InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Building High-Quality Products with Distributed Teams
To ensure the quality of the products and services, Intermedia uses a common test & pre-production environment for all distributed teams. Lilia Gorbachik, product manager at Intermedia, mentioned at European Women in Tech that having a mature testing process, working with risks, and making daily decisions from a high-quality product perspective are key aspects to build high-quality products.
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Effectively Using Jira with an Overarching Vision
Dzmitry Hryb of Atlassian partner DevInit has recently published an article responding to a TechCrunch story that claimed using Jira's issue-centric model could result in a myopia, which misses the "macro-vision." Recent writing by architect Eltjo R. Poort and DevOps lead Matt Saunders also offers patterns for using Jira with other best-fit tools to capture vision and architectural direction.
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Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey
After having seen and evidenced the tangible benefit of lean at Mashreq Bank, agile was seen as a natural progression, an evolutionary step. Agile and lean are well-linked; you still need to identify waste, and remove non-value add activities so you can spend more time doing what the customer needs, argued Steve Snowdon. Together with Ed Capaldi he spoke about Mashreq Bank’s Lean Agile Journey.
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The Role of Executives and Managers in Value Stream Management: Insight from Al Shalloway
As organizations are transitioning to agile, executives' role is to design and communicate the vision of an effective organization that best aligns with its culture and performance goals. In the most effective organizations, managers have the responsibility of reducing the cost of delay, by removing any organizational blocker impeding the flow of value.
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JUnit Project Moves to Azure Pipelines for Builds
JUnit, a unit testing framework for Java, is one of the most popular libraries used by Java developers. The JUnit team recently announced they've adopted Azure Pipelines for continuous integration (CI).
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Agile in Higher Education: Experiences from The Open University
Universities need to embrace an agile and product mindset, as they are grappling with hypothesis-driven development of new kinds of products and services of which they understand very little, for users whose behaviours and needs they little understand, said Matthew Moran. He presented applying the agile mindset, principles and practices for online course development at Aginext 2019.
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Applying Artificial Intelligence in the Agile World
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems with the agile world is having a disruptive effect on how we build software and the types of products that we build, said Aidan Casey. By combining machine learning and deep learning we can build applications that truly learn like humans. AI bias is a very serious concern, as AI systems are only as good as the data sets used to train them.
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People Are More Complex Than Computers: Growing the Equal Experts' Team and Culture
Earlier this week, in QConLondon 2019, Mairead O’Connor from Equal Experts presented on the topic “People are more complex than computers”. In this talk, O'Connor presented on the way that Equal Experts managed to grow into a network of 1,500 people, with over 800 of them being consultants and the organisational and cultural challenges that come with creating this unique organisational structure.
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How Airbnb Simplified the Kubernetes Workflow for 1000+ Engineers
Melanie Cebula talked about the internal tooling and strategies Airbnb adopted to support over 1000 engineers concurrently configuring and deploying over 250 critical services to Kubernetes. One key enabler was a layer of abstraction and generation of Kubernetes configuration from higher level primitives using standardized environments and namespaces (and automated validations whenever possible).
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Building Services at Scale at Airbnb: QCon London Q&A
The re-architecture to SOA at Airbnb improved the performance of the services and site reliability. Faster build and deploy times led to increased developer productivity, and improving clarity and boundaries for ownership increased efficiency. Jessica Tai, a software engineer at Airbnb, presented Airbnb’s Great Migration: Building Services at Scale at QCon London 2019.
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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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Scaling, Incident Management and Collaboration at New York Times Engineering
The New York Times Engineering Team wrote about their approach to scaling and incident management against the backdrop of increased traffic during the November 2018 US midterm elections.
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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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The Risk of Climate Change and What Tech Can Do: QCon London Q&A
Data centres create more emissions than the aviation industry due to energy usage and 24x7 availability, and the growth of the cloud computing and mining of cryptocurrencies is increasing the impact technology has on our climate. Moving existing servers to providers who use renewable sources of electricity could lead to planet-wide climate improvements. A QCon Q&A with Jason Box and Paul Johnston.
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Debugging Microservices Running in Containers: Tooling Review at KubeCon NA
At KubeCon NA held in Seattle in December 2018, several tools for debugging containerised microservices were presented throughout the conference sessions and the sponsored booths demonstrations. A notable separation appears to be occurring within the market, between "active" and "passive" debugging tools. Two examples within these categories are Rookout and Squash, respectively.