InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Pandemic Programming Survey Results Show Negative Impact of COVID-19 Changes
The Pandemic Programming survey looked at the ways that developers' lives have been impacted by the lockdowns and changes caused by COVID-19. Over 2200 people from 52 countries answered the questionnaire to assess their wellbeing and productivity before and while working at home. The results show that wellbeing and productivity are suffering with some groups more impacted than others.
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Making Distributed Organizations More Effective
An autonomous team model with teams organized around geographical or time-zone proximity can make a distributed organization more effective. With the Reverse Conway Maneuver you can deliberately add or remove bottlenecks to better support the designs you are trying to build.
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Applying Observability to Ship Faster
To get fast feedback, ship work often, as soon as it is ready, and use automated systems in Live to test the changes. Monitoring can be used to verify if things are good, and to raise an alarm if not. Shipping fast in this way can result in having fewer tests and can make you more resilient to problems.
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Mental Wellbeing in the Tech Industry: QCon London Q&A
Businesses are losing a lot of money to mental ill-health. The pace at which the tech industry moves and the pressure to deliver can leave staff struggling to keep up. People have different sweet spots for pressure and performance, and they change over time; the way to know an individual’s sweet spot is by talking to people to find out how they work.
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Facilitating Threat Modelling Remotely
ThoughtWorks' Jim Gumbley recently published a guide to Threat Modelling on Martinfowler.com with a template for facilitating remote and onsite sessions. He makes a case for continuous threat modelling within each iteration, alongside business stake-holders. Derek Handova has also written about removing friction from security through automation and a greater security focus in the SDLC.
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Predicting the Future with Forecasting and Agile Metrics
Common estimation approaches often fail to give us the predictability we want. Forecasting provides a range of possible outcomes with the chance of outcomes becoming reality. It can answer questions like “When will it be done?” or “What can we deliver by xx?” with confidence.
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Conflicting Reports on Remote Worker Productivity and Contentment
Remote working is becoming normal for the tech industry, with most tech employees working remotely due to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19. Studies and surveys are trying to measure the impact on productivity that organisations are seeing as a result of the shift. The results are conflicting and illustrate the complexity of the times we find ourselves in.
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Volkswagen’s Journey towards a Software-Driven Company
Volkswagen is changing their working methods for software development, where they focus on regaining their own development skills and developing new products based on new technologies and methods. The technologies used are decided on by the teams independently.
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QCon San Francisco 2020 Announces Program Committee
The QCon team has finalized the Program Committee for QCon San Francisco 2020 (Nov 16-18). The committee works on all aspects of software development. At QCon topics, track hosts and speakers are handpicked to guarantee relevant and timely content.
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Tech Giants Shift to More Remote Working for the Long Term
As the impacts of COVID-19 continue to be felt around the globe, and many tech industry employees get used to working from home, large tech companies are making long-term decisions about allowing and encouraging their people to work remotely. Facebook, Twitter, Shopify and others are making plans to have most or all of their workforce permanently remote.
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How Agile Can Work Together with Deadlines
Even with a hard deadline, you can still prioritise work in sprints, use daily stand ups to manage blockers, and run retrospectives to improve your ways of working. Stakeholder relationships are key when attempting to negotiate and soften arbitrary deadlines. Start conversations up front to set better expectations and ensure a smoother delivery, particularly when facing uncertainty.
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In Memory of John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway, pioneering Mathematician and creator of the Game of Life, was sadly lost to covid-19 in April. Hackday recently wrote about his influence on generations of programmers. The Communications of the ACM, the Scientific American and Siobhan Roberts, his biographer, have all written about his long list of celebrated accomplishments and contributions.
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How to Supercharge a Team with Delegation: QCon London Q&A
Delegating work can result in getting it done better and faster; it increases team autonomy and creates opportunities for learning. Delegation is a continuum: it begins by doing a task yourself and ends by having somebody else take on that task. James Stanier, VP of engineering at Brandwatch, spoke about delegating to self-organizing teams at QCon London 2020.
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Predicting Failing Tests with Machine Learning
Machine learning can be used to predict how tests behave on changes in the code. These predictions reduce the feedback time to developers by providing information at check-in time. Marco Achtziger & Dr. Gregor Endler presented how they are using machine learning to learn from failures at OOP 2020.
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Architecture Decision Records at Spotify
Several teams at Spotify use architecture decision records (ADR) to capture decisions they make. ADRs have brought a number of benefits to Spotify, including improved onboarding for new developers, improved agility when handing over project ownership due to organization changes, and improved alignment across teams regarding best practices.