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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Facilitating Team Health Assessments

    Teams can do health assessments to explore and discuss their team’s health and happiness. It’s good to let teams create their own health check, understanding what healthy looks like for the team in question. As facilitators, we can help teams decide where and how to improve.

  • Distributed DevOps Teams: Enabling Non-Stop Delivery

    Keeping in touch and being cohesive as a distributed team is a challenge many face. Assigning stories from a shared backlog helped a distributed team in doing non-stop delivery, as did giving all members of the team the authority to promote to production and back-out code at need. You need to give attention to the architecture to prevent creating similar or duplicate micro-services.

  • Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations: an Overview

    Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) combines sophisticated methods from deep learning, data streaming processing, and domain knowledge to analyse infrastructure data from internal and external sources to automate operations and detect anomalies (unusual system behavior) before they impact the quality of service.

  • Collective Learnings about Remote Working during Covid-19

    The response to the pandemic showed how to make sure people are productive and included in a hybrid environment, and it's all due to the learnings we carried on from March 2020. Many organisations demonstrated how it’s possible to work in an inclusive and productive way even if people are distributed around the world.

  • Distributed DevOps Teams: Supporting Digitally Connected Teams

    To establish a digital connection within a globally distributed team, an organization provided the team members with both collaboration tools and supplied an extra monitor with a visualization board. Collaboration using the online chat and white board initially posed challenges, as the board was tweaked towards the teams’ needs.

  • How Testers Can Contribute to Product Definition

    Utilizing the tester’s feedback during product definition and design is valuable for the business. Listening to the organization's needs, understanding the business goals, and customizing the test process by incorporating different skills and practices is one way testing can begin while the product is still "on paper".

  • Experiences from Having Developers Write E2E Tests

    Developers writing e2e tests can make code testable, provide fast feedback, and prevent bugs. Wix worked with their product managers, developers, and QA engineers to transition from QA-only testing, to having developers write e2e tests to shift QA left and deliver faster.

  • Adding Security to Testing to Enable Continuous Security Testing

    Teams can be trained by security experts to become able to identify areas to add security testing in the test process and add security checks as part of functional test automation. This can lead to continuous security testing where security defects can be spotted at an early stage with higher security testing coverage in every release.

  • Shifting Quality Left with the Test Pyramid

    Shifting quality left means building in quality much earlier in the software development cycle, rather than testing for quality after completion of development. Using the test pyramid model, a project was able to move testing towards earlier stages, thereby finding defects that caused integration issues earlier in development.

  • The Importance of Psychological Safety for Agile Transformations in Africa

    The absence of psychological safety in the world of work limits the agile transformation journeys of organisations in Africa. Psychological safety is an enabler, not an act of weakness. Organisations that do not understand or foster it might find it difficult to survive in these VUCA times.

  • Engaging All Generations with Adaptable Reward and Recognition Systems

    Reward and recognition systems should be adaptable, agile, and take contexts into consideration. All generations want three things - to be respected, rewarded and recognised for their work. The motivation and the form factor of the rewards are what differ for the generations. You need to be creative and keep reward and recognition systems fresh, and tailor them to teams.

  • Developing Testing Skills outside of Working Hours

    Gamifying your way of testing, joining online testing communities of practice, and virtual traveling; these are examples of activities you can do outside of working hours that can make you a better tester. You can practice continuous learning with other testers in the world, and then implement things you learned at your workplace and share them with your team to improve ways of testing.

  • Using Machine Learning in Testing and Maintenance

    With machine learning, we can reduce maintenance efforts and improve the quality of products. It can be used in various stages of the software testing life-cycle, including bug management, which is an important part of the chain. We can analyze large amounts of data for classifying, triaging, and prioritizing bugs in a more efficient way by means of machine learning algorithms.

  • Sustainable Internet: Reducing the Environmental Impact

    To be sustainable, the internet needs to assess, mitigate, and live up to its responsibilities for a healthy environment. By understanding the environmental impact, we can point to avenues where progress is possible and identify aspects of our digital infrastructures that come with unintended consequences that are too severe to look the other way.

  • How Kanban Can Support Evolutionary Change

    Evolutionary change is about starting where you are and improving one small change at a time. You need a stressor, a reflection mechanism, and an act of leadership to provoke change and institutionalize it. Understanding empathy allows change agents to find out what resonates with someone and work around resistance.

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