Here is our monthly selection of interesting knowledge material on programming, software testing and project management:
Blog: Agile Scenarios and Storyboards
Blog: The difference between Test First and Test Driven Development
Blog: Daily Process Thoughts: Agile Coach or Scrum Master
Blog: Daniel Cook on 8 Laws of Productivity
Blog: 5 Things That Will Make Your Agile Development Project FAIL
Article: Transitioning to Agile
Article: Exploratory test adventure: a creative, collaborative learning experience (PDF)
Article: Designing Experiences for Responsive Web Sites
Article: Is Agile Always Appropriate?
Article: SQL Performance Issues: Query Compilation
Article: The Implications of Having a Definition of Done on …

Code reviews and software inspections have existed for a long time in the software engineering world. They have been however only adopted by a minority of software development projects. Programmers have always been reluctant to submit their code to the criticism of their peer. The pair programming technique promoted by the Agile approaches has faced the same obstacles and is regularly ranked in the bottom of the agile practices adoption surveys.

Methods & Tools is proud to be the media sponsor of the upcoming Scrum Gathering India Regional 2013 that will take place in Pune, July 36 and 27 2013.

In the preface of his book Essential Scrum, Kenneth Rubin writes “giving a new Scrum team just The Scrum Guide and expecting good results would be like giving a new chess player a 15-page description of the rules of chess and expecting her to be able to play a reasonable game of chess after reading it.”

Here is our monthly selection of interesting knowledge material on programming, software testing and project management:
Web site: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Java Coding Standard (PDF)
Web site: Guidelines for Unit Testing Python Code
Web site: The Agile Atlas
Article: Basing Earned Value on Technical Performance (PDF)
Article: Ten Tips for Constructing an Agile Database Development Environment that Works
Article: Taking on a Project in Difficulties
Article: Iteration Retrospective Activity: Turn the Tables
Article: QTP Best Practices
Article: Dot NET Assemblies and Strong Name Signature
Tools: Zucchini, a visual iOS testing framework
Tools: cipra, a C++11 unit testing framework
Video: How Good …

Here is a list of software development related conferences and events that will take place in the coming weeks and that have media partnerships with the Methods & Tools software development magazine:
STAREAST, April 28–May 3 2013, Orlando, USA
GeeCON, May 15-18 2013, Krakow, Poland
ICSE 2013, May 18-26 2013, San Francisco, USA

DevOps Summit Europe: Enabling DevOps, 23 May 2013, London, UK
NxtGenTesting – Next Generation Testing conference, 23 May 2013, London, UK
Android DevCon Spring, May 28-31 2013, Boston, USA
Better Software & Agile Development Conference West, June 2-7 2013, Las …

I am frequently amused when the same people who believe that it is not possible to get the requirements for a product correct up front, and therefore want to use Scrum for development, will in the next breath explain how they aren’t quite ready to start using Scrum because they haven’t worked out all of the details of their Scrum approach! This type of thinking is poorly aligned with fundamental Scrum principles.