InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Portia Tung on Playful Leadership
Playful leadership is a serious topic - play is the most effective and efficient way of enabling individuals to learn, lead and work together. It fosters a growth-oriented approach that enables people to change with relative ease and even joy instead of resistance and anguish. Play is important to well being and creativity in the workplace.
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The Risk of Climate Change and What Tech Can Do: QCon London Q&A
Data centres create more emissions than the aviation industry due to energy usage and 24x7 availability, and the growth of the cloud computing and mining of cryptocurrencies is increasing the impact technology has on our climate. Moving existing servers to providers who use renewable sources of electricity could lead to planet-wide climate improvements. A QCon Q&A with Jason Box and Paul Johnston.
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Mitigating Software Vulnerabilities at Microsoft over the Last 20+ Years
At BlueHat IL 2019, Microsoft engineer Matt Miller described how the software vulnerability landscape has evolved over the last 20+ years and the approach Microsoft has been taking to mitigate threats. Interestingly, among the major culprits of security bugs, says Miller, are memory safety issues, which account for 70% of total security bugs Microsoft has patched.
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Katherine Kirk on Dealing with Teamwork Hell
Dysfunction in teams can truly feel like being in hell, confined within an endless loop of unhappiness, and there are ways to approach the challenges through actively managing your own response to stressful situations, maintain your own integrity and ethical standards and diligently take small steps rather than trying to address every aspect of the situation at one time.
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Using Contract Testing for Applications with Microservices
When using microservices, integration points between services are a hotbed for bugs. With consumer-driven contract testing, the consumer defines the contract and verifications are made against it within the providers build/test lifecycle. Contract testing fits well into a microservice workflow and kills your integration bugs, argued Maarten Groeneweg at the European Testing Conference 2019.
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Release Management and Customer Experience at Snapchat
In 2019, T-Mobile hosted Snapchat executive, Tammarrian Rogers, and release manager, Claire Reinert, who presented how, in three years, they transformed their release management processes and culture which directly improved their customer experience.
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Effective Mob Programming Patterns
Lisi Hocke spoke at the Testing United conference in Bratislava about how she helped shape a collaborative environment through the use of mob-programming. Hocke described how her team effectively used a strong-pairing style. Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Jeff Langr have both recently written about their own patterns for maximising the benefits of mob programming. We survey their experiences.
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GitHub Draft Pull Requests Enable New Collaboration Workflows
GitHub has introduced draft pull requests to handle work-in-progress scenarios where you might want to open a PR or start a conversation with your teammates before your code is ready to be reviewed.