InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
Getting Feedback from Test-Driven Development and Testing in Production
Teams rely on strong unit and integration tests instead of end-to-end tests. Using TDD, pair programming, and good design, they ship small changes often, test in production for real feedback, and use feature toggles to reduce risk, Ola Hast and Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom mentioned in their talk about continuous delivery with pair programming.
-
Building Software Organisations Where People Can Thrive
Continuous learning, adaptability, and strong support networks are the foundations for thriving teams, Matthew Card mentioned. Trust is built through consistent, fair leadership and addressing toxic behaviour, bias, and microaggressions early. By fostering growth, psychological safety, and accountability, people-first leadership drives resilience, collaboration, and performance.
-
European Initiative for Data Sovereignty Released a Trust Framework
The Danube release of the Gaia-X trust framework provides mechanisms for the automation of compliance and supports interoperability across sectors and geographies to ensure trusted data transactions and service interactions. The Gaia-X Summit 2025 hosted facilitated discussions on AI and data sovereignty, and presented data space solutions that support innovation across Europe and beyond.
-
Taking the Technical Leadership Path
Technical leaders face challenges beyond individual contributor work: aligning with business on investments, managing systemic aspects, mentoring, and keeping up with a changing codebase. We need technical alignment—shared codestyle, implementation patterns, and standards—to avoid accidental complexity. Leadership grows through practicing skills, improving team issues, and acting as a role model.
-
What Testers Can Do to Ensure Software Security
A secure software development life cycle means baking security into plan, design, build, test, and maintenance, rather than sprinkling it on at the end, Sara Martinez said in her talk Ensuring Software Security. Testers aren’t bug finders but early defenders, building security and quality in from the first sprint. Culture first, automation second, continuous testing and monitoring all the way.
-
Things Software Developers Think They Don’t Need to Care about, But Can Impact Their Job
Holly Cummins gave a keynote at Goto Copenhagen where she urged developers to care about overlooked issues that shape their work. She warned of unintended consequences of design decisions, promoted systems thinking and statistical literacy, stressed mastering concurrency as hardware evolves beyond Moore’s Law, and mentioned the impact of AI on the job market.
-
Beyond Win Rates: How Spotify Quantifies Learning in Product Experiments
Spotify has introduced the Experiments with Learning (EwL) metric on top of its Confidence experimentation platform to measure how many tests deliver decision-ready insights, not just how many “win.” EwL captures both the quantity and quality of learning across product teams, helping them make faster, smarter product decisions at scale. The outcome must support one action: ship, abort, or iterate.
-
How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Us Connect with Customers
In software development, success means going beyond meeting requirements. We must create products that surprise and delight users and are innovative, create impactful solutions, Ken Hughes said in the keynote “Connection is Everything”. AI can help us connect with customers and create better user experiences.
-
Lessons Learned from Migrating a Legacy Test Suite to Gauge with Kotlin
Liran Yushinsky shared how his team replaced brittle bash and kubectl tests with a unified Kotlin + Gauge framework. Using Fabric8, Terraform, and Ansible, they automated their test environments. Feedback loops dropped from hours to minutes, developers joined testing efforts, and shared ownership boosted quality and release speed.
-
Learnings from Cultivating Machine Learning Engineers as a Team Manager
As an AI team manager, Vivek Gupta stays broadly informed to guide AI experts effectively and drive the team. Engineers need feedback on both technical and interpersonal skills, Gupta mentioned at Dev Summit Boston. He stresses learning time, asking for help, and cross-team collaboration. Mentorship, data handling, and human-in-the-loop validation are key to success for machine learning engineers.
-
Growing Yourself as a Software Engineer, Using AI to Develop Software
Sharing your work as a software engineer inspires others, invites feedback, and fosters personal growth, Suhail Patel said at QCon London. Normalizing and owning incidents builds trust, and it supports understanding the complexities. AI enables automation but needs proper guidance, context, and security guardrails.
-
Creating Impactful Software Teams That Continuously Improve
Culture shapes how we feel, work, and succeed, says Natan Žabkar Nordberg. People thrive in different environments—some need autonomy, others structure. Trust must be given first, not earned. Leaders should guide, not control, fostering autonomy and safety.
-
Developing and Deploying Software in a Sustainable Way
Sustainable APIs benefit most from minimalism, Jochen Joswig said at OOP Conference . Deployment should consider energy, usage, carbon intensity, hardware acquisition. Remote work, long device lifespans, and green office practices can lower emissions. Efficient CI, selective builds, smaller artefacts, and optimized assets can further reduce energy use.
-
The Decisions You Don't Know You're Making: QCon Keynote Explores Hidden Choices in Engineering
Engineering teams make their most consequential decisions not in architecture reviews or sprint planning, but through invisible choices embedded in metrics, defaults, and everyday behaviors. In their QCon San Francisco 2025 keynote, Shawna Martell and Dan Fike challenged the industry's focus on documented decision-making while the decisions that truly shape systems and culture go unrecognized.
-
How to Do Sociotechnical Design Using Domain-Driven Design and Change Smuggling
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) can upskill sociotechnical design to navigate organizational dynamics and decision complexity in human systems. Change smuggling offers a practical way to launch small, safe-to-fail probes, nudging sociotechnical changes to emerge organically and conversationally.