InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
Migrating a Monolith towards Microservices with the Strangler Fig Pattern
ScholarPack has migrated away from its monolith backend using a Strangler Fig pattern. They applied incremental development and continuous delivery to target customers’ needs, in the meanwhile strangling their monolith.
-
QCon Plus: Summary of the Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks Track
Qcon Plus ran in November 2020. Once of the tracks focused on Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks. Hosted by Randy Shoup of eBay, the track concentrated on some of the important people skills needed for effective communication and collaboration in and outside teams.
-
Using Agile with a Data Science Team
Agile helped a data science team to better collaborate with their stakeholders and increase their productivity. As priorities became clear, the team was able to focus and deliver. Buy-in of the data science team by taking them through a journey of agile was crucial to making it work.
-
BBC Online Going Serverless
In a recent article, the BBC engineering team describes the work done moving BBC Online to the cloud and to a serverless deployment. Half of the BBC’s website is now rendered serverlessly with AWS Lambda.
-
Organisational-Level Agile Anti-Patterns - Why They Exist and What to Do about Them
Agile anti-patterns can affect organisations, morale, and quality if left untreated. The critical first step is acknowledging the existence of the pain point. Effective root cause analysis helps to understand what causes the anti-patterns to arise in organisations, where actions can be taken to address those causes.
-
QCon Plus: Summary of the Inclusion & Diversity in Tech Track
QCon Plus is running over three weeks in November. One of the tracks on the first day focused on Inclusion and Diversity in Tech. The track was designed to to change perceptions about DEI and advance the conversation. Three talks provided the audience with concrete tools, difficult questions and invited them to deep self exploration.
-
Applying Lean and Accelerate to Deliver Value: QCon Plus Q&A
Understanding the science and math behind lean principles and practices can enable engineering leaders to advocate for and implement them in their workplace. This way they can directly impact employee engagement and morale, as well as the bottom line, as David Van Couvering explained in his talk about applying lean principles and practices for delivering value at QCon Plus 2020.
-
Creating and Nurturing an Intentional Remote Culture
Company culture isn’t built in the short term, nor can it be imposed. It’s deeply rooted in the founders’ ideologies and behaviours around work. From there, it grows and evolves organically as the company hires individuals who embrace these values, and who also bring their own identity into the mix.
-
Value vs Time: an Agile Contract Model
An agile contract model can help us to focus on the value delivered to the customer. It allows for rewarding teams and people, and can drive continuous improvement towards common goals. InfoQ interviewed Andrea Zomer, CEO at Zupit, about their experiences with an agile contract model.
-
Remote Onboarding Changes the New Hire Experience
As organisations make remote working more and more the norm, the employee onboarding experience needs to change to engage new people with their colleagues and the organisation effectively. The onboarding experience needs to be designed to engage the new employee and actively make them feel welcome and a part of the team.
-
How Stopping Estimations Helped a Team to Become More Predictable
When making estimations using story points didn’t feel helpful, a team decided to experiment with #NoEstimates. Breaking down stories into smaller tasks gives them insight into their velocity and has made them more predictable. It also helps them to spend less time on process and have more time available for delivering value.
-
Articulating Leadership through Nemawashi and Collaborative Boards
High performance teams don’t need to be managed, but led. Collaborative boards is where leadership and teams meet to align direction and initiatives. Nemawashi can be used to separate conversations from meetings. Fernando Guigou spoke about articulating leadership using an approach that he calls ZenSum at Agile Tour London 2020.
-
Applying a Zero-Bug Policy at Redgate
A zero-bug policy is a simple yet effective bug management system that can help you avoid being buried deep in months or sometimes even years-old bugs. Any bugs you agree are serious enough for you to fix, you fix right away, and any other bug will not be fixed and closed. Tom Walsh spoke about how Redgate Software applied the zero-bug policy at Lean Agile Exchange 2020.
-
Remote Working for Tech Workers is Here to Stay
Remote working is here to stay for tech workers, irrespective of what happens with COVID-19. Many tech companies are changing their long term planning and hiring practices to allow for remote working in the future, and benefits packages are being reworked to provide support for parents with child care and home schooling pressures.
-
Experiences from Using a Disciplined Approach to Change
When a company embraces the agile path, the first question is: “Where do I want to go?” and not “What is the right framework to do agile?” A disciplined approach to change can help you to choose from possible practices such as a “design pattern book” for agile transformation, and to identify when a practice is promising and when the current context is not the most favorable for it.