InfoQ Homepage Stories & Case Studies Content on InfoQ
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Design Sprints at LEGO: Q&A with Eik Thyrsted Brandsgård
Design sprints have led to a high level of energy and motivation at LEGO. You need to discuss the ideas and learnings coming out of each sprint to decide if there’s a solution or if you need to go deeper in the next sprint. Design sprints have created a sense of pride; a belief that teams can tackle any challenge, and the feeling that individuals can add value that exceeds their expected roles.
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Uncovering Sustainable and Scalable Solutions for Digital Transformations
Using the term “digital transformation” limits our change approach to traditional linear management techniques which are ineffective in dealing with today’s organizational complexity. We need to focus on understanding the context and the organization’s inner working to come up with sustainable and scalable solutions for organizational change.
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Experience Building a QA Team in a Growing Organization
Shifting the test team to the left brought the whole team closer together, enabled faster learning, and improved collaboration, claimed Neven Matas, QA team lead at Infinum. He spoke at TestCon Moscow 2019 where he shared the lessons learned from building a QA team in a growing organization.
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How Design Systems Support Team Communication and Collaboration
By using design systems, design teams can improve their workflow, reuse their knowledge, and ensure better consistency, said Stefan Ivanov. They allow one to fail faster and to speed up the iteration cycle, enable spending more time collecting user feedback in the early stages of product design, and reach the sweet spot of a product market fit much faster.
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Human Centered Design for Special Needs: Q&A with Mileha Soneji
Observing users to understand their needs helps to define the problem you need to solve, argued Mileha Soneji. In her talk at ACE Conference 2019 she showed how human-centered design with minimum viable prototypes can help to gain better insight faster, and that breaking down problems into smaller problems can be used to ideate simpler solutions.
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Optimize Automated Testing Using Defect Data
By integrating the test framework and the bug tracking system, it becomes possible to deactivate test cases for known bugs and reactivate them when the bug is solved. Aneta Petkova, QA chapter lead at SumUp, presented The Framework That Knows Its Bugs at TestCon Moscow 2019.
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Investigating Near Misses to Prevent Disasters: QCon London Q&A
Investigating near misses by gathering data from the field and exploring anything that looks wrong or is a bit odd can help to prevent disasters, said Ed Holland, software development manager at Metaswitch Networks. At QCon London 2019 he gave a talk about avoiding being in the news by investigating near misses.
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Experiences from Getting Started as a Lead
Having a transition period to lead teams together with a mentor helped Dan Persa to have a smooth switch from senior software engineer to engineering lead. At Codemotion Amsterdam 2019 he shared some of his experiences and learnings, in order to inspire other developers to take the leadership path.
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Discovering Culture through Artifacts: QCon London Q&A
Behavior and values are two critical components to organizational culture; values denote what the organization believes in, and behaviors are rooted in those values, argued Mike McGarr, engineering leader at Slack. At QCon London 2019 he spoke about improving your understanding of an organization’s culture, the key components of culture, and what to look for in order to learn about the culture.
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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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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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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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Learning to Code Better with Lean Coding
Lean coding aims to provide insight into the actual coding activity, helping developers to detect that things are not going as expected at the 10 minute-level and enabling them to call for help immediately. Developers can use it to improve their technical skills to become better in writing code.
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Experiments with Blockchain at Dutch Railways
Testers will sooner or later be asked to test IT-solutions that incorporate blockchain technology. Software development is different for blockchain-based applications; blockchain impacts the way we are used to working, said Sanne Visser, a software tester at Dutch Railways. She spoke about how professionals can deal with blockchain-based software at European Women in Tech.
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Adding Agile to Lean at Toyota Connected
Adding agility to Lean Product Development enabled Toyota Connected to deliver faster, with higher quality, and reduced costs. Nigel Thurlow presented “Lean is NOT enough” at Lean Digital Summit 2018 where he showed how they embraced agile for colocated teams and outsourcing, and how portfolio planning evolved to an executive prioritization model to increase business agility.