InfoQ Homepage Stories & Case Studies Content on InfoQ
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Investigating Near Misses to Prevent Disasters: QCon London Q&A
Investigating near misses by gathering data from the field and exploring anything that looks wrong or is a bit odd can help to prevent disasters, said Ed Holland, software development manager at Metaswitch Networks. At QCon London 2019 he gave a talk about avoiding being in the news by investigating near misses.
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Experiences from Getting Started as a Lead
Having a transition period to lead teams together with a mentor helped Dan Persa to have a smooth switch from senior software engineer to engineering lead. At Codemotion Amsterdam 2019 he shared some of his experiences and learnings, in order to inspire other developers to take the leadership path.
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Discovering Culture through Artifacts: QCon London Q&A
Behavior and values are two critical components to organizational culture; values denote what the organization believes in, and behaviors are rooted in those values, argued Mike McGarr, engineering leader at Slack. At QCon London 2019 he spoke about improving your understanding of an organization’s culture, the key components of culture, and what to look for in order to learn about the culture.
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Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey
After having seen and evidenced the tangible benefit of lean at Mashreq Bank, agile was seen as a natural progression, an evolutionary step. Agile and lean are well-linked; you still need to identify waste, and remove non-value add activities so you can spend more time doing what the customer needs, argued Steve Snowdon. Together with Ed Capaldi he spoke about Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey.
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Agile in Higher Education: Experiences from The Open University
Universities need to embrace an agile and product mindset, as they are grappling with hypothesis-driven development of new kinds of products and services of which they understand very little, for users whose behaviours and needs they little understand, said Matthew Moran. He presented applying the agile mindset, principles and practices for online course development at Aginext 2019.
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Building Services at Scale at Airbnb: QCon London Q&A
The re-architecture to SOA at Airbnb improved the performance of the services and site reliability. Faster build and deploy times led to increased developer productivity, and improving clarity and boundaries for ownership increased efficiency. Jessica Tai, a software engineer at Airbnb, presented Airbnb’s Great Migration: Building Services at Scale at QCon London 2019.
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Learning to Code Better with Lean Coding
Lean coding aims to provide insight into the actual coding activity, helping developers to detect that things are not going as expected at the 10 minute-level and enabling them to call for help immediately. Developers can use it to improve their technical skills to become better in writing code.
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Experiments with Blockchain at Dutch Railways
Testers will sooner or later be asked to test IT-solutions that incorporate blockchain technology. Software development is different for blockchain-based applications; blockchain impacts the way we are used to working, said Sanne Visser, a software tester at Dutch Railways. She spoke about how professionals can deal with blockchain-based software at European Women in Tech.
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Adding Agile to Lean at Toyota Connected
Adding agility to Lean Product Development enabled Toyota Connected to deliver faster, with higher quality, and reduced costs. Nigel Thurlow presented “Lean is NOT enough” at Lean Digital Summit 2018 where he showed how they embraced agile for colocated teams and outsourcing, and how portfolio planning evolved to an executive prioritization model to increase business agility.
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Lean and Agile Transformation at Banco BPI
After adopting Scrum, Banco BPI came to lean in an iterative way, by doing things that made sense to them in their context. Their goal is to bring parties closer together to optimise the whole system and avoid micro-optimisations. Your own context and needs must guide you, don't wait to have the perfect answer, but iterate relentlessly and take small steps is what they learned.
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Enterprise Agility in the Norwegian Government
The Norwegian Labor and Welfare Directorate wanted to transform their IT department to be able to deliver value continuously and deliver faster, in line with users' ever-increasing expectations. Torill Iversen, director, and Kjell Tore Guttormsen, team lead, spoke about how they went from bureaucracy to enterprise agility at the Atlassian Summit Europe 2018.
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Doubling Delivery Without Multiplying Staff, Using Lean Principles
Lean tools can help to improve productivity and fulfil customer commitments. At Keepeek, techniques like pull flow, PDCA, and Red Bin are used to analyse discrepancies. Improvements are prioritised on customer impact. As a result, their throughput increased significantly, customer satisfaction went up, and their NPS improved.
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Think of Software as a Force for Good, Using Teal and Agile
A teal organisation set its horizon by defining its higher purpose and describing why it exists. Individuals join the company because of the value it creates for the world, and work freely towards a specific purpose. A teal and agile company has a culture of complete openness, transparency and mutual trust; everyone should feel safe and encouraged to share ideas, and make mistakes, without fear.
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Enabling Individual Growth for Business Value at Tangible
When a company starts to grow, working together is not enough for new people to learn the culture. For competence growth and for developing their culture, Tangible organizes workshops, internal days of knowledge exchange, hosted events and training, and evening activities, and assigns mentors for new people. This helps them to align individual values and intentions with the corporate vision.
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Organizational Refactoring at Mango
To increase agility, companies can descale themselves into value centers in charge of a business strategic initiative, with end-to-end responsibility and with full access to the information regarding customer needs. You need to create spaces where people can cross-collaborate and learn, using for instance self-organized improvement circles, Communities of Practice or an internal Open Source model.