InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Improving Software Quality with Gamification
Bingo Bongo sessions for bug hunting and playing risk storming games can improve quality. Gamification supports learning, can make everyday work interesting, and strengthen team spirit. Playing games should be part of the daily work at the office and seen as an effective work time. In gamification, a real value is created by the creative process.
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Five Behaviours of Successful Staff Plus Engineers
Staff plus engineers act as technical leaders to have a bigger impact. Their ability to get things done goes beyond their individual capacity to grow and mentor others. The tech industry has moved away from thinking that engineers work individually and collaboration is one of the most important behaviours in a staff plus role.
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Infinite Representations: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Developers can face impossible things in their daily work. It’s impossible to directly represent infinity or to hold infinite precision on a discrete physical computer. Storage and representations are bounded. Ignoring or being unaware of this impossibility can lead to bugs or systems behaving differently than expected. Kevlin Henney gave the keynote Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022.
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Apache NetBeans 13 Delivers Improved Developer Experience
The Apache Software Foundation has released Apache NetBeans 13, their integrated development environment (IDE), claiming a simpler and smoother startup experience along with the partial upgrade of Maven, Gradle, and PHP. Written in Java and originally designed for the Java community, NetBeans is a cross-platform, polyglot IDE that includes language support for HTML5, PHP, and C/C++.
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Dockerfile Linter Hadolint Brings Fixes and Improvements, and Support for ARM64 Binaries
After a long wait, recent Hadolint releases have brought a number of fixes, improvements, and support for ARM64 binaries.
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Scaling and Automating Microservice Testing at Lyft
Lyft used cloud-based isolated environments for several purposes, including end-to-end testing. As the number of microservices increased, tests using these environments became harder to scale and lost value. Recent articles describe how Lyft shifted to testing using request isolation in a shared staging environment and used acceptance tests to gate production deployments.
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Using Team-Set Salaries for Company-Wide Compensation
Team-set salaries (TSS) can be scaled up by doing appraisals across teams where results are automatically calibrated. The scores indicate where conversations are needed. TSS encourages people to learn new skills and adapt.
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Developer Experience at Lyft: from the Cloud to Local Environments
Lyft engineering finished their decomposition of a monolith into a collection of microservices back in 2018. Modular development environments using Docker containers eventually moved to the cloud. Recent articles describe how their development tooling struggled to keep up as time passed and the number of microservices exploded. Development environments had to return to the engineer’s machine.
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Creating Tight Cohesive Tech Teams for Women to Thrive
Women in tech need a dynamic, valuing team, stimulating work, push and support, local role models, nonjudgmental flexibility, and personal power. Tight cohesive teams can provide high-quality interactions, making people feel valued.
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HashiCorp Moves HCP Packer into GA with New Security Workflows
HashiCorp has moved HCP Packer into full general availability. HCP Packer is their cloud hosted offering of Packer, a machine-image building tool. The release adds a number of new features including improved security workflows, custom metadata, and integration of compliance checks with Terraform Cloud workflows.
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Making On-Call Less Painful for Developers by Using High-Quality Alerts
On-call is an increasing reality for developers. Improving alerts to reduce noise, automation, and removing warnings can help to make on-call work more humane. A driving force behind automation is Infrastructure as Code. Over time you can abstract that code so that it fits other use cases, which helps propagate best practices.
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NubesGen Brings Git Push to Azure Infrastructure
With a new command-line interface (CLI) available in its v0.8.0 release, NubesGen can now automatically find its configuration, and set up a GitOps workflow for deploying Infrastructure as Code into Azure, allowing developers to easily get up and running with cloud infrastructure for their projects. InfoQ interviewed Julien Dubois, project leader of NubesGen, on the product and where it’s headed.
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How Security by Design Helped to Manage Risks in a Cloud Migration
When a company migrated to the cloud, security issues arose due to difficulties in getting stakeholders on board and involving security from the start. Embedding security assessments as part of the continuous cloud DevOps process and adopting an agile strategy for security risk management throughout the lifecycle of the project helped to increase the governance of security during the migration.
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Fair Individual Compensation for Agile Teams with Team-Set Salaries
Team-set salaries can be used to set fair compensation for individuals in multiskilled, collaborative, autonomous teams. People don’t appraise themselves, only their colleagues. It gives everyone a direct say in salary settings.
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GitHub Codespaces Can Now Be Templated to Improve Performance
GitHub has introduced prebuilt Codespaces to reduce the time it takes to spin up a full development environment for large, complex projects.