InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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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Visual Studio 17.10 Preview 2: GitHub Copilot-Powered Pull Requests, SSDT Support for VS in ARM64
Microsoft has released Visual Studio 17.10 Preview 2. This release contains features regarding GitHub Copilot-powered pull requests, support for SQL Server Developer Tools in VS on ARM64 and support for Garbage Collection Insights in Managed Memory Window.
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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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How to Tame Technical Debt in Software Development
According to Marijn Huizenveld, discipline is key to preventing accumulating technical debt. In order to be disciplined you should make it difficult to ignore the debt. Heuristics like fixing small issues immediately, agreeing on a timebox for improvement, and making messy things look messy, can help tame technical debt.
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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 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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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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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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State of FinOps 2024: Reducing Waste and Embracing AI
In the 2024 State of FinOps survey, Engineering Enablement has been replaced by a focus on cost and waste reduction. This shows maturity of FinOps as the persona getting the most value from FinOps remains the engineer. The confluence of AI and FinOps observability aims to optimise cloud spend visibility and improve insights into early AI experimentation, as well as sustainability goals.
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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 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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Skills and Insights for First-Time Managers
The skills and capabilities required to be an effective first-time engineering manager are often orthogonal to those of an IC. These range from people management through to delivery of projects. We report on recent podcasts featuring Ben Greenberg, Matt Stratton and Shopify's James Stanier as they share practical management patterns for prospective, new and seasoned engineering managers.
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How to Develop a Culture of Quality in Software Organizations
According to Erika Chestnut, software organizations can develop a culture of quality with a clear commitment from leadership, not only to endorse quality efforts in software teams, but also to actively champion them. This commitment and advocacy should manifest in data-driven decision-making that strikes a balance between innovation and quality, ensuring that we maintain the highest quality.
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How Continuous Mobile Development Can Benefit from Test Automation
Test automation can support continuous mobile software development by reducing manual testing efforts, minimizing human errors, and accelerating the release cycle. Burak Ergören shared his experiences from automating their mobile testing at QA Challenge Accepted 2023.