InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods 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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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In the 2024 State of FinOps survey, Engineering Enablement has been replaced by a focus on cost and waste reduction.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.
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Why Stable Software Teams Aren't Always Best: Self-Selection Reteaming at Redgate
There are advantages to having the same group of people stay together, especially in achieving a time-bound software development project. However, in a world where we increasingly see product or stream-aligned teams who own long-living software from creation through to delivery, operation, and ongoing improvements, then optimising for very stable teams is not the best idea, Chris Smith argues.
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Learning from Big Tech’s Engineering Productivity Metrics
Gergely Orosz and Abi Noda published a Pragmatic Engineer article titled Measuring Developer Productivity: Real-World Examples. InfoQ reports on insights from Noda’s survey of engineering metrics used across 17 well-known tech giants. Noda found that rather than wholesale adoption of frameworks like DORA, leading teams use a mix of org-specific qualitative and quantitative metrics.
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Using ChatGPT for Amplifying Software Testing Practices and Assisting Software Delivery
Artificial intelligence can assist software delivery and be used to automate software testing and optimize project work. Dimitar Panayotov uses ChatGPT to generate test data, create email templates, and produce explanations based on test results. This saves him time that he can invest to become more productive.
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Async Ops and Scalable Keyspaces Make Threads Go Viral
Meta's Engineering team has published a post explaining how they built the infrastructure for Threads, their new online social media and networking service. The decision to launch was abrupt, with the infrastructure teams having just two days' notice. However, the teams were confident in Meta's infrastructure's maturity and past performance to effectively support the app's rapid growth.
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Building a Dedicated Platform for Frontend Developers at the Norwegian Government
Recognizing the challenges faced by frontend developers, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration decided to build a dedicated platform to address their needs. It offers services like a CDN, an observability stack for monitoring and debugging, and feature management using Unleash. The platform is treated as a product to drive adoption and improve the developer experience.
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How Playing Games Enables Engaging Ways of Learning Agility
Games can help us create a collaborative, joyful, and fun experience in which we play to solve complex problems. According to Jakub Perlak, people can play games that have a meaningful purpose, and have fun in doing so. Games create space for intentional cognitive activity which helps us when learning something new and adapting to changes that are important for agility.