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  • Low-Code Tools Optimize Engineering Time for Internal Applications

    Internal tools are critical pieces of software, often custom-built, and requiring significant developer bandwidth. Low-code platforms can optimize developer productivity, facilitate collaboration, and allow less technical employees to be more active in the development process.

  • Using the Problem Reframing Method to Build Innovative Solutions

    Building products that customers love relies heavily on the problem space: how well you know your audience and how clear are the pain points and main problems your users are facing. This means that the solution to a problem depends on how we frame the problem. This article provides different practices and tools on how to apply problem reframing underpinned by a real case study.

  • Going Digital in the Middle of a Pandemic

    IBM achieved an enterprise-wide digital transformation program despite the challenges posed by 100% remote work and the pandemic. The article explores various transformation levers such as team set-up, process, architecture, engineering practices & tooling, metrics & governance, and culture, and shows how they were applied to achieve sustainable outcomes.

  • Talking Like a Suit - Communicating the Importance of Engineering Work in Business Terms

    This article explores how to construct engineering work as a story, including clearly presenting a problem, offering a solution, and showing the business a path to success that solves their problem and avoids failure. By presenting your case in this way, you significantly increase your chances of getting these engineering problems addressed, while also becoming a better partner for the business.

  • How the Financial Times Approaches Engineering Enablement

    Companies need teams working on infrastructure, tooling and platforms; the way they work has to change so that they do not become a bottleneck. These teams need to be about enabling product teams to deliver business value. Investment in this area pays off as it speeds up many other teams and allows product-team engineers to focus on solving business problems that provide value to the organisation.

  • Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt

    Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. What we observe and label “technical debt” is the by-product of a dysfunctional process. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.

  • Lightweight External Business Rules

    Complex enterprise applications usually come with varying business logic. Such conditions and subsequent system actions, known as rules, are ever varying and demand involvement of domain specific knowledge more than technology and programming. The rules must reside outside the codebase, authored by people with core domain expertise with minimal tech knowledge.

  • Introducing the KivaKit Framework

    In this article, we take a brief tour of the KivaKit open source Java microservices application framework. KivaKit is a collection of mini-frameworks designed to work together. Each mini-framework is described in more detail at https://www.kivakit.org as well as on Jonathan Locke’s blog State of the Art.

  • Microservices — the Letter and the Spirit

    Microservices to be a pattern of ‘decoupled services’ managed to get the best out of it (the underlying understanding of the pattern (‘small’ vs ‘decoupled’) forces developers to take certain design decisions that are consistent with these objectives. In this article discuss we will discuss well and poor implementations: ‘small-services’ vs ‘decoupled-services’ or ‘Letter’ vs the ‘Spirit’.

  • Faster Financial Software Development Using Low Code: Focusing on the Four Key Metrics

    Low code/no code can help firms achieve the four key performance metrics described in the State of DevOps Reports and Accelerate, to achieve a faster pace of software development. Financial services especially stand to benefit from the trend of adopting low code/no code to drive digital transformation.

  • Reducing Cloud Infrastructure Complexity

    Cloud computing adoption has taken the world by storm, and is accelerating unabated. According to Flexera’s annual State of the Cloud Report for 2020, 93% of respondents used multi or hybrid cloud strategies. This article examines different aspects of cloud infrastructure complexity, and approaches to mitigate it.

  • How to Not Lose Your Job to Low-Code Software

    The uptake of low code software is so strong that it will almost certainly make its way into your organization. Most software engineers shouldn’t be concerned about this because they are good at the things that low code software is not yet good at. The key to surviving and thriving during this change is ensuring that your role encompasses responsibilities that low code can’t yet do.

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