InfoQ Homepage Quality Content on InfoQ
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Unlocking Software Engineering Potential for Better Products
Becoming an empowered team means solving problems rather than shipping features. Empowering software engineers and involving them early in discovery work can result in better products. If we measure outcomes rather than output, we can also hold teams accountable. Supporting software engineers to empower them means trusting them and getting out of their way.
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Programming Foundations for Test Automation
Proper programming foundations can improve your test automation, making it easier to maintain testing code, and reduce stress. A foundation of the theory and basic principles of coding and programming can help to bring test automation to the next level. Object-oriented programming principles can help to overcome code smells.
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Test Automation Requires a Strategy and Clean Code
Having a good strategy for test automation can make it easier to implement test automation and reduce test maintenance costs. The test automation pyramid and automation test wheel can be of help when formulating a test automation strategy and plan. Test automation code should be clean code, and treated similarly to production code.
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How to Assess Software Quality
The quality practices assessment model (QPAM) can be used to classify a team’s exhibited behavior into four dimensions: Beginning, Unifying, Practicing, and Innovating. It explores social and technical quality aspects like feedback loops, culture, code quality and technical debt, and deployment pipeline.
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Helping Teams Deliver with a Quality Practices Assessment Model
The quality practices assessment model explores quality aspects that help teams to deliver in an agile way. The model covers both social and technical aspects of quality; it is used to assess the quality of the team’s processes and also touches on product quality. With an assessment, teams can look at where their practices lie within the quality aspects and decide on what they want to improve.
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How Twitter Automated Data Quality Check Process
Twitter engineering has recently shared a blog post on how they architected and developed a quality automation platform. Twitter digests and creates thousands of data sets for different data products and applications. The next natural step is to make sure of the quality of the data by adding automation on top of it. In this news post, we explore this architecture in more detail.
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How We Can Use Data to Improve System Quality
To understand how systems are being used, we can collect metrics and identify trends over time. The data and insights gained can be used to improve system quality by improving software design or testing patterns.
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Using the Technical Debt Metaphor to Communicate Code Quality
With technical debt, we end up paying a gradually rising cost. The technical debt metaphor was intended as a way to help us talk and think about the invisibility of decisions and qualities in code. Kevlin Henney gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022. His sixth impossibility was technical debt is quantifiable as financial debt.
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Google Production Excellence Program "ProdEx": Christof Leng at DOES 2022
Christof Leng, SRE lead at Google, presented ProdEx, their production excellence review program that helps manage operational risks and promote best practices. ProdEx is a community that builds platforms together, establishes standards and promotes best practices, so people learn from each others and grow. Today they have more than 100 SRE teams signed up and have performed more than 1000 reviews.
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Getting Feedback When Your Colleagues Are Also Your Customers
Getting and using feedback from colleagues who are also customers using your product can improve the quality of the product and help to improve the way of working. In this situation, it’s easier to receive feedback, but you can get overloaded by it.
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Applying Observability to Increase Delivery Speed and Flow in Teams
When we design team and departmental processes, we want to know what’s happening in the software teams. Asking team members to provide information or fill in fields in tools adds a burden and distorts reality. Setting up observability in the software can provide alternative insights in a less intrusive way. Observability in the software can be an asset to organizing teams.
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Every Question Has an Answer: an Impossible Thing for Developers
We tend to assume that every question has an answer, which for instance isn’t true when we want to find out what the current time is. Developers should increase awareness of unexpected failure modes, advertise the possibility of failure, and use time-outs to recover from waiting for an answer that will never come.
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Improving Software Quality with Gamification
Bingo Bongo sessions for bug hunting and playing risk storming games can improve quality. Gamification supports learning, can make everyday work interesting, and strengthen team spirit. Playing games should be part of the daily work at the office and seen as an effective work time. In gamification, a real value is created by the creative process.
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How Measuring Defect Mass Helps to Test Critical Product Areas
Introducing a measurement called “defect mass” helped a project to find the most impacted areas by developments and decide how many tests should be run for each impacted area. Using this measurement together with other KPIs helped them focus their testing. They managed to decrease the number of customer incidents.
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Implementing Remote Software Verification and Validation Using a Real Vehicle
Bosch is doing automated regression testing and user testing using a real car instead of a simulated one. Their aim is to test the software as quickly as possible, both from the test engineer's and user's perspectives. The car can be accessed remotely, and team members can work without being in the car.