InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Creating Impactful Software Teams That Continuously Improve
Culture shapes how we feel, work, and succeed, says Natan Žabkar Nordberg. People thrive in different environments—some need autonomy, others structure. Trust must be given first, not earned. Leaders should guide, not control, fostering autonomy and safety.
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How NASA Tests Their Software for the Space Shuttle and the Orion MPCV
NASA uses multiple testing levels, independent validation, standards, safety communities, and tools to ensure safety. Darrel Raines gave a talk about software development and testing for the Space Shuttle and the Orion MPCV. He explained how they learn from failures and near misses and continually improve their process.
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Applying Observability to Leadership to Understand and Explain your Way of Working
Leadership observability means observing yourself as you lead, treating yourself as the system that is under observation. Alex Schladebeck shared how narrating thoughts, using mind maps, asking questions, and identifying patterns helped her as a leader to explain decisions, check bias, support others, and understand her actions and challenges.
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Expanding Continuous Improvement beyond Agile Practices
After being on an agile journey where practices were centered on IT, a company is now exploring ways to extend them beyond IT and scale their approach. Ramya Sriram presented how they focus on continuous improvement through agile practices, feedback, and customized maturity assessments. Emphasizing flow metrics with a strong learning culture, they aim for efficiency and sustainable growth.
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Inflection Points in Engineering Productivity for Improving Productivity and Operational Excellence
As companies grow, investing in custom developer tools may become necessary. Initially, standard tools suffice, but as companies scale in engineers, maturity, and complexity, industry tools may no longer meet needs. Inflection points, such as a crisis, hyper-growth, or reaching a new market, often trigger investments, providing opportunities for improving productivity and operational excellence.
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Applying DevOps Principles and Practices as a Quality Assurance Engineer
DevOps streamlines software development with automation and collaboration between development and IT teams for efficient delivery. According to Nedko Hristov, testers' curiosity, adaptability, and willingness to learn make them suited for DevOps. Failures can be approached with a constructive mindset; they provide growth opportunities, leading to improved skills and practices.
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How to Foster a Continuous Improvement and Learning Mindset in Software Development
According to Ramya Sriram, individuals and teams must embrace a continuous improvement and continuous learning mindset to stay competitive and relevant. She spoke about continuous improvement and learning, where she explored how her company fosters a culture of innovation through programs that support experimentation, providing employees with the time and space to explore new approaches and adapt.
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Using DORA for Sustainable Engineering Performance Improvement
DORA can help to drive sustainable change, depending on how it is used by teams and the way it is supported in a company. According to Carlo Beschi, getting good data for the DORA keys can be challenging. Teams can use DORA reports for continuous improvement by analysing the data and taking actions.
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Managing High-Performing Software Teams
High-performing teams expect their leader to enable them to make things better, Gillard-Moss said at QCon London. Independence in software teams can enable decision-making for faster delivery. Teams need empathy, understanding, and guidance from their managers.
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How to Improve Software Team Performance with Experimentation
According to Terhi Aho, experimentation is a way of thinking that guides action. By experimenting we can develop ways of working without a major change process. It can help software teams to solve problems in small steps, relieve their workload, and foster self-management.
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Planning, Automation and Monorepo: How Monzo Does Code Migrations Across 2800 Microservices
Monzo products are supported by an extensive microservice-based platform of over 2800 services. The company relies on planning and heavy automation to drive code migrations at scale and leverages config service to support gradual roll forwards and quick rollbacks in case of issues. Migrations are managed by a central team rather than service owner teams to avoid delays and inconsistencies.
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Enabling Fast Flow in Software Organizations
Resolving impediments to flow and removing unnecessary sources of cognitive load can make culture issues disappear in organisations, Nigel Kersten argued. Start with a clear strategy that is easy to communicate, then follow the path to creating stream-aligned teams and platform teams, he suggested.
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How a Game of Patterns Can Help Software Organisations to Gain Insights and Improve
Patterns can help us to understand how things work and how cultures develop. The game in an organisational system is about recognizing patterns and anti-patterns. According to Tiani Jones, leaders should work on the system rather than in the system and create the conditions for the development and sustainment of good patterns in software organisations.
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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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Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.