BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ

  • Becoming a Better Tech Leader with Coaching

    Coaching, both personal and professional, can help to understand your potential and discover ways to exercise that potential in your daily work. For Maryam Umar, coaching has proved to be highly useful in her tech work of leading testers and engineers.

  • Building Quality in for Blockchain Systems

    Blockchain technology can be used to build solutions that can naturally deliver better software quality. Using blockchain we can shift to smaller systems that store everything in a contract. We have to understand our data needs and decide what is stored in the chain and what off-chain, and think about how requirements, defects and testing history can be built into the contract models.

  • Shifting to Asynchronous Communication in Software Teams

    As some companies begin to go back to the office and embrace hybrid working, they are at risk of alienating those who wish to remain remote, which is looking to be a considerable number of workers in our industry. James Stanier suggests using more asynchronous means of communication and spending more time writing to each other rather than speaking in meetings.

  • The Challenges of Reading Code and How to Deal with Them

    Reading code can be confusing in many ways; we are not explicitly taught how to read code, and we rarely practice code reading. Being aware of the cognitive processes that play a role can help to become better at reading code.

  • Leading a DevOps Transformation - a Collaborative Engineering Approach

    When leading a DevOps transformation, transparency and visibility can help to get teams engaged in chance. Once involved, developers can act as knowledge multipliers and contribute to change initiatives. A mixture of solving frequently-occurring problems, addressing complex problems, and showing progress of the transformation can help to keep stakeholders involved.

  • How to Work Asynchronously as a Remote-First SRE

    The core practices for remote work at Netlify are prioritising asynchronous communication, being intentional about our remote community building, and encouraging colleagues to protect their work-life balance. Sustainable remote work starts with sustainable working hours, which includes making yourself “almost” unreachable with clear boundaries and protocols for out of hours contact.

  • Adapting a Zero Bug Policy to Solve Bugs

    Applying a zero bug policy made it easier to prioritize bugs and increased team visibility and responsiveness towards bugs. As it’s a radical change, you will need to adapt it to your context regarding decision-making and time to fix a bug.

  • Dealing with Cognitive Biases in Software Development

    Cognitive biases help us to think faster, but they also make us less rational than we think we are. Being able to recognize and overcome biases can prevent problems and increase the performance of software teams.

  • What Machine Learning Can Do for Security

    Machine learning can be applied in various ways in security, for instance, in malware analysis, to make predictions, and for clustering security events. It can also be used to detect previously unknown attacks with no established signature.

  • How Mob Programming Collective Habits Can be the Soil for Growing Technical Quality

    Mob programming can support teams in changing old habits into new effective habits for creating products in an agile way. Collectively-developed habits are hard to forget when you have other people around. Mob programming forces individuals to put new habits into practice regularly, making them easier to adopt. Teams are intolerant of repetition, looking for better ways of doing their work.

  • How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity

    Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.

  • Lowering Recovery Time through AI-Enabled Troubleshooting

    Machine learning algorithms for anomaly detection can assist DevOps in daily working routines, where generalized ML models are trained and applied to detect hidden patterns and identify suspicious behaviour. Applied machine learning for IT-operations (AIOPs) is starting to move from research environments to production environments in companies.

  • How a Safe-to-Fail Approach Can Enable Psychological Safety in Teams

    Companies can establish a culture of psychological safety among their employees, a culture in which failing is not frowned upon but rather is accepted as something that can happen to anyone. Safe-to-fail should be part of the corporate culture. A shift in the way we envision success can lead to a better understanding of where failure lies and provide courage to overcome our fears.

  • Improving Gender Inclusion by Using Agile Principles

    Pakistan is behind with regards to gender inclusion in technology; however, coding boot camps are helping women to get jobs and become financially independent. Faiza Yousuf, a product management expert and community leader, spoke about how she uses agile principles for improving gender inclusion at Agile 2021.

  • The Future of Agile in Africa: Challenges and Progress

    The African continent is trailing behind in the adoption of agile compared to other continents as it faces wicked challenges and setbacks. However, the next two decades seem to be promising to the young continent, as tech startups, SMEs and large corporations are recognizing that a collaborative approach to product development leads to more productive and value-driven results.

BT