WORDS TO THE WISE

Technology

The true cost of the last mile

14.07.2021

The huge boost in eCommerce caused by the Coronavirus pandemic and the resultant influx in home deliveries is a trend some believe is here to stay, but what is the true cost it’s having on our society, our retailers and even our environment?

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leadership

Learnings from digital leaders: Creating culture shifts in healthcare

12.07.2021

In this interview, The London Clinic’s James Maunder shares with us his approach to creating self-empowered technology teams, and the behaviours that set an organisation apart when it comes to driving forward change and innovation.

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technology

Getting Started with Performance Testing

02.07.2021

In this blog post we’ll look at the different types of performance testing and how to get started if you’re new to it.

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technology

Learnings from digital leaders: Driving forward innovation in Government

24.05.2021

Harvey Neve headed up digital products and transformation at Public Health England for three years before moving on to become director of a digital technology services consultancy. In this interview he shares his extensive experience of leading change and driving forward digital innovation.

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technology

What is mutation testing?

17.05.2021

Mutation testing assesses the quality of your test suite. It works by making an edit to your code, then running the test suite and identifying what in your code base can break or change without tripping one of your unit tests.

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scrum & agile

Best practices for blended or hybrid teams

19.04.2021

Most software product and service delivery projects are done in house or externally, with the project management being internal. In recent years, however, we are seeing an increase in the use of hybrid teams that combine in-house and external experts.

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Technology

Understanding how the API-first approach affects testing

12.04.2021

The API-First approach is a software development design approach that has become increasingly popular in recent years; so how can we utilise this to help us to improve quality whilst simultaneously improving the efficiency of our QA tests?

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News

Worth Internet Systems appointed as development partner to UK Research and Innovation

08.04.2021

Following a competitive procurement process, Worth Internet Systems has been appointed as development partner to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on the build of their new digital funding service.

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When should you choose to outsource your software development? It’s a question we get asked a lot.

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Technology

The ultimate guide to Headless CMS

30.03.2021

Over the last few years, whenever I’ve been in a conversation about content management, the question keeps coming up, “Is it headless?”

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News

Launching our new office in South Africa

25.03.2021

This week marks the launch of our new office in Stellenbosch's infamous Technopark, near Cape Town, South Africa.

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strategy, vision, scrum & agile

Key ingredients for a successful team

22.03.2021

Whether you choose to develop products in-house or with an external partner like WORTH, the success of your project largely depends on the teams involved.

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technology

Standing the test of time

15.03.2021

Testing is a great way to assert the existence of value in your product. In this blog post we’ve proposed a set of rules for creating low maintenance, well-written tests.

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User experience, Design

Good discovery leads to better results

08.03.2021

This may sound obvious, but a good discovery phase leads to better digital solutions. It’s certainly true in our experience. But the opposite is also true: jumping straight into development or doing it under pressure or without a clear goal, rarely leads to good results.

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technology, user experience, development, strategy

Continuous everything

22.02.2021

Continuous improvement can provide the means to unify and accelerate your product success, and produce a better quality product and user experience.

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Technology, Delivery

Provocative thoughts that lead to successful delivery

08.02.2021

There are many things that come together to make digital product or service delivery a success. Knowing your users and their needs. Understanding your organisation and how it functions. And either having the in-house technical expertise to deliver digital solutions, or working in partnership with a firm like us.

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Technology, Delivery

5 reasons to fight complexity in your IT systems

26.01.2021

Unnecessary complexity in IT systems can and should be avoided. In IT, almost with no exception, the best solution is the simplest solution. A solution that gets you where you want to go. A solution that can be launched quickly. A solution that helps you get feedback from real users when they actually use it. A solution that defers decision making. A solution that is not going to block you or your organisation in the future to make alternative, better decisions to deliver a resilient digital service.

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Development

The importance of deleting

05.11.2020

The aim of the article is not to put forward the idea of deletion for deletion's sake. Sometimes solutions to things are large, this approach aims to simplify as much as possible.

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Development

On metrics part 4: Worthy Metrics

26.08.2020

This is part four - the final part - in a short series of articles on the nature of metrics generally but within product and especially software development particularly.

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Scrum & Agile

How we have built our new agile workspace

27.07.2020

"An agile workspace: a space in which people have the option to choose how and where they want to work within that workspace." For WORTH, an agile workspace means a space our employees love to be at. We want them to be happy, feel welcome, inspired and motivated.

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Development

On metrics part 3: Making metrics work

20.07.2020

This is part three in a short series on the nature of metrics generally, and within software development particularly. In the previous article we outlined three fundamental characteristics of bad metrics: Goodhart’s problem, Drucker’s problem, and the context problem. There are also simple practical problems, and we’ll address those here too.

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Development

On metrics part 2: why metrics fail

25.06.2020

This is part two in a short series on the nature of metrics generally and within software development particularly.

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Development

On metrics Part 1: How metrics kill you

15.06.2020

This is part one in a short series of articles on the nature of metrics, especially within product and software development: - Data distortion, data literacy, and data disillusionment

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Scrum & Agile

The perfect agile team

29.05.2020

“The perfect team is an agile team; built for speed, small at just four or five people, confident and empowered to make decisions. If it comes to it they will roll the dice.”

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Technology

“I’m not technical” is a self-fulfilling prophecy

16.04.2020

There is a costly gap between the world of business and the world of technology. This article is about when human beings involved in software development say the words: "I'm not technical."

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Most people are lazy, and testers are no exception. It’s one of the main reasons automated end-to-end and regression tests exist. But there are dozens of different automation tools in every thinkable programming language (however… I would pay to see someone port Selenium to Fortran), so which one do you pick? In this blog I will make a case for CodeceptJS and offer a short introduction.

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Equality, Women in Tech

Making fairness and equality a personal objective

13.02.2020

Being a woman in the male dominated tech world has its perks. I have been part of predominantly male groups like this for most of my life and I am totally ok with that. Actually… I still am a woman amongst men in most areas of my life: at home and at work.

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Technology

Is there room for personal development in IT projects?

12.12.2019

I like nuance. It leaves room for discussion. I recently read an article criticising Go’s (the programming language) take on simplicity.

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In this post, we're having a chat with Frontend Developer Chris Johnson, to get his thoughts on working with Liferay.

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Security, Security Champions, Technology

Security Champions Guild: Tips for fun and interactive workshops

16.09.2019

Enabling and scaling security processes into agile teams was the biggest challenge for the Security Team. The way we approached this was by starting a Security Champions Guild. In this article, the Security Team will take you on this journey.

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Prior to starting my new job at as a Tech Lead at Worth, I had a couple of weeks of free time. During that time, it was a perfect moment to reflect on a couple of things. One of these things being the various projects that I have worked on. While reflecting on these projects, I became curious about what I liked about the ones that were a success, and what I disliked about the ones that turned out to be a failure.

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According to Stack Overflow, GraphQL is part of the ‘hottest stack’ in the tech scene . It has continued to be adopted by many companies for the benefits it brings. It was developed by Facebook in 2012 to drive their large, complex social systems of billions of users. In this piece, we’ll discover what GraphQL is, the reasons to adopt it and how to implement it.

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"Scribo Algorismus Ergo Sum". Who says such a thing? I guess I do. It is an addiction that has been part of me since I was a teenager. The real question is: how come writing code is still so much fun? I don't know, but it is!

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Traineeship

Traineeship part II: The Experiences

14.06.2019

In February this year, trainees Amy, Polina and Hakan marked the start of their adventure as trainees at WORTH. Following 'Traineeship blog Part I: The Expectations' , we now learn about the experiences of our trainees during and after the traineeship. Keep on reading to find out about all the things the trainees learned, how they experienced the traineeship overall, and what they enjoy most about working at WORTH.

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Traineeship

Traineeship Part I: The Expectations

04.06.2019

Last year, WORTH introduced the start of a 12 week, full-stack, guided training program developed in-house by our technical coaches. It introduces junior software engineers/frontend developers to the technologies and methodologies that we use inside the company. These also happen to be some of the most successful techniques in the industry.

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Thinking about working abroad? Or about working in another city in the Netherlands? Or maybe you're thinking of moving your business elsewhere? Then I have one more question for you: Have you thought about The Hague? The Dutch WORTH office has been in The Hague for over 15 years. Here are 5 reasons why we are happy we work in The Hague!

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I wanted to explore how businesses make decisions about the big ideas of our day — AI, privacy, security, bias. I wanted to better understand the ethics of business. I wanted to be a better writer, so I could get it all down in words. But I wasn’t. So I wrote it into a game! A game which you can play and make the decisions for yourself.w text

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Here at WORTH, we’re dedicated to producing quality products. To that end, the testers are always trying to improve and learn more. To help them we created a list of resources, online trainings and a few assignments.

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The first part of this article, 'Exploring Agile Part I', has been an exploration of Agile from different perspectives, concluding that many are doing Agile by focussing on specific frameworks or practices. It also briefly touched upon the holistic perspective on Agile where a shift in mindset is considered the ultimate goal.

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Strategy, Vision, Change Management, User Experience

How to strategically design your vision

07.03.2019

This article provides an overview of what a vision is, the benefits of having a well-informed vision and how to create a vision that can be practically implemented to help drive businesses towards their desired future state.

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As we previously discussed in Aimar's previous blog post, DevOps aims to improve quality and efficiency, while reducing the risk of failure within software development teams. There are a number of ways we may achieve this by. These include breaking down team-silos, automating processes and continuously quantifying success. To view all this from a slightly more practical angle, this time we'll focus on 'three ways DevOps efforts help save time'.

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When using a website menu on a mobile device, how exactly does the user get to a landing page? Click on the heading? The chevron icon? Do you need an extra menu item for the landing page? Simple questions, banal even, but as a jobbing designer we have to resolve them one way or another. The best way to trash your projects’ usability is to not consider the little things as you go along.

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Gamification, User Experience, Design

Engaging people with game elements and mechanics

31.01.2019

As a User Experience Designer, one of my main tasks is to make it easy for users to achieve their goals and perform their tasks using the service we create. We summarise this as “having a good experience” while using the application, the service, and preferably throughout all interactions a person has with a product or service. However, this is not always enough to keep people engaged or motivate them. Gamification can enhance experience to improve motivation and engagement.

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Explaining the meaning of Agile or “to be agile” is no easy task. The saying “The more you learn, the less you know”, definitely applies to this topic. In an attempt to demystify its different meanings, this article explores Agile from three different perspectives, concluding with a fourth, holistic perspective.

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Here at Worth, we want to help you deliver great products. To help you do that, here's two checklists that we made for Design Sprints and Lightning Decision Jams that we don’t want to keep to ourselves!

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In this insight, I explore how tech is disrupting the food delivery industry, restaurant typologies, how we eat, live, and so on. Underpinning all of this, is modern life’s greatest woe: our collective lack of time, and our undeniable need to... eat.

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Teaching, Technology

Lessons from eight months of teaching

03.01.2019

For eight months, I worked as an instructor at a web-development bootcamp. The company that I worked for is a company that welcomes people with little to no programming background, teaches them a very specific stack of technologies, and then helps them to get a job. It involves assessments, and not all students make it to the end. With zero teaching experience to start with, I was bound to learn a lot. Here are the lessons I have learned from eight months of teaching.

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Devops

So, what exactly is DevOps?

21.12.2018

What is DevOps all about? Following part one of the DevOps blog series, we dive a little further into this mysterious domain, how it emerged, and why it is imperative to have within your company.

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Oh, hey there! Today I would like to talk a bit about self-organizing teams. Now I know that there are many articles online with different opinions on this topic. Therefore, I will now share mine.

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How sentiment sketches help clients empathise with their users.

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It can be difficult to find a guide on the basics for effectively using PortSwigger’s Web Security’s Java-based graphical tool, Burp. To that end, I’m going to review how you can simply view requests in Burp Suite and modify them. The Community Edition, which can be downloaded free of charge, is sufficient for this.

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Agile and adaptable organizations are the ones that thrive in today’s ever-changing, uncertain global business environment. In our company, multiculturalism brings together a diverse bonanza of cultures and ethnic backgrounds on a daily basis.

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I recently came across a debate about DevOps job titles: Build Engineer, Release Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer and Cloud Platform Engineer. What do they actually mean in terms of responsibilities and technical skills? How did they come into the picture over the last couple of years?

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Since I started working for Worth over a year ago, I’ve been involved in the QA process for multiple Liferay DXP projects. Because Liferay has its own unique challenges for test automation, I wanted to share a few of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

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Technology, Security

Part II: Security in the Design Phase

09.10.2018

Security is important in every stage of your project. From the Discovery Phase to the Deployment Phase, and everything in between. This post focuses on the second project phase: Design.

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How do you scale agile across an organisation? This question prompted me to take the Scrum@Scale course with Jeff Sutherland, read articles and cases about scaling with scrum, and attend Agile Amsterdam for which the theme was “Agile At Scale”.

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Roughly 5 years ago, two remarkable ideas for web development were born in the JavaScript ecosystem. One was the React Library which was built by Facebook developers, trying to solve many problems that existed with building web user interfaces. The other, was Typescript, a JavaScript transpiler built by Microsoft.

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Ways in which Design Sprints can integrate into the GDS agile delivery phases. Examples are provided of how we have done this here at WORTH.

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Technology, Smart home, IOT

Smart Home Lessons Learned and the Future of the Internet of Things

27.08.2018

Whilst your smart system is providing value for your family, business or city, integrated additions will provide both the agility to respond to changing technologies and possibilities, as well as a more sustainable smart system for long term benefit.

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The security team at WORTH recently attended the annual OWASP Appsec Europe event in Europe. When planning to attend this event next year, keep the following tips in mind:

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Design Thinking, User Experience

Design Thinking for Non-Designers

06.07.2018

Design is more than a department that deals with just aesthetics (how things look). At its core, it is the principle of problem seeking and problem solving, with the intention of a product, service, process or a form of communication, enhancing a person’s experience.

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UI, User Experience

Scannability: A case for uppercase

29.06.2018

In this article, I pin-point important reasons in favour of using uppercase characters in UI design and describe how these should be applied.

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Security, Compliance, Technology

PART I: SECURITY IN THE DISCOVERY PHASE

15.06.2018

Security is important in every stage of your project. From the Discovery Phase to the deployment phase, and everything in between. This post will focus on the first project phase: Discovery.

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Security, Agile, Technology

Introduction: Our Agile Security Journey

31.05.2018

Welcome to: "Our Agile Security Journey". Wouter de Meijer, Ernout van der Waard and Bryan Soman have put together a security blog series to guide you in your decision-making. First up: Our Agile Security Journey.

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Numerous lists of user stories are transformed into long streams of ones and zeros. But there is so much time and effort put in the system, that they forget one little tiny piece of the puzzle...the user.

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Government, Scrum & Agile

THINK 'AGILE GOVERNMENT PROJECT' IS A PARADOX?

07.11.2017

WORTH Scrum Master Marian Maas dispels all fears in her Liferay Digital Solutions Forum Roundtable.

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Agile Development, Scrum & Agile

Agile Development Under Fire

02.06.2017

Recently my colleague Nuno shared a talk by Dave Thomas with the tantalizing title “Agile is dead”. My initial response was one of slight annoyance being trolled with another agile bashing click bait video. I watched it all the way through with a sense of deja-vu, then it hit me. I had seen it before!

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