InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Airbnb: Using Guardrails to Identify Changes with Negative Impact across Teams
Airbnb rolled out an internal Experiment Guardrails system to identify potentially negative impacts of changes across different teams. Whenever a proposed change does not pass any of the guardrails, it is escalated for further analysis by affected teams and stakeholders, explains Airbnb data scientist Tatiana Xifara.
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Meetings in a Time of Separation
Having many people in virtual meetings can lead to people who only partly attend and become disengaged. We should question who should be attending the meeting and make information from the meeting available for those who decide not to attend to decrease meeting FOMO.
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Maintaining Psychological Safety under Pressure
When leaders are under pressure they can fall into dark side behaviours that can cause deep and lasting harm to organisation culture and psychological safety. Leaders need to be very conscious about deliberately managing their reactions and responses to pressure situations in order to avoid allowing what are often character strengths to be overused and potentially become toxic.
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Becoming Personally Agile for Mental Health
Feeling the need to be constantly producing high-quality deliverables with a high sense of perfection can lead to stress and can cause burnout. You have to first accept that you have a problem to find your way out of burnout. Applying agile on a personal level can help you to achieve high goals while reducing stress and lowering the chance of getting burnout.
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Building an Intentional Organisation: a Holistic Approach
Building an intentional organisation requires a mindset that considers all organisational building blocks holistically. Leadership is key; actions that managers take have organisational consequences which need to be aligned to design an organisation that can achieve its purpose.
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Experiences from a Testing Tour of Pairing and Learning
Being a solo tester on a team, Parveen Khan decided to do a testing tour where she paired remotely with testers and developers to explore topics. It became a testing journey of learning where she explored testing topics like performance testing, AI and ML, observability, and Sketchnoting. In doing these sessions she also experienced how pairing and sharing can help to develop oneself.
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The Journey from Monolith to Microservices at GitHub: QCon Plus Q&A
GitHub needed to fundamentally rethink how they did software development due to all of the different cultures, norms, and technology stacks that their teams brought to the table. They are migrating toward a microservices architecture that enables different teams and systems and technologies to work harmoniously together.
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QCon Plus: Summary of the Remote Working Track
The QCon Plus conference ran over three weeks in November, 2020. Travis McPeak hosted the Best Practices for Remote Work track, aimed at sharing the learnings from world class remote companies about how to leverage remote working for the benefit of employees, customers and the organisation as a whole.
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Experiences from Testing Stochastic Data Science Models
A data science model is a statistical black box; testing it requires an understanding of mathematical techniques like algorithms, randomness, and statistics. To validate data science models you can use thresholds to handle output variance.
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Team-Level Agile Anti-Patterns - Why They Exist and What to Do about Them
A good scrum master or coach can address team-based anti-patterns, for instance by explaining what less than optimal outcomes arise and what is likely to happen if the anti-pattern remains unaddressed.
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Analyzing Large Amounts of Feedback to Learn from Users
Making it easy for users to give feedback and automating the collection of feedback helps to get more feedback faster. Using artificial intelligence, you can analyze large amounts of feedback to get insights and visualize trends. Sharing this information widely supports taking action to enhance your product and solve issues that users are having.
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The Benefits of Nostalgia: Q&A with Linda Rising
Remembering the past can bring about benefits; nostalgic reflection can make us more optimistic. Looking back leads us to feel there is meaning and purpose in our lives which enables us to better navigate the future and help us move forward.
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Safe and Fast Deploys at Planet Scale: QCon Plus Q&A
Uber has automated the deployment of services using a hybrid cloud model. All services are deployed using the same rollout techniques and workflows, ensuring safe deployment and mitigation of any issues. Abstracting away the differences between clouds supports engineers in building services that run on any platform.
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The Challenges of End-to-End Testing of Microservices
Microservices work well with independent teams who have end-to-end responsibility and use an automated CI/CD pipeline. Ensuring software quality through end-to-end testing can conflict with rapidly integrating and releasing software components. If an end-to-end test fails, the CI/CD pipelines of all involved microservices are blocked until the problem causing the test to fail is solved.
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2021 State of Testing Survey: Call for Participation
The 2021 State of Testing survey aims to provide insights into how the testing profession develops and to recognize the adoption of testing practices and testing trends. The survey is open through December.