean McIlroy explains the reasoning and logic behind giving a pivotal role to their ReleaseBot in a detailed blog post.
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GitHub Delivers Copilot Enterprise for Large Organizations
GitHub Copilot Enterprise, a Copilot plan available for enterprises that use GitHub Enterprise Cloud, is now generally available. It offers AI capabilities to improve the user's experience on GitHub.com, including the option to communicate with Copilot directly in the browser and to access Copilot's context from different project repositories.
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AWS CodePipeline Embraces Monorepos, GitFlow and Branches
AWS has announced new features in CodePipeline, their managed continuous delivery service facilitating automated release pipelines for application and infrastructure updates. These additions aim to support teams employing various delivery strategies, providing customers with more flexibility in their pipeline designs.
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Apple Open Sources Pkl, a Configuration as Code Programming Language
Recently, Apple open-sourced Pkl, pronounced "Pickle," a configuration-as-code language. Pkl has the the goal of streamlining configuration management, by serving as a command-line utility, software library, or build plugin.
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What Software Developers Can Do to Prevent Forgetting or Overlooking Things
According to Ilian Iliev, software developers tend to forget to do things they do not have to think about every day, which can cause delays or impact the functionality of the product during a software project. To prevent overlooking something, he suggested starting early with automating deployment, setting up error logging, and using lists and reminders of things that were forgotten previously.
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Booking.com Doubles Delivery Performance Using DORA Metrics and Micro Frontends
The team in Booking.com’s fintech business unit implemented a series of improvements across the backend and the frontend of its platform and was able to double the delivery performance, as measured by DORA metrics. Additionally, the Micro Frontends (MFE) pattern was used to break up the monolithic FE application into multiple decomposed apps that could be deployed separately.
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How Moral Values and Ethics Impact Software Delivery
Ethics and morality ensure fairness and integrity, which according to Anton Angelov is crucial for software professionals and society. The rise of technological advances, globalization, and demographic changes pose challenges to maintaining moral values in software delivery. Angelov believes that it is crucial for the QA industry to have a strong ethical framework.
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How Airbnb Migrated from Buck to Bazel with Minimal Interference to Developers
Following in the line of other organizations migrating their build pipelines to Bazel, Airbnb provided a detailed walk-through of the process that led them to leave Buck behind and improve both build times as well as project generation and loading times.
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Zurich Insurance Group's Journey with Scalable Account Vending and AWS Account Factory for Terraform
AWS recently highlighted Zurich Insurance Group's use of AWS Account Factory for Terraform, which enabled them to attain the desired performance parameters needed to facilitate the provisioning of more than 3000 accounts. Zurich Insurance Group streamlined its Cloud Adoption Strategy by using the Scalable Account Vending solution, automating the process of setting up new AWS environments easily.
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How to Prevent and Repay Technical Debt: What Teams, Tech Leads and Managers Can Do
Tech leads, project managers, and managers can prevent technical debt by giving software developers more time; in addition, they can plan for spare time and refactoring sprints to allow teams to improve code. To prioritise technical debt, development teams can show how much time we can save if we invest, and how complicated the software will become in the future if we don’t repay technical debt.
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DoorDash Uses CockroachDB to Create Config Management Platform for Microservices
DoorDash created a configuration management platform to help its logistics team maintain the growing number of business preferences and configuration values. The company used CockroachDB for persistence and simplified the architecture compared with the previous solution. The new platform enables experimentation, improves configuration value lifecycle, and provides flexibility and extendibility.