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 remote teams, software quality, mentoring, daily stand-ups, test automation, Agile certifications, project management, DevOps, software architecture, product owners, JMeter and JavaScript code analysis.
Text: On Messing up Your Remote Team—and Then Getting It Right I think more companies should open their doors up to remote/distributed workers. It is a HUGE advantage when hiring; and not just because of the expanded hiring pool, either. Even many people who want to go to the office every day (like me) prefer companies who invest in distributed teams, because of the cultural implications, as well as the social justice impact.
Text: Software Quality, Bugs, and SLAs Your app feels buggy. There are lots of small quality issues, and it crashes now and then. The engineering team buried in bugs: they don’t know which ones to address first. What do you do? How do you get the product feeling great, the engineering team feeling productive and proud of delivering a high-quality product, pumping out features while keeping the bugs down?
Text: How To Be A Good Software Engineer Mentor Mentoring is one of the best ways to help junior developers grow their skills. As a mid-level or senior developer, it’s up to you to decide what kind of mentor you want to be. The most important thing to keep in mind as a mentor is that it’s not about you. It’s not about your experience or how eloquently you can write code. Your goal as a mentor should be to help the junior dev understand more than code. They can read about that. You need to show them the other things that you only get from experience. Here are a few things you can do to be a good web developer mentor.
Text: Rethinking the daily stand-up Different engineering teams function in different ways. Each employ various strategies and processes, informed and shaped by changing technologies, markets, personnel, competitive landscapes, and company culture. But one ritual — the daily stand-up — has become particularly popular with engineering teams around the world. The format is remarkably similar in every organization; teams get together for a short amount of time and run through what each person did yesterday, what they’re working on today, and anything that’s blocking them.
Text: Conway’s Law for Test Automation? As software test automation becomes more and more like a software development project – I would hypothesize that Conway’s law indeed predicts the shape of the (test) automation solution. So in other words, if the shape of your automation is a pyramid/triangle, so is your team structure heavy on development tests.
Text: Three Things Every Software Testing Risk Management Plan Needs As a software developer, you understand that testing is an integral part of software development. However, software testing is not just about finding and fixing bugs; it is also about identifying and mitigating risks. Therefore, risk management is an essential part of any software testing process, and having a risk management plan in place is critical during the testing planning phase.
Text: I am Certifiable! – Honest Mom All The Agile Kids Are Doing It! CSM, PMI-ACP, PSM. Some people wear their certifications like badges of honor. In this article, Mark Haynes describes, with a facetious bias, some of the negative sides of Agile certifications.
Video: Eating Elephants: Conquering Big Projects One Bite at a Time Have you ever started a new software development project, or been given a task that at face value seems simple enough? But as you start digging deeper, you realize that you have only just seen the tip of the iceberg? The deeper you dig, the more paralyzed you become by.
Video: Effective DevOps for Organizations DevOps is still hot, but far too often it feels like it makes things harder. This presentation will help you fix that. As an IT professional, you are probably in an organization still figuring out how to implement DevOps. Maybe you have specialist DevOps roles or teams, or maybe you’ve just renamed some job titles. Regardless, there are fundamentals you should understand and practices you should adopt if you want DevOps to work. This session will cover the fundamentals of DevOps, why they matter, and how to effectively apply them regardless of your industry, size, or structure.
Video: Fractal Software Architecture Why is software development so difficult? A major reason is that you spend more time reading than writing code. If you can decrease the time required to read existing code, you can increase productivity. You can decrease the time you waste reading complicated code by writing code that is easy to read – code that fits in your head.
Video: Write Tests That Don’t Suck: Test Driven Development in JavaScript This session discusses Test-Driven Development (TDD) in JavaScript, without the dogma, without the buzzwords, in simple clear examples, using Visual Studio Code, Jest and Wallaby.js.
Video: Strategy Maps: Connecting Roadmaps to the Bigger Picture This presentation explains what strategy is, how to visualize it and importantly how to visualize your competitors’ strategy, so you visualize options in time, in context and can translate this to roadmaps suitable for agile teams to iterate on and plan to an appropriate horizon. There are at least 12.
Video: Testing Web Applications with Playwright Playwright is an open source framework for Web Testing and Automation developed by Microsoft. It allows testing Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API. Playwright is built to enable cross-browser web test automation that is always green, capable, reliable and fast. You can use the Playwright API in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, .NET and Java.
Video: How to Recognize a True Product Owner There are many examples of fake Product Owners (PO) in the companies (PO as Business Analyst, PO as Project Manager, Proxy PO). Companies cause this by using many organisational design antipatterns (assign one PO per team, “Product” being in fact a component, using committee for product decisions instead of one person).
Tools: Learning JMeter : Documentation, Tutorials, Videos JMeter is an open source test automation framework developed under the stewardship of the Apache Foundation that is mainly used for performance and load testing. This article provides pointers to documentation, tutorials, courses and videos to learn to use JMeter.
Tools: LambdaTest – Cloud-Based Platform For All Testing Needs LambdaTest is a cloud-based platform that caters to all your automation and manual testing needs without owning any device physically. LambdaTest provides web application testing, mobile web, and native app testing with an option to choose from emulators or actual devices. In addition to usual web and app testing, the tool allows a list of integrations, making it a unified solution with all the necessary features for a tester.
Tools: Open Source JavaScript Code Analysis The quality of the JavaScript code is often verified with the traditional activities of unit and functional testing. There are however tools that allow checking code before or during its execution to assess its quality and its adherence to coding standards using a process called code analysis. This article presents a list of open source tools to perform static and dynamic code analysis on JavaScript programs.