InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Actionable Green Choices for Your Software, Your Products, and You
Climate change is no longer just a huge worry cloud hanging over our heads. There are solutions, choices, and actions we can take - for ourselves, our children, and the future. This article gives you information about some of those choices: some bare glimpses into the art of the possible; others are tried and tested methods with known outcomes.
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Enhancing Your "Definition of Done" Can Improve Your Minimum Viable Architecture
A Definition of Done describes the criteria that determines whether a software product is releasable. While normally focused on functional aspects of quality, teams can strengthen the quality and sustainability of their products if they expand their DoD to include architectural considerations.
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IDEA: a Framework for Nurturing a Culture of Continuous Experimentation
For a team to be agile, they need a culture that allows them to learn, unlearn, and relearn. This article explains how teams can foster such a culture, navigate through the complexities of modern development environments and harness agility to deliver software quickly that fits the needs of users and business sponsors. It describes a framework to explore, plan, implement and evaluate ideas.
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Adaptive, Socio-Technical Systems with Architecture for Flow: Wardley Maps, DDD, and Team Topologies
Designing for adaptability sounds easier than done. How do you design and build systems that can evolve and thrive in the face of constant change? This article provides a high-level introduction to combining Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and Team Topologies to design and build adaptive, socio-technical systems optimized for a fast flow of change.
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Autism at the Workplace: Autism Coaching as a Methodology
As a person with autism or other neurodiversity, it’s important to get to know yourself really well. It’s even better if another person can get to know you from the inside-out. Dennie Declercq and his mom Ivette Marchand found a way to allow for open and vulnerable communication between them. They made Declercq’s life-manual, which enables him to be happy and productive as a software developer.
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Embracing ADHD and Other Neurodivergencies in Software Development Teams
In recent years, there has been increased attention to neurodivergencies such as ADHD, hyper-sensitivity, autism, dyslexia, etc. In this article, Dietrich Moerman tells his own story about ADHD while working as a software developer and becoming a team lead, what he learned, and what he found to be working well to help people with ADHD and more to thrive in their teams and companies.
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Shift in Sprint Review Mindset: from Reporting to Inclusive Ideation
Sprint Reviews should foster a dynamic environment of creativity, exploration, and continual refinement, where important product and overall business decisions are taken. In this article, we will explore the substantial mindset shift and routine change from a typical reporting-focused to interactive data-driven culture of Sprint Reviews.
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Using Trauma-Informed Approaches in Agile Environments
Scientific and clinical understanding of how the human nervous system develops and works has increased tremendously. Its implications are so profound they radiate far beyond the field of psychology. Topics such as trauma-informed law, volleyball coaching, legal counseling, education, and social activism have arisen. It is time to consider how it affects working in an agile tech environment.
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Thinking Deductively to Understand Complex Software Systems
Thinking differently can allow us to approach problems in new ways. With testing, approaching the problem with a negative approach can lead to more thorough test cases.
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Debugging outside Your Comfort Zone: Diving beneath a Trusted Abstraction
This article takes a deep dive through a complex outage in the main database cluster of a payments company. We’ll focus on the aftermath of the incident - the process of understanding what went wrong, recreating the outage in a test cluster, and coming up with a way to stop it from happening again, and dive deep into the internals of Postgres, and learn about how it stores data on disk.
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Minimising the Impact of Machine Learning on our Climate
This article introduces the field of green software engineering, showing the Green Software Foundation’s Software Carbon Intensity Specification, which is used to estimate the carbon footprint of software, and discusses ideas on how to make machine learning greener. It aims to give you the tools to take an active part in the climate solution.
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Easy Implementation of GDPR with Aspect Oriented Programming
GDPR compliance should be a default feature in every application that handles PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Most organizations have an impression that GDPR is a luxury feature that needs special tools to implement. But, we can see that the frameworks and design patterns we already use in our everyday development can very well be used to implement the GDPR rules.