InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Platform Engineering Challenges: Small Teams, Build Versus Buy, and Building the Wrong Thing
The team at Syntasso wrote a series of blog posts outlining twelve challenges that platform teams face. These challenges include having a small platform team support a large organization, failing to understand the needs of the platform users, and struggling with the build-vs-buy argument.
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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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Google Releases Kubernetes GitOps Observability Dashboard
Google Cloud introduced Config Management Dashboard that allows the Platform Administrator or Operator to have a real-time picture of configuration syncs and failures across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
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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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Avoid Being an "Ivory Tower" Architect: the Relationship between Architects and Their Organisation
In a recently published episode of Armchair Architects, the speakers discussed the relationship between software architects and the rest of the organisation. They detail how a successful architect can impact others by switching between going into the trenches and zooming into a tree and then being able to zoom out and estimate if that tree still fits into the forest.
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How Palo Alto Approaches Platform Engineering
Ramesh Nampelly, senior director of cloud infrastructure and platform engineering at Palo Alto, recently wrote about how Palo Alto approaches platform engineering. They built their own internal developer platform (IDP) based on the open-source tool Backstage. Their platform covers infrastructure provisioning, policy management, observability, and cost management.
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Kubernetes Report Finds Increase in Poorly Configured Workloads
Fairwinds, a provider of Kubernetes software, has released their Kubernetes Benchmark Report 2023. The report shows an overall trend of worsening configuration issues across the surveyed organizations. This includes increases in organizations running workloads allowing root access, workloads without memory limits set, and workloads impacted by image vulnerabilities.
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State of DevOps Report Finds Platform Teams Lacking Product Management Support
Puppet released the 2023 State of DevOps Report with a focus on Platform Engineering. The report found that organizations with platform engineering teams report increased developer velocity, improvements in system reliability, greater productivity, and better workflow standards. Organizations still need to work on adopting a product mindset with the platform teams.
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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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Creating Great Psychologically Safe Teams with Sandy Mamoli
Sandy Mamoli, author and coach at Nomad8, recently appeared on the No Nonsense Agile Podcast to discuss her experience in creating safe, high-performing and self-selected teams. Keith Ferrazzi, author of Competing in the New World of Work, also recently wrote about his experience with using empowering social contracts to cultivate great teams. Both emphasized safety and candour.
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Internal Platform Framework Kratix Releases Community Marketplace
Kratix, an open-source framework for building internal platforms, has released a marketplace of community-provided Promises. Within Kratix, Promises represent components curated by the platform team that application teams can request. The Kratix Marketplace is open for submissions from the community.
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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.
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Six Essential Tracks at QCon London, March 27-29, 2023: Architecture, FinTech, ML, and More!
QCon London international software conference returns this March 27-29 with its 17th edition. Technical leaders who are driving innovation and change in software will share the latest trends and techniques from their real-world projects to help you solve common challenges. Learn about emerging trends in 2023, how to adopt them, how to avoid pitfalls, and how to embrace the best practices.
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Amazon ECS Adds Automated Rollbacks
Amazon has released native support for automated rollbacks within their Amazon ECS service. This feature leverages Amazon CloudWatch metric alarms to monitor and, if necessary, reverts the in-progress deployment. This feature supports using any system metrics that CloudWatch Container Insights collects for Amazon ECS as well as custom metrics.