InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
Firefox Releases Facebook Container Extension
Firefox has released an extension that it claims will stop the company snooping on users’ non-Facebook web traffic. The Facebook Container extension isolates users' identities to a separate container tab, which makes it harder for Facebook to track other web activity.
-
Automating Visual Testing with Appraise
Developing applications where the look and feel is key for success might help to automate visual testing. Appraise, an open source tool on Github licensed under MIT, applies the approach of specification by example to visuals. It helps teams to review and approve changes to web pages using visual inspection.
-
Making Stack Overflow More Welcoming
Jay Hanlon, EVP of Culture and Experience for Stack Overflow, posted a blog entry titled “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change”. In the post he explains the problems Stack Overflow have which make it an unwelcoming and intimidating place. He explains the commitment to addressing the issues and provides specific steps they are taking.
-
Measuring Trust and Its Impact on Leadership and Organisational Change
Atlassian's Dom Price and Prudy Gourguechon, a business psychology consultant, have both recently written about the importance of trust between teams and their leaders, indicating the difficulty in confidently measuring this. They provide behavioural patterns to look out for in the way teams collaborate, deal with uncertainty, take personal ownership and experience inclusivity from leadership.
-
Sustainable Software with Agile
Sustainable software enables you to deliver changes to the customer more quickly with a lower likelihood of bugs, decrease of the total cost of ownership of applications, and increase business agility. It’s possible to verify the sustainability of software using a combination of automated analysis of source code, expert review of technical artifacts, and comparison with benchmark data.
-
Trunk Based Development as a Cornerstone for Continuous Delivery
Dave Farley, co-author of the pivotal Continuous Delivery book, recently wrote about push-back to the practice of trunk based development, despite evidence of its role in achieving the benefits of CI and high performing teams. Jez Humble, his co-author, also commented in a twitter-thread on the cultural aspects of the practice to understand its relation to programmer psyche.
-
12th State of Agile Report Published
The 2018 State of Agile Report has been published by CollabNet VersionOne. Some of the conclusions from the report are that the need for customer and user satisfaction is increasing, more and more organizations are scaling agile, distributed teams are becoming the norm in agile software development, and many organization have started or plan to start a DevOps initiative in the next 12 months.
-
IBM Looking for a Quantum "Killer App"
A first bunch of startups have joined IBM’s Q Network to help explore practical applications of quantum computing for business and science, writes IBM Research director Jeff Welser, looking for a quantum killer app.
-
Lean-Agile Procurement for Outsourcing
One of the last barriers to organisations becoming agile in their operations is the procurement process. At the recent Agilia Conference, Mirko Kleiner presented on Lean-Agile Procurement, an approach to negotiating service contracts which involves procurement specialists, IT teams and suppliers, to move from a combative stance to a collaborative approach to addressing the customers’ needs.
-
Software Engineering for Creativity, Collaboration, and Inventiveness
A software engineering discipline must be iterative, based on feedback, incremental, experimental, and empirical. Craftsmanship is not sufficient; engineering is an amplifier, it enhances creativity, collaboration, and inventiveness. Continuous delivery is grounded in engineering principles.
-
Cultivating Psychological Safety
When we’re feeling stressed, threatened, or unsafe, it becomes harder to think creatively, work collaboratively, and solve problems. You can cultivate a culture of safety by letting folks know that it’s safe to make mistakes, by listening for real understanding, and by practicing mindfulness.
-
Dr. Nicole Forsgren on the DORA & Google Collaboration on the New Accelerate State of DevOps Report
DORA and Google Cloud will conduct original research to be delivered as The Accelerate State of DevOps Report focused on software developer issues. The research aim is to surface new findings that provide guidance for improvement in resource management, productivity and quality of technology delivery teams.
-
Leaders Discuss How to Build Great Engineering Cultures
QConLondon’s Building Great Engineering Cultures track brought together a panel of leaders to take questions from an audience. Leaders from Google, Sky Betting and Gaming, ITV, Deliveroo and GlobalSign shared how they support and build great cultures for engineers, accounting for individual growth, organisation need, a social conscience and a balanced life.
-
Perspectives on Mob Programming and Mob Testing
Maaret Pyhäjärvi, author of the Mob Programming Guidebook, wrote about her experience with mob testing, and how it contributed to her team's journey to recognising improved cross-functionality. Woody Zuill also recently spoke to the Agile Uprising podcast about discussing how mob programming provides an effective collaboration model for delivering software in small releasable increments.
-
Q&A with Stuart Davidson on Scaling Continuous Delivery at Skyscanner
Stuart Davidson spoke at QConLondon 2018 about Skyscanner's mission to get from a reactive operations model to providing teams with an empowering developer experience. Davidson told the story of how, with support and a lofty-goal from their CTO, they began on a technical and cultural journey to enable their squads to deliver 10 thousand times a day. InfoQ speaks with Davidson to learn more.