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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.
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Pandemic Shines Security Spotlight on Zoom Collaboration Risks
COVID-19 self-isolation has resulted in Zoom growing from 10m to 200m daily users. This has highlighted issues with Zoom's data privacy, security practices and meeting configurations. Bruce Schneier and other security commentators have provided insights into these issues. While governments and major companies have banned it, Zoom started a 90-day security hardening stint with former Facebook CSO.
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Looking after Mental Health and Wellbeing During COVID-19
In times of crisis such as what is happening around the world with COVID-19, anxiety, fear, sadness, anger and frustration are normal reactions and we need to accept that these emotions will happen without minimising or denying them. There are things which you can do to help overcome the stress; empathic responding is one way to positively deal with the stresses we all find ourselves under.
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How Team Interactions Help Kubernetes Adoption with Manuel Pais at QCon London
Manuel Pais talked at QCon London about how team interactions are vital to reduce cognitive load to have a successful adoption of Kubernetes. Pais recommends having a digital platform on top of Kubernetes. And, organizations can get started by assessing the team's cognitive load, defining a digital platform, and setting clear team interactions.
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Successful Remote Working
For both employees and employers, remote work requires intentional design and implementation to be effective. People find remote work challenging because the established mindset says that being in an office is how work gets done. Despite the challenges, when remote work is done well, the advantages to employees and employer are sufficient to make it worthwhile.
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Exploring Costs of Coordination During Outages with Laura Maguire at QCon London
Laura Maguire talked at QCon London about how the coordinative efforts during outages cause a high cognitive cost. Maguire found out that coordination during anomaly response is difficult, that existing models can undermine speedy resolution, and that the strategies to control the cost of coordination are adaptive to the type of incident. Moreover, tooling has additional costs of coordination.