InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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How to Avoid Failing at Mobile Test Automation
Test automation in mobile development should be done by the Scrum team; don’t set up separate test automation teams, said Nadya Denisenko. She advised obeying the testing pyramid for mobile testing and involve testers from the start. Testers are quality-oriented developers who can guide and assist other developers in delivering high-quality software; manual testing will disappear in the future.
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Testing Complex Distributed Systems at FT.com: Sarah Wells Shares Lessons Learned
The complexity in complex distributed systems isn’t in the code, it’s between the services or functions. Testing implies balancing finding problems versus delivering value, said Sarah Wells at the European Testing Conference. Testers often have the best understanding of what the system does; they have a good hypothesis about what went wrong, and are able to validate it pretty quickly.
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Retrospective 3.0 at Ocado Technology
Toni Tassani identifies retrospective pitfalls, such as stale and repetitive activities and raises risks: the retrospective as an excuse for not solving issues on the spot, identifying an experiment but not driving the impediment to resolution, Post-it theater. He suggests looking at retrospectives radically differently, leveraging continuous improvement techniques borrowed from Kanban.
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Tech Ethics and Professionalism
Anne Currie, strategist at Container Solutions and co-founder of the Sustainable Servers campaign, is giving a talk titled "Are Tech Ethics Unprofessional?" at the upcoming Aginext.io conference. She spoke to InfoQ about her talk and why ethics has become such an important topic in recent times.
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Q&A with Susanne Birgersdotter about Entrepreneurship and Thriving in Tech
Make sure that as an entrepreneur you are extremely well-informed before a presentation, about your own topic and also about the investors and their company. When your first idea or company fails, don’t quit, don’t play safe, and get back up as fast as you can. Female entrepreneurs who want to thrive in tech can join a women in tech group where members empower, connect and support each other.
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2019 State of Testing Survey: Call for Participation
The 2019 State of Testing survey is now seeking participation, and aims to provide insights into how the testing profession develops and to recognize testing trends. Anyone completing the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the State of Testing 2019 report once it is published.
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The Five Principles of Very Fast Organizational Transformations (VFOT)
The five principles of Very Fast Organizational Transformations (VFOT) are principled, time-boxed, whole-system, inviting and everyone at once. They are based on open source and open space foundational and proven theories and practices. Combined to form a cohesive transformative strategy, they guaranty the speed of any transformation because they are inclusive, empowering and transparent.