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Transforming Software Product Teams into Tech Investors
The key responsibility of an organisation lies in balancing user value with profitability. In a product organisation, software product teams invest their own time. According to Fabrice des Mazery, software developers are much more than stakeholders; they are the main investors as they are part of the product teams.
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How Data Mesh Platforms Connect Data Producers and Consumers
A challenge that companies often face when exploiting their data in data warehouses or data lakes is that ownership of analytical data is weak or non-existent, and quality can suffer as a result. A data mesh is an organizational paradigm shift in how companies create value from data where responsibilities go back into the hands of producers and consumers.
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Fostering Healthy Tech Teams in a DevOps World
Building healthy DevOps tech teams that are responsible for a broad area can be challenging. To measure the success of your team, several frameworks provide metrics indicating team health. Psychological safety matters for healthy teams to ensure each software engineer brings their own lived experiences to build better products and that they feel safe to do so.
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How to Scale Agile Software Development with Technology and Lean
Agile software development can be done at scale with the use of technology like self-service APIs, infrastructure provisioning, real-time collaboration software, and distributed versioning systems. Lean can complement and scale an agile culture with techniques like obeyas, systematic problem-solving, one-piece-flow and takt time, and kaizen.
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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.
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Challenges and Solutions for Building Machine Learning Systems
According to Camilla Montonen, the challenges of building machine learning systems are mostly creating and maintaining the model. MLOps platforms and solutions contain components needed to build machine systems. MLOps is not about the tools; it is a culture and a set of practices. Montonen suggests that we should bridge the divide between practices of data science and machine learning engineering.
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Catalyzing Change in Software Organizations: Find Allies, Invite People, and Sustain Engagement
Much of the change we experience in software organizations is coercive. Software engineers, architects, and people in software engineering management roles feel they cannot spark change without formal authority, Eb Ikonne mentioned at QCon London 2024. To catalyze change, he suggested identifying allies, inviting people to participate in the change, and sustaining engagement through storytelling.
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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.
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Application Security Optimised for Engineering Productivity
Laura Bell Main presented a webinar on 2024 trends in application security. She called out a shift from siloed DevSecOps initiatives to building an understanding of dev friction, and presenting solutions which optimise engineering productivity. Nikki Robinson also recently spoke about the importance of taking a developer experience targeted approach to security platform engineering.
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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.
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QCon London: The Art, Science and Psychology of Decision-Making
At QCon London 2024, Hannes Ricklefs, head of architecture at the BBC, gave a well-received talk on decision making. Ricklefs summarised the key reasons behind applying art, science and psychology to the discipline of decision-making, focusing on appropriate methodologies to use and the effects of biases on our ability to make good decisions in both a personal and business context.
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Enabling Software Platform Adoption with Self-Service and User Engagement
In order to scale a platform, it has to become a self-service product with software engineers and managers engaged, taking advantage of new technologies. A stakeholder engagement program was established with senior engineers and managers across the company, explaining how the new tools can increase developers' productivity and team velocity.
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The Impact of Testing in Software Teams
Communicating quality gaps, holding space for good testing, and writing automation are some of the ways that testers contribute to software teams. According to Maaret Pyhäjärvi, we need to think about testing, not testers. Collaboration and having conversations between team members can result in valuable impact that changes the product and the experiences of our users.
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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.
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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.