InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ
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Technical Debt is Quantifiable as Financial Debt: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Technical debt can be quantified in various ways, but you cannot precisely quantify the associated financial debt. According to Kevlin Henney, we can quantify things like how many debt items we have, the estimated time to fix each debt item, a variety of metrics associated with our code, such as cyclomatic complexity, degree of duplication, number of lines of code, but not the financial debt.
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Using Data to Predict Future Usage and Increase User Insights
By identifying usage trends, you can proactively adjust load, scaling, and routing to better handle the load on particular parts of the globe when you know it will peak there. Data about how users interact with your application can be used to design future features that better mimic these patterns and ensure that new features have a better chance of solving real user problems and getting adopted.
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Establishing Autonomy and Responsibility with Networks of Teams
Working in outdated ways causes people to quit their work. Pim de Morree suggests structuring organizations into networks of autonomous teams and creating meaningful work through a clear purpose and direction. According to him, we can work better, be more successful, and have more fun at the same time.
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How to Test Low Code Applications
For low code applications there are technical things you don’t have to test, like the integration with the database and the syntax of a screen. But you still have to test functionally, to check if you’re building the right thing. End-to-end testing and non-functional testing can be very important for low code applications.
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A Distributed System is Knowable: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Failure in distributed systems is normal. Distributed systems can provide only two of the three guarantees in consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. According to Kevlin Henney, this limits how much you can know about how a distributed system will behave. He gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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Dealing with Cognitive Load Using Observability
We can make good decisions with speed when we limit the cognitive load on any one person or team. Observability can help to increase delivery speed, by providing information to developers that helps them to make decisions quickly.
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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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Developing and Evolving SaaS Infrastructures for Enterprises
SaaS companies that are focused on the enterprise market need to evolve their infrastructure to meet the security, reliability, and other IT requirements of their customers. IT admins and large customers are two important sources of requirements to drive development.
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Promoting Empathy and Inclusion in Technical Writing
Empathy is the first step in practicing sustainable, genuine inclusion. If persons or groups of people feel unwelcome because of the language being used in a community, its products, or documentation, then the words can be changed. Identifying divisive language can help to make changes to the words that we use.
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The Future is Knowable before it Happens: an Impossible Thing for Developers
In software development there are always things that we don’t know. We can take time to explore knowable unknowns, to learn them and get up to speed with them. To deal with unknowable unknowns, a solution is to be more experimental and hypothesis-driven in our development. Kevlin Henney gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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The Journey of Going Back to Testing after Being a Testing Manager
Returning to testing after having become a test manager can be challenging. For Julia María Durán Muñoz it meant finding a company that appreciated her experience and recognized her desire and ability to do technical work. It can help to get training to update your knowledge, refresh your technical skills, and practice your skills before starting interviews.
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Trust-Driven Development: Accelerate Delivery and Increase Creativity
By building trust you can break silos, foster collaboration, increase focus, and enable people to come up with creative solutions for products and for improving their processes. The DevOps movement was created to break the silos in the organisations; trust can be built by organising pair programming across various functions and various teams.
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Transitioning to Modern Testing: How Testers Can Stop Being the Training Wheels for Teams
Traditional testing, where testers act as safety nets and testing is separated from implementation, can have a detrimental impact on quality. Testers can instead act as coaches, collaborate in teams, and foster change, to stop becoming the training wheels for teams. Culture is key, particularly in that the environment provides psychological safety.
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Words Matter in Documentation to Build Better User Experience
The language that we use in our products or documentation can make people feel unwelcome or hurt people. We can choose words that are precise, not dependent on complex metaphors, and convey messages without negative connotations.
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How Getting Feedback from Angry Users Helps to Develop Better Products
Every time you change something in your product, angry users can show up. These users are engaged and they care about your product. Listening to them can help you find golden nuggets of user insight to improve your product.