Ben Linders
InfoQ
Tilburg, NB, Netherlands
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Past articles by Ben:
How the Hybrid and Remote Working Revolution Impacts Maintaining Mental Health
Whether working remotely or in a hybrid environment, the way in which we work with one another is changing, and can impact mental health and well-being. Personality characteristics can influence how we respond to remote or hybrid working environments. Organizations can foster psychological safety by focusing on culture, transparency, clarity, learning from failure, and supportive leadership. → Read More
Developing Software to Manage Distributed Energy Systems at Scale
Functional programming techniques can make software more composable, reliable, and testable. For systems at scale, trade-offs in edge vs. cloud computing can impact speed and security. → Read More
How to Lead and Manage in This Brave New Remote and Hybrid World
Hybrid working is a mindset of trusting people and providing opportunities to get the best from everyone regardless of place and time. Managers have the opportunity to make people feel empowered, motivated, and productive. Alternatively, they can squash creativity, fun and psychological safety. → Read More
Sustainability for Development and Operations with DevSusOps
For a sustainability transformation, a business has to figure out how to measure its carbon footprint, come up with a plan to change the way it powers everything, and change the products they’re making, and even the markets that they operate in. Adrian Cockcroft spoke about sustainability in development and operations at QCon San Francisco 2022. → Read More
How to Analyze Behavior and Influence Behavior Change with the ABC Model
Having an agile mindset is not enough; we need to change behavior for adopting agile. With the Antecedent Behavior Consequence (ABC) Model, you can analyze the behavior, figure out what triggers it, and think about strategies to drive behavioral change. → Read More
Test Automation Requires a Strategy and Clean Code
Having a good strategy for test automation can make it easier to implement test automation and reduce test maintenance costs. The test automation pyramid and automation test wheel can be of help when formulating a test automation strategy and plan. Test automation code should be clean code, and treated similarly to production code. → Read More
How to Assess Software Quality
The quality practices assessment model (QPAM) can be used to classify a team’s exhibited behavior into four dimensions: Beginning, Unifying, Practicing, and Innovating. It explores social and technical quality aspects like feedback loops, culture, code quality and technical debt, and deployment pipeline. → Read More
Creating Environments High in Psychological Safety with a Combined Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach
Leadership is critical for making psychological safety happen, but they need to lead by example and show that it’s safe for people to take interpersonal risks. Complementing leadership with team workshops in communication skills can enable people to speak up and feel safe to fail. → Read More
Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives. → Read More
Sustainability for Software Companies: Reducing Impact by Deciding What Not to Do
Small and medium-sized companies can contribute to sustainability with emissions reduction, mental health offerings and inclusion. To support sustainability, software engineers can think about “what not to do” to reduce complexity and make solutions smaller, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint. → Read More
Helping Teams Deliver with a Quality Practices Assessment Model
The quality practices assessment model explores quality aspects that help teams to deliver in an agile way. The model covers both social and technical aspects of quality; it is used to assess the quality of the team’s processes and also touches on product quality. With an assessment, teams can look at where their practices lie within the quality aspects and decide on what they want to improve. → Read More
Learnings from Applying Psychological Safety Across Teams
Applying ideas from psychological safety can enable people to speak up in teams about what they don't know, don't understand, or mistakes they have made. Trust and creating safe spaces are essential, but more is needed. People need to feel that they will not be punished or embarrassed if they take interpersonal risks. → Read More
Testing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
Advanced driver assistance systems can have a huge number of test cases. Cutting the elephant into smaller pieces can ensure every bit and piece is tested. A good test environment is essential to be efficient, fast and flexible to cover all required tests to ensure quality. Testers should be involved in the project right from the beginning to avoid task-forces, quality- or delivery problems. → Read More
How Defining Agile Results and Behaviors Can Enable Behavioral Change
Specifying and measuring behavior within a certain organisational context can enable and drive behavioral change. To increase the success of an agile transformation, it helps if you link the desired behaviors to the expected results. This way you set yourself up to be able to reinforce the behavior you want to see more of in order to reach your results. → Read More
Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators
Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization. → Read More
How We Can Use Data to Improve System Quality
To understand how systems are being used, we can collect metrics and identify trends over time. The data and insights gained can be used to improve system quality by improving software design or testing patterns. → Read More
Applying Machine Learning for Business Outcomes at Travelopia
Travelopia changed its focus from a technology approach to business outcomes, and adapted agile and lean for delivering machine learning solutions. This enabled them to deliver machine-learning business models faster and better. → Read More
Scalable Automation Frameworks for Functional and Non-Functional Testing
Separating the capabilities of a testing framework from the actual tests can enable scaling automated testing for complex enterprise products. According to Alexander Velinov, we should agree on the types of tests to execute automatically during release and what should be kept as manually triggered tests. → Read More
The Myth of Product Mindset: It's What You Do, Not How You Think
Companies nowadays are looking for ways to cultivate a product mindset. While the idea of cultivating a “product mindset” allows us to focus primarily on ourselves, actually transforming our organizations often means changing our behavior to focus on our customers and how we work together to serve them. → Read More
Using the Technical Debt Metaphor to Communicate Code Quality
With technical debt, we end up paying a gradually rising cost. The technical debt metaphor was intended as a way to help us talk and think about the invisibility of decisions and qualities in code. Kevlin Henney gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022. His sixth impossibility was Technical Debt is Quantifiable as Financial Debt: → Read More