InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Making Agile Software Development Work for Multicultural Teams
While equality provides team members with the same opportunities and allowances, equity is about creating an environment where individual and unique needs can be met. According to ElMohanned Mohamed, communication in multicultural teams should be precise and clear with low dependence on the context.
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QCon London: a Tale of Team Topologies
At QCon London 2024, Ricardo Nuno Almeida spoke about adapting Team Topologies at m3ter. Almeida, senior software engineering manager at m3ter, spoke about how adaptability proved crucial to success and ran through m3ter's journey of evolving team topologies to meet growth demands and changing priorities.
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How to Build Large Scale Cyber-Physical Systems
To build large-scale safety-critical systems, we need to decompose the system into smaller solvable problems, resolve what is known, and resolve unknowns through experiments, Robin Yeman argued. She suggested investing in test environments for both software and hardware early to enable being test-driven early to increase the safety, security, reliability, and availability of the systems.
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QCon London: Curating a Developer Experience
In a talk at QCon London 2024 titled "Curating the Developer Experience," Andy Burgin discussed embracing Developer Experience (DevEx) as an operational philosophy at the betting company Flutter. Recognising the potential of DevEx to enhance productivity and foster collaboration and empathy between teams, Burgin explained how Flutter implemented and evolved their Developer Experience.
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Challenges and Solutions for Building Machine Learning Systems
According to Camilla Montonen, the challenges of building machine learning systems are mostly creating and maintaining the model. MLOps platforms and solutions contain components needed to build machine systems. MLOps is not about the tools; it is a culture and a set of practices. Montonen suggests that we should bridge the divide between practices of data science and machine learning engineering.
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Enhancing Developer Experience for Creating Artificial Intelligence Applications
For one company, large language models created a breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) by shifting to crafting prompts and utilizing APIs without a need for AI science expertise. To enhance developer experience and craft applications and tools, they defined and established principles around simplicity, immediate accessibility, security and quality, and cost efficiency.
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QCon London: the Dangerous Dichotomies of People Management
In the world of people management, it's not just about ticking off tasks; it's about delving into the nuanced, impactful aspects that truly make a difference. Experienced manager and product director Hannah Foxwell highlighted many critical yet often overlooked elements for fostering a cohesive and productive team environment in a talk at QCon London 2024.
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Catalyzing Change in Software Organizations: Find Allies, Invite People, and Sustain Engagement
Much of the change we experience in software organizations is coercive. Software engineers, architects, and people in software engineering management roles feel they cannot spark change without formal authority, Eb Ikonne mentioned at QCon London 2024. To catalyze change, he suggested identifying allies, inviting people to participate in the change, and sustaining engagement through storytelling.
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Rachael Greaves at QCon London: Ethical AI Can Decrease the Impact of Data Breaches
At QCon London, Rachael Greaves, chief executive officer at Castlepoint Systems, presented both the obligations and benefits of data minimisation as a mechanism to decrease the impact of data breaches. AI autoclassification and automatic decision-making tools help with the ever-increasing data volumes as long as ethical principles are considered, allowing decisions to be challenged.
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How Technology Can Drive Culture Change in Software Organisations
Technological improvements like containers, VMs, infrastructure-as-code, software-defined-networking, collaborative version control, and CI/CD can make it possible to fix cultural issues around organisational dynamics and bad product delivery. According to Nigel Kersten, software leaders should leverage tech to create positive changes in organisational dynamics and relationships between teams.
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How a Game of Patterns Can Help Software Organisations to Gain Insights and Improve
Patterns can help us to understand how things work and how cultures develop. The game in an organisational system is about recognizing patterns and anti-patterns. According to Tiani Jones, leaders should work on the system rather than in the system and create the conditions for the development and sustainment of good patterns in software organisations.
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QCon London: Spreading Ownership and Delivering Value at Spotify with Backstage Plugins
At QCon London, Pia Nilsson and Mike Lewis from Spotify led a session explaining how they have evolved the plugin architecture of Backstage to enable easier extensibility. Going into the background of Backstage's inception, Nilsson explained how Backstage has emerged as a technology being used to change the ways of working for 3000 employees in a meaningful way.
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How to Do Sustainable Software Development
Software sustainability includes computing for environmental purposes and using resources appropriately. According to Coral Calero, software engineers need a holistic way of looking at software and should be aware of the environmental impact of software. Several tools and frameworks are available for software engineers to do sustainable software development.
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QCon London: Scaling Microservices Architecture and Technology Organization at Trainline
During the recent QCon London conference, Trainline’s CTO spoke about the evolution of the company’s system architecture and organizational structure over the last five years. The company had to adapt to market changes and growing customer expectations by improving the performance and reliability of its technology platform.
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Application Security Optimised for Engineering Productivity
Laura Bell Main presented a webinar on 2024 trends in application security. She called out a shift from siloed DevSecOps initiatives to building an understanding of dev friction, and presenting solutions which optimise engineering productivity. Nikki Robinson also recently spoke about the importance of taking a developer experience targeted approach to security platform engineering.