InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ
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How to Improve Testing by Using a Gentle Nudge
Nudging gives us opportunities to positively influence our behavior. Its principles can be applied in testing to increase attention or to enhance the product's quality. Nudging makes use of our biases. This term may cause concern for testers as it poses a risk to delivering useful software. However, scientists have also recognized its potential to positively influence our behavior.
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How Open-Source Maintainers Can Deal with Toxic Behavior
Three toxic behaviors that open-source maintainers experience are entitlement, people venting their frustration, and outright attacks. Growing a thick skin and ignoring the behavior can lead to a negative spiral of angriness and sadness. Instead, we should call out the behavior and remind people that open source means collaboration and cooperation.
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Late Architecture with Functional Programming
Many approaches to software architecture assume that the architecture is planned at the beginning. Unfortunately, architecture planned in this way is hard to change later. Functional programming can help achieve loose coupling to the point that advance planning can be kept to a minimum, and architectural decisions can be changed later.
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What Engineers and Companies Can Do to Increase Social Impact
Engineers in the tech industry have the means for social impact through their network, skills, and experience. Companies can create impact by making business practices socially-minded. Inclusive training considers the circumstances and backgrounds of individuals, with minimum entry barriers to ensure broad participation, including ethnicity, gender, neurodiversity, and socio-economic background.
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Leading in Hybrid and Remote Environments: Skills to Develop and Tools That Can Help
Leading in hybrid and remote environments requires that managers develop new skills like coaching, facilitation, and being able to do difficult conversations remotely. With digital tools, we can include less dominant and more reflective people to get wider reflections from different brains and personalities. This can result in more diverse and inclusive working environments.
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Improving Web Accessibility with Semantic HTML and Testing Techniques and Tools
Web accessibility benefits all of us. Designers, developers, and testers can check for web accessibility and can make the web and services more inclusive, for instance by using semantic HTML, following web standards when coding, and testing for web accessibility. Countries are introducing regulations to enforce inclusive standards.
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BBC’s Enablement Team Principles Focus on Openness, Collaboration, and Respect
At QCon London BBC shared the five enablement principles paving the road for their teams towards improved development and release processes. Steph Egan shared techniques, challenges and learnings from her team’s journey, with the major takeaway being that the principles have almost nothing to do with the tools themselves.
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Learnings from Measuring Psychological Safety
Asking people how they feel about taking certain types of risks can give insight into the level of psychological safety and help uncover issues. Discussing the answers can strengthen the level of safety of more mature teams and help less mature teams to understand how they could improve.
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Programming Foundations for Test Automation
Proper programming foundations can improve your test automation, making it easier to maintain testing code, and reduce stress. A foundation of the theory and basic principles of coding and programming can help to bring test automation to the next level. Object-oriented programming principles can help to overcome code smells.
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Sustainability for Development and Operations with DevSusOps
For a sustainability transformation, a business has to figure out how to measure its carbon footprint, come up with a plan to change the way it powers everything, and change the products they’re making, and even the markets that they operate in. Adrian Cockcroft spoke about sustainability in development and operations at QCon San Francisco 2022.
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How to Analyze Behavior and Influence Behavior Change with the ABC Model
Having an agile mindset is not enough; we need to change behavior for adopting agile. With the Antecedent Behavior Consequence (ABC) Model, you can analyze the behavior, figure out what triggers it, and think about strategies to drive behavioral change.
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Test Automation Requires a Strategy and Clean Code
Having a good strategy for test automation can make it easier to implement test automation and reduce test maintenance costs. The test automation pyramid and automation test wheel can be of help when formulating a test automation strategy and plan. Test automation code should be clean code, and treated similarly to production code.
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How to Assess Software Quality
The quality practices assessment model (QPAM) can be used to classify a team’s exhibited behavior into four dimensions: Beginning, Unifying, Practicing, and Innovating. It explores social and technical quality aspects like feedback loops, culture, code quality and technical debt, and deployment pipeline.
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Creating Environments High in Psychological Safety with a Combined Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach
Leadership is critical for making psychological safety happen, but they need to lead by example and show that it’s safe for people to take interpersonal risks. Complementing leadership with team workshops in communication skills can enable people to speak up and feel safe to fail.
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Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.