BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Risk Content on InfoQ

  • Improving IT Performance with Continuous Delivery

    The main benefit of continuous delivery is lower-risk releases; comprehensive test automation and continuous integration are practices that have the biggest impact on IT performance. Research of continuous delivery and IT performance tells us that implementing continuous delivery practices leads to higher IT performance and high performers achieve both higher tempo and higher levels of stability.

  • Practical Tips for Automated Acceptance Tests

    Testing techniques like Equivalence Partitioning, Boundary Value Analysis, and Risk-based Testing can help you decide what to test and when to automate a test. InfoQ spoke with Adrian Bolboacă about different types of tests, writing sufficient and good acceptance tests, criteria to decide to automate a test, and how to apply test automation to create executable specifications.

  • Applying Supply Chain Management to Deliver Faster with Higher Quality

    Supply chain management can raise the bar with continuous development, argues Joshua Corman, Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and co-founder of Rugged Software. Our dependence on IT and software is growing faster than our ability to secure it, and applying supply chain approaches to software development helps to address complexity which reduces risks and increases quality.

  • Building an Agile Organization Using Business Mapping

    Dan North gave a talk about business mapping at the Scaling Agile for the Enterprise 2016 congress in Brussels. InfoQ interviewed him about the problems that he sees from a business perspective when the IT part of an organization adopts agile, and asked him what business mapping is and how it can help organizations to increase their agility.

  • Exploring the Causes of Problems with the Analysis of Competing Hypothesis Method

    The analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH) method can be used to evaluate multiple competing hypotheses when investigating problems. The method mitigates cognitive biases that humans experience when exploring the causes of problems.

  • Is Unhedged Call Options a Better Metaphor for Bad Code?

    In a blog post on bad code and technical debt Steve Freeman described how Chris Matts came up with the metaphor of an unhedged call option for bad code. This post is being intensively discussed on Reddit and on Hacker News recently. InfoQ interviewed Steve and Chris about using metaphors for bad code and code smells, trade-offs and costs of low quality code, and responsibilities for code quality.

  • Building Agile Relationships with Customers and End-Users

    Teams can become so focused that they forget the world around them and risk losing contact with stakeholders. This makes it difficult for them to know what their customers need and how end users will use their products. At the ASAS2014 conference Daisy Rasing-de Joode will show how successful agile teams create synergy by being interdependent and highly collaborative with their environment.

  • Nurturing a Culture for Continuous Learning

    Continuous learning supports agile adoption in enterprises. A culture change can be needed to enable and support continuous learning. There are several things that managers and agile coaches can do to establish and nurture a continuous learning culture.

  • How to Do Just Enough Up-front Design

    This article includes advice for doing enough up-front architectural design to provide the needed structure to start a project, aligning the team with the architect’s vision and assessing the possible risks.

  • Stories of Using Real Options to Take Decisions

    Projects and product development is one long series of difficult decisions, says Pascal Van Cauwenberghe. Real Options can help you to take the right decision at the right time, even under difficult circumstances. At the Agile Tour Brussels conference, Pascal presented stories of his experiences with using real options in decision taking.

  • Software Development as Risk Management

    Should software development look to finance for planning risk and uncertainty? That question recently surfaced in a debate about the “Last Responsible Moment” decision making practice in agile software development. This article covers some recent trends and debate around using finance concepts for risk management and planning in software development.

  • SOA and Information Risk Management

    Clive Gee, an experienced IBM SOA Practitioner, describes how IT securing the networks has evolved into what he refers to as Information risk management. As the collaboration space increases with application integration and service oriented systems, he examines the risk management of the increased the surface area of threats and vulnerability.

  • Visual Risk Management

    Irrespective of the size of the project, stakeholders feel confident when they can a keep track of the risks and their mitigation strategies. Agile heavily promotes the use of information radiators. Keeping in line with the philosophy of radiators, Agilists suggested different ways of depicting risks visually for easy tracking and mitigation.

  • Lean + Real Options = Reduced Complexity and Risk

    Real Options, a decision-making process based on Financial Option mathematics, was mentioned by Kent Beck in his 1999 "white book," Extreme Progamming Explained. More recently, Agilists have been exploring how Real Options intersects with Agile. Now Chris Matts and Olav Maassen specifically address the Lean Software community, proposing that application of Real Options improves Lean Development.

  • Agile Risk Management

    Risk management is an activity directed towards the assessing, mitigating and monitoring of risks. Agilists suggest ways to effectively manage risk and use it to make better commitments to the stakeholders.

BT