InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ
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Open Source Benefits to Innovation and Organizational Agility
Capital One hosted their 3rd Agile Conference in December 2018 in Virginia. Among the guest speakers, Andrew Aitken, global open source strategy leader at Wipro, presented the state of open source and how it is becoming an industry-wide organizational keystone strategy in driving innovation and in retaining top talent.
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How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A
Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.
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Portia Tung on Playful Leadership
Playful leadership is a serious topic - play is the most effective and efficient way of enabling individuals to learn, lead and work together. It fosters a growth-oriented approach that enables people to change with relative ease and even joy instead of resistance and anguish. Play is important to well being and creativity in the workplace.
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Using Contract Testing for Applications with Microservices
When using microservices, integration points between services are a hotbed for bugs. With consumer-driven contract testing, the consumer defines the contract and verifications are made against it within the providers build/test lifecycle. Contract testing fits well into a microservice workflow and kills your integration bugs, argued Maarten Groeneweg at the European Testing Conference 2019.
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Release Management and Customer Experience at Snapchat
In 2019, T-Mobile hosted Snapchat executive, Tammarrian Rogers, and release manager, Claire Reinert, who presented how, in three years, they transformed their release management processes and culture which directly improved their customer experience.
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How to Avoid Failing at Mobile Test Automation
Test automation in mobile development should be done by the Scrum team; don’t set up separate test automation teams, said Nadya Denisenko. She advised obeying the testing pyramid for mobile testing and involve testers from the start. Testers are quality-oriented developers who can guide and assist other developers in delivering high-quality software; manual testing will disappear in the future.
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Testing Complex Distributed Systems at FT.com: Sarah Wells Shares Lessons Learned
The complexity in complex distributed systems isn’t in the code, it’s between the services or functions. Testing implies balancing finding problems versus delivering value, said Sarah Wells at the European Testing Conference. Testers often have the best understanding of what the system does; they have a good hypothesis about what went wrong, and are able to validate it pretty quickly.
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Q&A with Susanne Birgersdotter about Entrepreneurship and Thriving in Tech
Make sure that as an entrepreneur you are extremely well-informed before a presentation, about your own topic and also about the investors and their company. When your first idea or company fails, don’t quit, don’t play safe, and get back up as fast as you can. Female entrepreneurs who want to thrive in tech can join a women in tech group where members empower, connect and support each other.
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Experiences from Remote Mob Programming: Q&A with Sal Freudenberg
At Cucumber, mob programming is done remotely by using a cycle in which the driver pulls down the latest code and then shares their screen, the team mobs for 10 minutes or so and commits the code. Next, the driver’s role rotates. “Remote mobbing works really well for me”, says Sal Freudenberg, “because it lets me tailor my working environment and work in a spot where I feel comfortable.”
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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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Protecting Artificial Intelligence from Itself
Applications using artificial intelligence can be fooled by adversarial examples, creating confusion in the model decisions. Input sanitization can help by filtering out improbable inputs before they are given to the model, argued Katharine Jarmul at Goto Berlin 2018. We need to start thinking of the models and the training data we put into them as potential security breaches, she said.
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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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Engineering a Generation Z Culture
The next generation of engineers brings a new set of challenges and opportunities for recruitment, building teams, and retaining talent. Barbara McCarthy, director of engineering at Hubspot, spoke about engineering a generation Z culture at Women in Tech Dublin 2018.