May 31, 2023

5 best practices for software development partnerships

“The key to successful co-creation is ensuring your partner is not just doing their job, but acting as a true strategic asset and advisor in support of your company’s bottom line,” says Mark Bishopp, head of embedded payments/finance and partnerships at Fortis. “This begins with asking probing questions during the prospective stage to ensure they truly understand, through years of experience on both sides of the table, the unique nuances of the industries you’re working in.” Beyond asking questions about skills and capabilities, evaluate the partner’s mindset, risk tolerance, approach to quality, and other areas that require alignment with your organization’s business practices and culture. ... To eradicate the us-versus-them mentality, consider shifting to more open, feedback-driven, and transparent practices wherever feasible and compliant. Share information on performance issues and outages, have everyone participate in retrospectives, review customer complaints openly, and disclose the most challenging data quality issues.

Revolutionizing Algorithmic Trading: The Power of Reinforcement Learning

The fundamental components of a reinforcement learning system are the agent, the environment, states, actions, and rewards. The agent is the decision-maker, the environment is what the agent interacts with, states are the situations the agent finds itself in, actions are what the agent can do, and rewards are the feedback the agent gets after taking an action. One key concept in reinforcement learning is the idea of exploration vs exploitation. The agent needs to balance between exploring the environment to find out new information and exploiting the knowledge it already has to maximize the rewards. This is known as the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. Another important aspect of reinforcement learning is the concept of a policy. A policy is a strategy that the agent follows while deciding on an action from a particular state. The goal of reinforcement learning is to find the optimal policy, which maximizes the expected cumulative reward over time. Reinforcement learning has been successfully applied in various fields, from game playing (like the famous AlphaGo) to robotics (for teaching robots new tasks).

Data Governance Roles and Responsibilities

Executive-level roles include leadership in the C-suite at the organization’s top. According to Seiner, people at the executive level support, sponsor, and understand Data Governance and determine its overall success and traction. Typically, these managers meet periodically as part of a steering committee to cover broadly what is happening in the organization, so they would add Data Governance as a line item, suggested Seiner. These senior managers take responsibility for understanding and supporting Data Governance. They keep up to date on Data Governance progress through direct reports and communications from those at the strategic level. ... According to Seiner, strategic members take responsibility for learning about Data Governance, reporting to the executive level about the program, being aware of Data Governance activities and initiatives, and attending meetings or sending alternates. Moreover, this group has the power to make timely decisions about Data Governance policies and how to enact them.?

Effective Test Automation Approaches for Modern CI/CD Pipelines

Design is not just about unit tests though. One of the biggest barriers to test automation executing directly in the pipeline is that the team that deals with the larger integrated system only starts a lot of their testing and automation effort once the code has been deployed into a bigger environment. This wastes critical time in the development process, as certain issues will only be discovered later and there should be enough detail to allow testers to at least start writing the majority of their automated tests while the developers are coding on their side. This doesn’t mean that manual verification, exploratory testing, and actually using the software shouldn’t take place. Those are critical parts of any testing process and are important steps to ensuring software behaves as desired. These approaches are also effective at finding faults with the proposed design. However, automating the integration tests allows the process to be streamlined.

What Does Being a Cross-Functional Team in Scrum Mean?

By bringing together individuals with different skills and perspectives, these teams promote innovation, problem-solving, and a holistic approach to project delivery. They reduce handoffs, bottlenecks, and communication barriers often plaguing traditional development models. Moreover, cross-functional teams enable faster feedback cycles and facilitate continuous improvement. With all the necessary skills in one team, there's no need to wait for handoffs or external dependencies. This enables quicker decision-making, faster iterations, and the ability to respond to customer feedback promptly. In short, being a cross-functional Scrum Team means having a group of individuals with diverse skills, a shared sense of responsibility, and a collaborative mindset. They work together autonomously, leveraging their varied expertise to deliver high-quality software increments. ... Building genuinely cross-functional Scrum Teams starts with product definition. This means identifying and understanding the scope, requirements, and goals of the product the team will work on.?

The strategic importance of digital trust for modern businesses

Modern software development processes, like DevOps, are highly automated. An engineer clicks a button that triggers a sequence of complicated, but automated, steps. If a part of this sequence (e.g., code signing) is manual then there is a likelihood that the step may be missed because everything else is automated. Mistakes like using the wrong certificate or the wrong command line options can happen. However, the biggest danger is often that the developer will store private code signing keys in a convenient location (like their laptop or build server) instead of a secure location. Key theft, misused keys, server breaches, and other insecure processes can permit code with malware to be signed and distributed as trusted software. Companies need a secure, enterprise-level code signing solution that integrates with the CI/CD pipeline and automated DevOps workflows but also provides key protection and code signing policy enforcement.

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