InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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MIT Technology Review Insights Survey on Zero Trust in Cybersecurity
MIT Technology Review released their findings from the Zero trust closes the end-user gap in cybersecurity on Sep 19, 2022. This report focused on the approach to cybersecurity and mainly demonstrates how organizations go beyond passwords to embrace a new approach to defending against cyberattacks.
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Reliable Continuous Testing Requires Automation
Automation makes it possible to build a reliable continuous testing process that covers the functional and non-functional requirements of the software. Preferably this automation should be done from the beginning of product development to enable quick release and delivery of software and early feedback from the users.
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Google 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report Finds Strong Culture Predictive of Strong Performance
Google has released their findings from the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report. This year's report focused on security with a specific emphasis on the software supply chain. The report found a broad adoption of the inspected practices with organizations that have a high-trust, low-blame culture leading the way in both security and operational practices.
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Building an Effective Platform by Focusing on End-to-End Workflows
Platform engineering teams need to focus on building end-to-end workflows versus individual tools according to Naphat Sanguansin, CTO at Prodvana. A focus on workflows will help to abstract away the complexities of running services and allow for application engineers to focus on their product.
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Technical Debt is Quantifiable as Financial Debt: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Technical debt can be quantified in various ways, but you cannot precisely quantify the associated financial debt. According to Kevlin Henney, we can quantify things like how many debt items we have, the estimated time to fix each debt item, a variety of metrics associated with our code, such as cyclomatic complexity, degree of duplication, number of lines of code, but not the financial debt.
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Using Data to Predict Future Usage and Increase User Insights
By identifying usage trends, you can proactively adjust load, scaling, and routing to better handle the load on particular parts of the globe when you know it will peak there. Data about how users interact with your application can be used to design future features that better mimic these patterns and ensure that new features have a better chance of solving real user problems and getting adopted.
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Establishing Autonomy and Responsibility with Networks of Teams
Working in outdated ways causes people to quit their work. Pim de Morree suggests structuring organizations into networks of autonomous teams and creating meaningful work through a clear purpose and direction. According to him, we can work better, be more successful, and have more fun at the same time.
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How to Test Low Code Applications
For low code applications there are technical things you don’t have to test, like the integration with the database and the syntax of a screen. But you still have to test functionally, to check if you’re building the right thing. End-to-end testing and non-functional testing can be very important for low code applications.
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A Distributed System is Knowable: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Failure in distributed systems is normal. Distributed systems can provide only two of the three guarantees in consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. According to Kevlin Henney, this limits how much you can know about how a distributed system will behave. He gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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Programming Observability: Measuring the Maturity of Observability as Code
Observability can be programmed and automated with observability as code. A maturity model can be used to measure and improve the adoption of observability as code implementation. Yury Niño Roa, cloud infrastructure engineer at Google, spoke about programming observability at InfoQ live August 2022.
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Dealing with Cognitive Load Using Observability
We can make good decisions with speed when we limit the cognitive load on any one person or team. Observability can help to increase delivery speed, by providing information to developers that helps them to make decisions quickly.
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Getting Feedback When Your Colleagues Are Also Your Customers
Getting and using feedback from colleagues who are also customers using your product can improve the quality of the product and help to improve the way of working. In this situation, it’s easier to receive feedback, but you can get overloaded by it.