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 productive programmers and teams, working together, testing estimation, saving low-morale teams, software architecture and agile assessment.
Text: How To Be More Productive Than Most Programmers Even one simple change in your day can make you twice as productive. In the article, you will find eight way to become more productive. The trick is that most programmers are too focused on how to write programs, and they overlook the essential things that make people productive.
Text: Design, Together As consultants, we often step into projects that are full of ambiguity, in business domains overwhelmed by complexity. We have learned that the art of successful delivery depends on tackling that complexity head-on, usually by diving in with questions.
Text: 5 Ways for Testing Time Estimation We need to distinguish the testing time and time for stabilizing the build. Time for build stabilization can vary and the whole team effort is in charge of that. In practice, the time buffer that each team member puts into his/her estimation should partially represent the build stabilization time. The main question is how much time the team can afford considering a crazy release schedule in the Agile world.
Text: 3 Team Effectiveness Models You Can Use to Create Highly Productive Teams Creating effective Agile teams is not easy. This article explores three models that can inspire you in the Scrum team creation process: the Lencioni Model, the 7T Model and the Tuckman’s Team Development Model.
Text: How to Write Good Test Cases for Database Testing: 4 Key Tips When developing software, you will need to write test cases to help ensure that your code is working as expected. Writing good database testing scenarios can go a long way toward improving your application’s reliability and making it easier to maintain in the future.
Text: How to Save a Dying, Low-Morale Team At a point in my career, I was the manager for a team at a global tech company. I had originally joined the team as an individual contributing software engineer, and when I did, the team was at a size of 8. But when I joined, I didn’t know the team was in trouble. I soon discovered that poor senior management had basically driven many members of the team to unhappiness. Low morale has its effects, and in the space of about five months, the team went from 8 to 4 people, which is about when I took over as the team’s manager. At that point, the difficult-to-work-with senior manager was gone, and so was the team’s previous direct manager.
Text: Building an Agile Assessment Tool Conceptually Scrum is simple, so why is achieving a mature agile team such a daunting experience? Maybe because it’s not just a matter of implementing the ceremonies. Scrum teams need to embrace continuous improvements through an incremental and iterative process.
Text: Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software It’s a good idea to facilitate a software architecture jam early on in the design process, instead of letting it play out organically, over a longer period of time. Doing so will mean more immediate feedback, a lot more people invested in the idea and blind spots of the approach caught earlier.
Text: Optimizing Testing: Testing Realities How much are software testing and software quality assurance important in today’s software development world. This article explores this topic and how organizations could get the most out of software testing.
Video: The Monoliths or Microservices Debate is Missing the Point The “monoliths vs microservices” debate often focuses on technological aspects, ignoring strategy and team dynamics. Instead of technology, smart-thinking organizations are beginning with team cognitive load as the guiding principle for modern software. In this talk, we explain how and why the debate of monoliths versus microservices is missing the point, illustrated by real case studies.
Video: Remote-First Team Interactions with Team Topologies Team-based software delivery can be very effective, but how can we promote and enable team-based approaches in a “remote-first world” for software development projects? What should teams think about, and what patterns can teams adapt to be effective when no one is in the office?
Video: Continuous Learning with Andon Cords in Software Development Teams Learn about one software development team’s struggle to improve collaboration and how they sought to shorten cycle time by carefully crafting an experiment with an Andon Cord. The Andon Cord is a Toyota innovation designed to empower front-line employees to recognize issues, initiate a stoppage of work, and work together as a team to quickly identify a path forward. The emergency cable strung above assembly lines became a symbol of the Toyota Way, and has widely been copied throughout the auto industry and beyond. This presentation will introduce metrics that show a surprising correlation between collaboration through Andon Cord pulls and Cycle Time.
Video: Securing Java Containers So you built your Java apps and containerized them, great job! But what does it take to secure a container? Are you sure you’re following all the best practices to build container images correctly? What are the threats you are not mitigating in a running container? There is no better way to understand container security than seeing some live hacking! This session introduces the state of docker security by reviewing vulnerabilities in Docker images and their impact on your Java application. Learn and adopt best practices of running secure containerized Java applications in production
Video: Practical Guidance for a Project to Product Transformation Ross Clanton and Amy Walters walk through an enterprise playbook, tactics, and case studies for how to successfully transform from a project to product based operating model. The target audience for this paper is leaders at any level of the enterprise who are driving a transition to a product-centric model. Transformations that shift from project to product require changes at every level and in every corner of the enterprise.
Video: Shifting QA Left: Emerging Trends in Code Quality and Security Automation This talk discusses various advances in program analysis technology that enable a larger class of bugs to be detected earlier in software development projects (and even to be automatically fixed in some cases). It focuses particularly on recent developments that enable tight integration of program analysis tools into DevOps processes.
Tools: Mockoon is an open source tool to design and run mock REST APIs. Compatible with the OpenAPI specification, Mockoon integrates perfectly with your existing applications and API design workflow. Mockoon offers you complete flexibility when creating your mocks: custom statuses, route and global headers, file serving or body editor, HTTPS, etc. You can simulate real-life scenarios with dynamic templating and the response rules system. You are also able to test your app resilience with sequential and random responses.
Tools: Why Choose Kualitee as Your Test Management Tool We are in that era of technology when there are so many different software testing tools available in the market that it can be difficult to narrow down your options. Let’s discuss one of these tools: Kualitee.
Tools: Free Online Scrum Tools Agile approaches like Scrum recommend a “just enough” attitude in software development and this is also the case when you discuss tools. Ideally, you would work with a small team that is collocated, but this is not always possible and you might be running your project virtually with a distributed Scrum team scattered around the world.