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 Lean UX and Agile, running tech projects, bug fixing policy, velocity obsession, estimating, chaos testing, user stories, performance testing, open source project management tools.
Text: Lean UX & Agile: Study Guide This study guide covers how to work through many of the challenges UX practitioners face when working in Agile. Perhaps you’re struggling to understand how UX fits in Agile or to decide when to do research and design each sprint. Maybe you’re finding it difficult to do any user research at all or feeling pulled in too many directions to do UX work effectively. Agile can be tricky for everyone, especially UX. We often have to adapt how we work and help others understand how we fit and contribute. The goal of this study guide is to provide tangible tools and tips to make the adaptation process clear and easy.
Text: How to Write Good Test Selectors Over the years I’ve written a lot of automation tests – some good, some flakey. Choosing the right selector is key to building non-flakey tests.
Text: How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum Project management is a topic most people have strong opinions on, and I’m no exception. To answer the question of how different companies run engineering projects, I pulled in help from across the industry.
Text: Optimizing Bugs Fix Policy I am sure you are familiar with the following scenario: a user is reporting to your Support team that something is not working for him as expected. Your Support team investigates the issue and agrees that there is a bug in the system. They open a JIRA bug to the R&D department with all the information they have collected, as expected from them. But then… a furious argument begins on the ticket. Support is saying that they think R&D should solve this bug within a week. The Customer Success Manager is saying this is a critical customer just before renewal. Therefore, we need to make all the effort to solve it within 48 hours, but R&D doesn’t see this as an urgent matter and thinks the bug should be solved within 30 days. Who is right?!
Text: Companies That Obsess Over Velocity Are Clueless About Scrum Most companies using Scrum spend a lot of time discussing velocity and devising ways to increase it. Velocity becomes a magical, almost mythical number that developers must chase in every Sprint.
The race for an ever-higher velocity is the number-one reason why so many developers hate working with Scrum. There’s never enough time to catch your breath, to pause and reflect on your work.
Text: No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates – and generally speaking humans are better estimators than what most people believe. This seems rather surprising given all we’ve heard about the problems of bad time estimations, projects going overboard, etc. and of course, your personal experience with software time estimates. But if people are terrible at estimation, how does that fit with our obvious evolutionary need to make quick decisions based on partial data? If we can’t estimate well how did we decide if a gap is wide enough to jump over, if an animal is worth the hunt, if a certain area is more likely to have water and shade? Without estimation skills we wouldn’t survive. So what’s going on?
Text: Chaos Testing: Strengthening System Resilience with a Proactive Approach Chaos testing, also known as chaos engineering, is a proactive methodology used to test the resilience and reliability of complex distributed systems. This article provides an in-depth overview of chaos testing, highlighting its benefits, key principles, techniques, the proposed chaos testing framework, and popular tools available in the market.
Video: We Need Guns, Lots of Guns – There Is No Silver Bullet The software development project managers are notoriously seeking for silver bullets. Models, concepts or frameworks that could miraculously fix whatever is broken; Lean, Agile, Scrum, SAFe®, DevOps. This talk is a travel back in time to recap Fred Brooks “Mythical Man-month” book and his prophecy that there are “No Silver bullets”.
Video: Deno: The JavaScript Runtime for the Serverless Era The open source Deno runtime demonstrates how clean and productive a modern, batteries-included, JavaScript programming environment can be. This talk describes why we are building it and how to use it.
Video: Driving Stakeholders Engagement with User Stories The presenter designed this workshop during COVID times to engage stakeholders better by using User Stories more efficiently. The idea of the workshop is to help people move away from the notion that User Stories are merely a “As a .. I want .. so that” writing template.
Video: A Medley of Frontend and Backend Performance Testing Techniques Frontend and backend performance are key elements in the success of websites. This presentation introduces you to both frontend and backend performance testing and why a medley of these software testing activities are needed to make sure that your website is performant.
Tools: Free and Open Source Project Management Tools This article contains a selected list of free and open source project management software tools that can be used to manage software development projects. The features provided by traditional open source project management tools are the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), the Gantt and PERT charts, Critical Path Management (CPM) to describe the sequences of tasks, for the project planning, resource allocation graphs, mind maps, tasks management, work and sprint completion monitoring and risk management.
Tools: Open Source Jira Plugins, Add-Ons and Utilities Developed by Atlassian, Jira is a commercial issue tracking tool that allows bug tracking and Agile project management. It is one of the most-widely used tool by Scrum teams working in corporate Agile software development environments.
Tools: Commercial and Open Source JMeter Plugins The Apache JMeter is an open source load testing tool developed by the Apache Foundation that can be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources. It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server and also some functional testing. JMeter has an open architecture that can be extended with plugins.