InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
Quality and Culture: Learnings from Other Disciplines and Industries
We can gain by learning about other industries such as aviation and healthcare, and studying other disciplines, argued Conor Fitzgerald, software tester at Poppulo, at RebelCon.io 2019. Aviation has a history of continually learning from its mistakes, whereas in healthcare, culture and bias seem to challenge learning and continuous improvement.
-
UX Design Ethics: Dealing with Dark Patterns and Designer Bias
It’s easy to design an interface that persuades users into something that’s in the interest of a company. The question design community needs to ask more often is if we should comply with such practices, argued Agnieszka Urbańska and Ewelina Skłodowska, UX designers, at ACE! 2019. Dark patterns and even unconscious designer’s bias contradict empathy and are incompatible with human-centered design.
-
Teaching Machines to Understand Emotions with Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis teaches computers to recognise the human emotions present in text. The fundamental trade-off in sentiment analysis is between simplicity and accuracy. Approaches vary from using a list of words associated with emotions, to deep learning with techniques like word embeddings, neural networks and attention mechanisms.
-
Summary of Chaos Community Day v4.0: Resilience, Observability, and Gamedays
Earlier in the year, the fourth edition of “Chaos Community Day” was held at Work-Bench in New York City. Key takeaways from the day included: the topic of chaos engineering draws heavily from other domains, which software engineers can also learn from; understanding systems, and communicating and exchanging the related mental models, is vital for establishing resilience.
-
Adapting Risk-Based Testing to Agile Teams: Think about Testing before Coding
Risk-based testing improves the quality of the delivered stories and helps system testers to become part of the Scrum team, said Csaba Szökőcs, a product expert at Evosoft Hungary Kft. At TestCon Moscow 2019, he explained how they adapted classical risk-based testing to fit with their agile implementation by making it part of the sprint planning and definition of done.
-
Experience Building a QA Team in a Growing Organization
Shifting the test team to the left brought the whole team closer together, enabled faster learning, and improved collaboration, claimed Neven Matas, QA team lead at Infinum. He spoke at TestCon Moscow 2019 where he shared the lessons learned from building a QA team in a growing organization.
-
How Design Systems Support Team Communication and Collaboration
By using design systems, design teams can improve their workflow, reuse their knowledge, and ensure better consistency, said Stefan Ivanov. They allow one to fail faster and to speed up the iteration cycle, enable spending more time collecting user feedback in the early stages of product design, and reach the sweet spot of a product market fit much faster.
-
Human Centered Design for Special Needs: Q&A with Mileha Soneji
Observing users to understand their needs helps to define the problem you need to solve, argued Mileha Soneji. In her talk at ACE Conference 2019 she showed how human-centered design with minimum viable prototypes can help to gain better insight faster, and that breaking down problems into smaller problems can be used to ideate simpler solutions.
-
Why and How Etsy Embraces Differences at the Workplace
Etsy has deployed various tactics to drive diversity and greater inclusion. They recently included diversity and inclusion in their guiding principles, integrated inclusion at each step of their employees' lifecycle, and developed strategies not just to hire diversity, but to foster a culture of inclusion. They empowered their employee resource groups to lead change based on feedback.
-
Optimize Automated Testing Using Defect Data
By integrating the test framework and the bug tracking system, it becomes possible to deactivate test cases for known bugs and reactivate them when the bug is solved. Aneta Petkova, QA chapter lead at SumUp, presented The Framework That Knows Its Bugs at TestCon Moscow 2019.
-
QCon San Francisco 2019: Registrations Open & Top Videos from QCon SF 2018
QCon San Francisco, the software conference that attracts attendees from all over the world, returns November 11-13, 2019, for the 13th year. QCon is organized by the people behind InfoQ & is dedicated to providing a platform for innovators & early adopters to share their story in the global epicenters of software development: Beijing, London, New York, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and San Francisco.
-
Open Source Testware for Systematic IoT Testing: Eclipse IoT-Testware
The project Eclipse IoT-Testware is delivering free open-source test tools and programs for the industry and companies developing Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions. At TestCon Moscow 2019 Axel Rennoch, senior scientist at Fraunhofer FOKUS, spoke about quality assurance for IoT.
-
Investigating Near Misses to Prevent Disasters: QCon London Q&A
Investigating near misses by gathering data from the field and exploring anything that looks wrong or is a bit odd can help to prevent disasters, said Ed Holland, software development manager at Metaswitch Networks. At QCon London 2019 he gave a talk about avoiding being in the news by investigating near misses.
-
How ThoughtWorks Applied User Centered Design to Drive Digital Transformations
At Agile India 2019, ThoughtWorks presented how design thinking enabled various industries to disrupt their technology and their business model. Product and technology teams need to interact differently and develop new customer centric skills. Based on how user centricity is changing business models and organizations, ThoughtWorks proposed a new version of the Agile Manifesto.
-
Experiences from Working with Distributed Agile Teams
Not being able to frequently connect with your colleagues face-to-face makes successful communication more difficult in distributed teams, said Shabi Shafei, Scrum Master at ABN AMRO Bank. A Q&A about how distributed teams can transform into great agile teams.