InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Expanding Continuous Improvement beyond Agile Practices
After being on an agile journey where practices were centered on IT, a company is now exploring ways to extend them beyond IT and scale their approach. Ramya Sriram presented how they focus on continuous improvement through agile practices, feedback, and customized maturity assessments. Emphasizing flow metrics with a strong learning culture, they aim for efficiency and sustainable growth.
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Using Social Drivers to Improve Software Engineering Team Performance
According to Lizzie Matusov, technical drivers like velocity offer an incomplete view of team performance. Social drivers—trust, autonomy, purpose, and psychological safety—provide a fuller picture and reveal important areas of opportunity for improvement. She spoke about the social drivers behind high-performing engineering teams at QCon San Francisco.
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Cultivating a Culture of Resilience in Software Organizations
Resilience helps individuals and organizations respond to challenges. Personal resilience is built through adapting, technical resilience by mastering a variety of tools, and organizational resilience through flexibility and strong networks. In fast-changing software industries, recognizing tech shifts and fostering learning, flexibility, and collaboration, enhances resilience.
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Mezzalira at QCon London: Micro-Frontends from Design to Organisational Benefits and Deployments
During his QCon London presentation, Luca Mezzalira, principal architect at AWS, shared his experience in building the ideal micro frontend platform. He disclosed the recipe for determining if micro frontends are right for your company, as well as the core principles of creating the perfect architecture for your use case, and also provided deployment strategies for distributed architectures.
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How Developers Can Eliminate Software Waste and Reduce Climate Impact
High performance and sustainability correlate; making software go faster by improving the efficiency of algorithms can reduce energy requirements, Holly Cummins said at QCon London. She suggested switching systems off when not in use to reduce the environmental footprint. Developers can achieve more by doing less, improving productivity, she said.
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Inflection Points in Engineering Productivity for Improving Productivity and Operational Excellence
As companies grow, investing in custom developer tools may become necessary. Initially, standard tools suffice, but as companies scale in engineers, maturity, and complexity, industry tools may no longer meet needs. Inflection points, such as a crisis, hyper-growth, or reaching a new market, often trigger investments, providing opportunities for improving productivity and operational excellence.
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QCon London: AI Agents Can Work Together to Make Humans Better
In a well-received closing keynote at QCon London 2025, independent AI consultant Hannah Foxwell challenged the common narrative about AI making us more productive and helping us to do more, instead arguing that AI agents should be designed to eliminate mundane work for us rather than replace human jobs.
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Learning from Embedded Software Development for the Space Shuttle and the Orion MPCV
Software development is much different today than it was at the beginning of the Space Shuttle era because of the tools that we have. But the art and practice of software engineering has not progressed that much since the early days of software development. Compilers are much better and faster, and debuggers are now integrated into development tools, making the task of error detection easier.
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QCon London: In an Enterprise Ecosystem Your Platform Is Not an Island
In a talk at QCon London, Rachael Wonnacott explained the challenges in building a developer platform in an organisation with legacy processes and how a golden path leading to either a Kubernetes Hotel or a Public Cloud House might be necessary.
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How Senior Software Engineers Can Learn from Junior Engineers
A rigid hierarchical dynamic between senior and junior software engineers can stifle innovation, discourage fresh perspectives, and create barriers to collaboration. According to Beth Anderson, senior engineers can actively learn from their junior counterparts. She suggests creating an environment of mutual growth, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
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Using Artificial Intelligence in Software Testing
Quality Assurance Engineers can evolve into artificial intelligence (AI) strategists, guiding AI-driven test execution while focusing on strategic decisions. Rather than replacing testing roles, AI can enhance them by predicting defects, automating test maintenance, and refining risk-based testing. Human-AI collaboration is crucial for maintaining quality in increasingly complex software systems.
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QCon London: Bringing DevOps Principles to Controls and Audit
Ian Miell delivered a talk at QCon London 2025 on a modernised approach to compliance, announcing an open-source project that aims to solve many of the problems seen in the audit and compliance process. Miell highlighted that there's a disconnect between modern DevOps practices of automation and repeatability, and traditional audit and compliance procedures.
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QCon London: Mistakes People Make Building SaaS Software
Jon Topper, AWS ambassador and founder of The Scale Factory, shared key insights at QCon London 2025 on building effective SaaS solutions. He highlighted pitfalls, stressing the importance of multi-tenancy from day one, automating tenant provisioning, and planning disaster recovery. Topper encouraged leveraging community wisdom to avoid costly mistakes and implement secure, scalable architectures.
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Lessons Learned from Growing an Engineering Organization
As their organization grew, Thiago Ghisi's work as director of engineering shifted from being hands-on in emergencies to designing frameworks and delegating decisions. He suggested treating changes as experiments, documenting reorganizations, and using a wave-based communication approach to gather feedback, ensuring people feel heard and invested.
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QCon London: a Three-Step Blueprint for Managing Open Source Risk
At QCon London 2025, Johnson Matthey's vulnerability manager, Celine Pypaert, discussed managing open-source dependency risks while maintaining momentum in innovation. She described a three-part blueprint for handling the security challenges that arise with the now widespread use of open-source dependencies.