Here is our monthly selection of knowledge on programming, software testing and project management. This month you will find some interesting information and opinions about leading remote teams, legacy code, software architecture strategy, test automation, barriers of agility, tester burnout and transforming Agile teams through feminist leadership.
Text: Lessons from Leading a Remote Engineering Team. You may think that managing remote teams is hard, and it is, but there are real benefits that you can achieve by being open to remote employees and building a remote team. Let’s talk about the benefits of a remote team, how to build your remote team, and how to set your people up to succeed.
Text: Mutation Testing For those who are not familiar with it, mutation testing is a method of evaluating test quality by injecting bugs into the code and seeing whether the tests detect the fault or not. The more injected bugs the tests catch, the better they are.
Text: Don’t Let Legacy Code Make You Suffer. Make It Suffer. Feeling like the codebase you’re working on is poorly designed? Wish you could focus on writing good code, rather than trudging through mud code all day long? Would life be easier if only the legacy codebase had a clearer structure? If you answered “Yes” to any of those questions, be aware that you’re not alone. Quite the opposite, in fact. You only need to talk to people for more than a minute at meetups or conferences to realize that a significant amount of developers suffer from legacy code.
Text: Delivering on an architecture strategy In this article I’ll show that we can achieve a sustainable balance between feature delivery and foundational architectural work by empowering teams with autonomy, and fostering a strong partnership between product and tech on within those teams. We’ll also see that autonomy isn’t enough. To make coherent progress on architectural goals, our teams also need to align behind a shared vision. The Strategic Architectural Initiatives framework delivers that alignment, allowing you to reap full benefit from your high-performing teams.
Text: How to track automation tests coverage & statistics. All QA Engineers eventually face the need for automation tests coverage tracking and statistics gathering. How to solve this problem with minimal losses and maximum wow effect (and benefit for yourself surely)?
Text: Barriers to Agility Agile organizations require different leaders, cultures, and structures. In this article, Zuzana “Zuzi” Šochová explains that the fewer barriers you give agility on the way, the more likely the frameworks, methods, and practices can make a difference. You don’t have to start with changing everything immediately, but sooner or later such change is inevitable.
Text: How to Deal with Software Tester Burnout The problem of occupational burnout among people due to the lack of interest in the tasks assigned or the unevenness of the assigned load has been extremely acute these days. And the field of software testing is not an exception for this issue. This article proposes tips on how software testers can deal with burnout.
Video: Efficiency vs Effectiveness in Agile. Learn the difference between effectiveness and efficiency, and whether your software development team can be agile without knowing it.
Video: What Is The Ideal Programming Language? What would your ideal programming language look like? Erik Doernenburg, head of technology at Thoughtworks, and Richard Feldman, author of “Elm in Action,” sat together at GOTO Copenhagen 2021 to chat about what theirs would look like. They also had a look into the future of up-and-coming programming languages.
Video: Expert Talk: DevOps & Software Architecture. In a world where software architecture is evolving rapidly, we are confronted with new challenges. Simon Brown, Dave Farley and Hannes Lowette cover some recent trends in software architecture, touching on hot topics such as DevOps and how to deal with complexity. At the same time they discuss bounded context and continuous delivery and how they are still being misunderstood by the industry.
Video: Transforming Agile Teams Through Feminist Leadership. Feminist Leadership is about capitalizing on the ideas and skills of as many individuals as possible by establishing team cooperation and group leadership instead of competition and personal leadership; it seeks to develop power “with others” instead of power “over others.”
Video: What Should Software QA Do? This talk tries to answer the question of what the software quality assurance (QA) team should be doing, and how it is not only more fruitful for the software development organization, but a more rewarding path for the Testing Craftsman.
Tools: Scrumlr is an open source web app for collaborative online retrospectives
Tools: EaselQA is an Open Source, Codeless, End to End Test automation framework.
Tools: RetroCadence: The Best Retrospective Tool For Agile Teams The retrospective is arguably the event that will yield the most benefits for your agile team. This is because it is the place where you identify crucial, valuable improvements for your team that will drive ongoing performance improvements. Such improvements allow your team to deliver higher value products in a shorter timescale.