InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
Web-Based Monte Carlo Simulation for Agile Estimation
A web-based tool for calculating project estimates using a Monte Carlo simulation was recently made publicly available. It was created in the hopes that agile teams will use it to facilitate conversations between scrum masters and product managers, focusing on realistic outcomes and not overly optimistic projections.
-
Building High-Quality Products with Distributed Teams
To ensure the quality of the products and services, Intermedia uses a common test & pre-production environment for all distributed teams. Lilia Gorbachik, product manager at Intermedia, mentioned at European Women in Tech that having a mature testing process, working with risks, and making daily decisions from a high-quality product perspective are key aspects to build high-quality products.
-
Effectively Using Jira with an Overarching Vision
Dzmitry Hryb of Atlassian partner DevInit has recently published an article responding to a TechCrunch story that claimed using Jira's issue-centric model could result in a myopia, which misses the "macro-vision." Recent writing by architect Eltjo R. Poort and DevOps lead Matt Saunders also offers patterns for using Jira with other best-fit tools to capture vision and architectural direction.
-
Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey
After having seen and evidenced the tangible benefit of lean at Mashreq Bank, agile was seen as a natural progression, an evolutionary step. Agile and lean are well-linked; you still need to identify waste, and remove non-value add activities so you can spend more time doing what the customer needs, argued Steve Snowdon. Together with Ed Capaldi he spoke about Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey.
-
The Role of Executives and Managers in Value Stream Management: Insight from Al Shalloway
As organizations are transitioning to agile, executives' role is to design and communicate the vision of an effective organization that best aligns with its culture and performance goals. In the most effective organizations, managers have the responsibility of reducing the cost of delay, by removing any organizational blocker impeding the flow of value.
-
Agile in Higher Education: Experiences from The Open University
Universities need to embrace an agile and product mindset, as they are grappling with hypothesis-driven development of new kinds of products and services of which they understand very little, for users whose behaviours and needs they little understand, said Matthew Moran. He presented applying the agile mindset, principles and practices for online course development at Aginext 2019.
-
Design and Security in Agile: QCon London Q&A
Reviews of design diagrams by domain experts can detect potential security breaches not found by vulnerability scans or security automation. Such reviews should focus on critical functions like issuing and managing access tokens, transferring data to external services, and running untrusted code, said Kevin Gilpin, enterprise software engineer and co-founder of AppLand, at QCon London 2019.
-
Microsoft Survey to Study the JavaEE to Cloud Migration: A Call to the Java Community to Participate
The Microsoft Azure engineering team is calling on the Java community to participate in a special survey to understand the challenges of migrating Java EE applications to the cloud. The team would appreciate input from developers who either: have already migrated Java EE applications to cloud; are currently going through a migration; or are planning to start a migration.
-
Observability in Testing with ElasTest
In a distributed application it is difficult to use debugging techniques common in developing non-distributed applications. Bringing production observability to your testing environment helps to find bugs, argued Francisco Gortázar at the European Testing Conference 2019. He presented ElasTest, a tool for developers to test and validate complex distributed systems using observability.
-
Applying Artificial Intelligence in the Agile World
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems with the agile world is having a disruptive effect on how we build software and the types of products that we build, said Aidan Casey. By combining machine learning and deep learning we can build applications that truly learn like humans. AI bias is a very serious concern, as AI systems are only as good as the data sets used to train them.
-
People Are More Complex Than Computers: Growing the Equal Experts' Team and Culture
Earlier this week, in QConLondon 2019, Mairead O’Connor from Equal Experts presented on the topic “People are more complex than computers”. In this talk, O'Connor presented on the way that Equal Experts managed to grow into a network of 1,500 people, with over 800 of them being consultants and the organisational and cultural challenges that come with creating this unique organisational structure.
-
Open Source Benefits to Innovation and Organizational Agility
Capital One hosted their 3rd Agile Conference in December 2018 in Virginia. Among the guest speakers, Andrew Aitken, global open source strategy leader at Wipro, presented the state of open source and how it is becoming an industry-wide organizational keystone strategy in driving innovation and in retaining top talent.
-
Building Services at Scale at Airbnb: QCon London Q&A
The re-architecture to SOA at Airbnb improved the performance of the services and site reliability. Faster build and deploy times led to increased developer productivity, and improving clarity and boundaries for ownership increased efficiency. Jessica Tai, a software engineer at Airbnb, presented Airbnb’s Great Migration: Building Services at Scale at QCon London 2019.
-
How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A
Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.
-
San Francisco: QCon.ai Schedule Nearing Completion
April 15-17 software engineering teams will gather in the Bay area for the Second Annual QCon.ai Software Conference. QCon.ai is focused on helping teams adopt and validate roadmaps in machine learning by hearing and learning from those that are doing it today. What truly differentiates QCon.ai is its machine learning focus given through the lens of the software engineer.