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InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ

  • Applying Observability to Ship Faster

    To get fast feedback, ship work often, as soon as it is ready, and use automated systems in Live to test the changes. Monitoring can be used to verify if things are good, and to raise an alarm if not. Shipping fast in this way can result in having fewer tests and can make you more resilient to problems.

  • GitLab Annual DevOps Survey Shows Emerging Trends and Changing Roles

    Completed by over 3500 developers from 21 countries, GitLab's DevOps survey encompasses three major areas, development and release, security, and testing. The survey hints at faster release cycles and improved quality, with the more recent DevSecOps area requiring more organizational fine-tuning. InfoQ has taken the chance to speak with GitLab's senior developer evangelist, Brendan O'Leary.

  • How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams

    A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.

  • What Will the Next 10 Years of Continuous Delivery Look Like?

    Dave Farley and Jez Humble talked at the DeliveryConf about their expectations for the next ten years of Continous Delivery (CD). For CD to succeed, the IT industry needs to focus on three performance aspects: technical, organizational, and cultural–all profoundly interrelated. DORA's report has shown that technical practices can lead the change, but they alone aren't enough.

  • Simulating Agile Strategies with the Lazy Stopping Model

    Simulation can be used to compare agile strategies and increase understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in different organisational and project contexts. The Lazy Stopping Model derived from the idea that we often fail to gather sufficient information to get an optimal result. Agile strategies can be simulated in the model as more or less effective defences against this “lazy stopping.”

  • The Importance of Fun in the Workplace

    Things at work that make us smile or laugh can improve team cohesion, productivity and organisational performance. Fun can’t be forced, but it can be fostered, said Holly Cummins at FlowCon France 2019, where she spoke about the importance of fun in the workplace.

  • How Deploying Every Feature Branch Enables Fast Product Feedback

    Pushing the boundaries of continuous delivery, you can fundamentally change the way people collaborate while building software. Christian Uhl presented at DevOpsCon Munich 2019 how deploying every feature branch using GitLab and Kubernetes helps them to get fast feedback from product owners and stakeholders.

  • Usability Testing and Testing APIs with Hallway Testing

    Hallway testing can be used to enhance the usability of products and make your UX better. You can also use it to test APIs as Ewa Marchewka, head of software integration and test department at Nokia, presented at TestCon Europe 2019. It’s cheap, straightforward, there’s no need for complicated tools, and it’s fast, getting feedback from the end-user almost instantly.

  • How Lean Has Helped the IT Team Take Pride in Their Work

    More teamwork, a better vision of daily work, a team that works in a concentrated way, and more pride in doing a job well; these are the benefits that Mélanie Noyel mentioned that their IT team at Acta gained from using Lean. At the Lean Digital Summit 2019 she presented on how they applied Lean to improve the IT team’s daily work.

  • How Team Feedback Can Drive OKRs

    Team feedback meetings can help teams to define their own goals. Such meetings increase focus and motivation within teams, and with proper transparency they enable alignment between the teams’ and organizational goals. In his talk at Agile Leadership Day 2019, Michael Sommerhalder presented how Digitec Galaxus combined quarterly team feedback meetings and team missions with OKRs.

  • Refactoring Organizations to Reduce Organizational Debt

    Organizations can accumulate organizational debt when adopting new ways of working. An agile mindset can be a driving force to remove organizational impediments and promote continuous improvement, said Jess Long, enterprise Agile coach at LeanDog. At the ACE Conference 2019, she presented how we can reduce organizational debt by refactoring organizations.

  • DevOps Needs Continuous Improvement to Succeed

    Continuous improvement is not a new thing and is often misunderstood. To be successful, we can take guidance from agile principles and apply them to the DevOps world, argued Mirco Hering, managing director at Accenture. At Agile Portugal 2019 he spoke about DevOps leadership in the age of agile.

  • Experience Building a QA Team in a Growing Organization

    Shifting the test team to the left brought the whole team closer together, enabled faster learning, and improved collaboration, claimed Neven Matas, QA team lead at Infinum. He spoke at TestCon Moscow 2019 where he shared the lessons learned from building a QA team in a growing organization.

  • How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A

    Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.

  • Retrospective 3.0 at Ocado Technology

    Toni Tassani identifies retrospective pitfalls, such as stale and repetitive activities and raises risks: the retrospective as an excuse for not solving issues on the spot, identifying an experiment but not driving the impediment to resolution, Post-it theater. He suggests looking at retrospectives radically differently, leveraging continuous improvement techniques borrowed from Kanban.

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