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  • A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: DevOps Dojo Stories from DOES London 2020

    Dojos were a popular topic at DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2020, appearing initially in Gene Kim’s opening remarks on the first day of the three-day virtual conference when he referred to Target’s dojo framework as shared in the IT Revolution Forum ebook. The concept went on to feature in talks from adidas, Virgin Atlantic, Comcast, Sky, Verizon, US Bank and Walmart.

  • Trust and Safety in High Performing Teams: QCon London Q&A

    People want to feel included in teams, and feel safe to learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo. The first thing for each of us to do is acknowledge that we have a partnership with each of our team members. Like all relationships, care and attention are needed to strengthen the bond and work together effectively.

  • Jakarta EE 9 - Milestone 1 Released by Eclipse Foundation

    The Eclipse Foundation celebrated the first milestone release of Jakarta EE 9 with a Jakarta EE 9 Milestone Release Party. The event, hosted by Eclipse’s Tanja Obradovic, Shabnam Mayel and Ivar Grimstad, featured short presentations by Java luminaries Will Lyons, Kevin Sutter, Scott Marlow, Steve Millidge and BJ Hargrave. The event was attended by 155 developers representing 20 countries.

  • DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2020: a Diversity and Inclusion Q&A with Shaaron A Alvares

    Shaaron A Alvares gave a talk at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 London Virtual titled ‘Accelerate Your DevOps Culture of Innovation with Everyday Inclusion and Belonging’. She began with presenting research data on the benefits of diverse teams, showing that diverse teams outperform their peers by 80%.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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