InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Scalable Automation Frameworks for Functional and Non-Functional Testing
Separating the capabilities of a testing framework from the actual tests can enable scaling automated testing for complex enterprise products. According to Alexander Velinov, we should agree on the types of tests to execute automatically during release and what should be kept as manually triggered tests.
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Unraveling Techno-Solutionism: How I Fell out of Love with “Ethical” Machine Learning
At the recent QCon San Francisco conference, Katherine Jarmul gave a talk on unravelling techno-solutionism, in which she explored the inherent bias in AI training datasets, the bias that assumes there will be a technical solution to almost any problem and that those technical solutions will be beneficial for mankind. She posed questions for technologists to consider when building products.
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The Myth of Product Mindset: It's What You Do, Not How You Think
Companies nowadays are looking for ways to cultivate a product mindset. While the idea of cultivating a “product mindset” allows us to focus primarily on ourselves, actually transforming our organizations often means changing our behavior to focus on our customers and how we work together to serve them.
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The Engineer/Manager Pendulum: Charity Majors at QCon SF
Charity Majors, founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, gave a talk at QCon San Francisco about the pendulum of being a senior engineer and manager. She discussed the need for managers in technical teams to have engineering credibility and the value that comes from deliberately embracing both senior technologist and manager roles, but not both at the same time.
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Kent Beck: Software Design is an Exercise in Human Relationships
In the closing keynote at QCon SF, Kent Beck spoke about how software design is an exercise in human relationships, why iterative and incremental development is the most cost effective way to build software, and how the overall cost of a software system is directly related to the cost of coupling and decoupling and the jackpot changes which result in cascaded coupling.
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Using the Technical Debt Metaphor to Communicate Code Quality
With technical debt, we end up paying a gradually rising cost. The technical debt metaphor was intended as a way to help us talk and think about the invisibility of decisions and qualities in code. Kevlin Henney gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022. His sixth impossibility was technical debt is quantifiable as financial debt.
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Building High-Trust and High-Performing Teams at Shopify in a Remote World
Jesse McGinnis spoke at QCon San Francisco on building high-trust and high-performing teams at Shopify in a remote world. He started by pointing out his talk on high-trust teams in a remote world.
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Hybrid Leadership is an Issue of Equity and Inclusion
Lena Reinhard spoke at QCon San Francisco on Successful Leadership in Hybrid Environments, in which she explored why hybrid working is attractive for companies and employees, the risks and challenges associated with hybrid working, and why leadership in hybrid environments is fundamentally an issue of equity and inclusion.
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Disney SRE "Proximity Powered Engineering" Culture: Jason Cox at DOES 2022
Jason Cox, SRE director at Disney, shares how he developed a world-class centralized shared services SRE organization based on “proximity-powered empathy engineering” and three core values: Listen: Know the Business - Know the Mission - Know the Team. Empathize: Shared Mission - Shared Struggles - Shared Wins. Actually Help: Build Community - Build Trust - Build Magic Together.
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Jonathan Smart on Organizing for Outcomes - DOES 2022
Jonathan Smart shares patterns and anti-patterns to help organzations organize for business value and outcomes. He recommended focusing on “Better”, which is quality, “Value”, “Sooner”, which is time to learning and time to value, “Safer”, which is minimal viable compliance, and “Happier”, which is happier customers, colleagues, citizens, and climate.
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Tapabrata Pal on DevOps at Fidelity: Investing in Inner Source and Engineering Excellence -DOES 2022
At the DevOps Enterprise Summit Vegas 2022, Tapabrata Pal presented the state of DevOps at Fidelity and their investment in DevOps and inner source. They were facing challenges with their tools sprawl, security, audit and compliance, and their metrics. They focused on a unified developer experience, their tools standardization, continuous compliance and contextual metrics.
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Motivating Employees and Making Work More Fun
Progressive workplaces focus on purpose and value, having networks of teams supported by leaders with distributed decision-making. Employees get freedom and trust, and access to information through radical transparency that enables them to experiment and adapt the organization. In such workplaces, people can develop their talents and work on tasks they like to do, and have more fun.
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State of Value Stream Management Report Shows Platform Adoption Increased 4X in a Year
The Value Stream Management Consortium has produced their 2022 report, which most notably shows a 4x increase in the number of respondents implementing a Value Stream Management platform. Organisations implementing VSM are using value streams to break down silos, and rather than setting a vision and goals up-front, many are just starting with a VSM mapping exercise treated as an experiment.
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Performance Testing Should Focus on Trends
Performance testing starts by setting a baseline and defining the metrics to track together with the development team. Nikolay Avramov advises executing performance tests and comparing the results frequently during development to spot degrading performance as soon as possible.
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Platform Engineering, DevOps, and Cognitive Load: a Summary of Community Discussions
Operations engineering is moving in the direction of platform engineering according to Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb. Majors sees platform teams tending to work higher up the stack than operations, DevOps, and SRE teams do. This shift in focus enables organizations to focus their limited development resources on their core product to drive maximum business value.