InfoQ Homepage Risk Management Content on InfoQ

Articles

RSS Feed

Newer Older

DevOps

Sustainable Operations in Complex Systems with Production Excellence

Successful long-term approaches to production ownership and DevOps require cultural change in the form of production excellence. Teams are more sustainable if they have well-defined measurements of reliability, the capability to debug new problems, a culture that fosters spreading knowledge, and a proactive approach to mitigating risk.

Liz Fong-Jones
on May 31, 2019
Culture & Methods

Cultivating a Learning Organisation

This article explores how creating an internal culture of experimentation and learning enabled a company to keep pace with the rapid iterations in tech that have become the regular way we do business. It shows that psychological safety is a key component of the learning organisation; employees need to be able to experiment and learn from any outcome - without fear that failure will be punished.

Andrea Dobson
on May 24, 2019
Culture & Methods

Three Keys to a Successful “Pre-Mortem”

Talking about what might go wrong acknowledges that many things are out of our control, and that we might mess up the things which are within our control. To have this conversation safely involves a structured activity called a pre-mortem. If held with some regularity, and always with creative problem solving time at the end, it can build a safe space for adaptation in the face of adversity.

Willow Brugh
on Nov 28, 2018
Architecture & Design

What Should Software Engineers Know about GDPR?

EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is moving out of the transition period next summer to become enforceable GDPR strongly emphasizes risk-based thinking; you take every step to mitigate privacy risks until the risks become something you can tolerate. As a software developer, this will affect you. This is what you need to know.

Arto Santala
on Dec 10, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on The Antifragility Edge: Antifragility in Practice

In the book The Antifragility Edge, Sinan Si Alhir shows how antifragility has been applied to help organizations evolve and thrive. He provides examples of how antifragility can be used beyond agility on an individual, collective (team and community) and enterprise level, and explores a roadmap for businesses to achieve greater antifragility.

Ben Linders
on Jan 14, 2017
DevOps

Book Review: Site Reliability Engineering - How Google Runs Production Systems

"Site Reliability Engineering - How Google Runs Production Systems" is an open window into Google's experience and expertise on running some of the largest IT systems in the world. The book describes the principles that underpin the Site Reliability Engineering discipline. It also details the key practices that allow Google to grow at breakneck speed without sacrificing performance or reliability.

João Miranda
on Sep 21, 2016
Culture & Methods

Adaptable or Predictable? Strive for Both – Be Predictably Adaptable!

Our efforts to improve software development face the question of what to focus on. Should we govern for predictability without concern of value, maximizing cost-efficiency without concern for end-to-end responsiveness? Or maybe do the opposite and govern for value over predictability, focus on responsiveness over cost efficiency? What we really need is to be predictably adaptable.

Dimitar Bakardzhiev
on Sep 06, 2016
Architecture & Design

Continuous Delivery Coding Patterns: Latent-to-Live Code & Forward Compatible Interim Versions

This article describes two novel practices for continuous delivery: Latent-to-live code pattern and Forward compatible interim versions. You can use these practices to simultaneously increase speed and reliability of software development and reduce risks. These practices are built on top of two other essential continuous delivery practices: trunk-based-development and feature toggles.

Luca Minudel
on Sep 02, 2016
Culture & Methods

Test Management Revisited

The concept of test management sits awkwardly in agile, mostly because it’s a construct derived from the time when testing was a post-development phase, performed by independent testing teams. Agile, with its focus on cross functional teams, has sounded the death knell for many test managers. While test management is largely irrelevant in agile, there is still a desperate need for test leadership.

Anne-Marie Charrett
on Apr 03, 2016
Architecture & Design

The Mathematics of Adaptive Security

Enterprise security teams are charged with maintaining the “perfect” set of security policies. In their pursuit of the perfect security policy, they are often the department of slow (because the pursuit of perfection takes time). At the same time, “to err is human…”

Matthew Glenn
on Nov 01, 2015
From a Project to a Product Approach Using LeSS at Agfa Healthcare

By changing the inner workings from a project perspective to a product perspective Agfa Healthcare established a less complicated process using a single backlog for the entire organisation. Main advice is to try to avoid setting up silos where they do not belong. When applying LeSS it is important to stick to its basic rules even though they are, in most organisations, very disruptive.

Jurgen De Smet
on Jul 01, 2015
Probabilistic Project Planning Using Little’s Law

When working on projects, it is most of the time necessary to forecast the project delivery time up front. Little’s Law can help any team that uses user stories for planning and tracking project execution no matter what development process it uses. We use a project buffer to manage the inherent uncertainty associated with planning and executing a fixed-bid project and protect its delivery date.

Dimitar Bakardzhiev
on Jun 21, 2015