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 projects, managing and interviewing developers, tracking user stories, integration testing, the dark side of Agile, continuous software architecture and DevOps.
Resource: Resources on GitLab’s all-remote approach. GitLab curated list of resources for remote professionals, teams, and organizations.
Text: From Software Engineer to Engineering Manager. A year ago, all engineers at ShopBack reported directly to the CTO. We had no Engineering Managers (EM), no team leads, and in other words — no structure. Recognizing this as a rising issue for a start-up with a 250% year-on-year growth rate, we hired a VP of Engineering to put a proper structure in place. Introducing engineering managers was a paradigm shift he proposed which had an outsized impact on the engineering team.
Text: 7+ Ways to Track User Stories. Why do we want to track user stories? There are several reasons, some better than others.
Text: A Node.js Guide to Actually Doing Integration Tests. Your software isn’t fully tested until you write integration tests for it. While unit tests help ensure that functions are properly written, integration tests help ensure that the system is working properly as a whole. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Luka Blažecki uses Node.js to explain why integration testing is important for every development platform and how to write clean, composable integration tests.
Text: Let me finish: how to stop interrupting… and change the world. We are all guilty of interrupting – but if we all just stopped and listened, argues Nancy Kline, we could radically change the way we live…
Text: Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews (And what you should use instead). Senior engineers are the lifeblood of any software organization. They are the most desired, most expensive, and most difficult to attract. And especially in an historically tight labor market, your hiring process needs to be tailored to their specific needs, as you need them much more than they need you. Senior engineers hate coding interviews, and if you’re looking to attract the best, you should hate them too.
Text: The Dark Side of Agile. After many years of working with Agile and being a witness to its results, we found the main mistakes (the dark side) that usually come up when implementing this methodology. Take a look at some reasons why Scrum fails within the software development projects.
Text: Is It Easy to Test Software? Software testing seems like an easy job to many people, thinking that some little theoretical knowledge will be enough to be good software testers. This article explains that you require more than this to test software efficiently.
Video: Continuous Software Architecture in Practice. These two videos are based on an interview by Simon Brown of Eoin Woodsm Co-Author of the book “Continuous Architecture in Practice”. This book is a modern and practical guide to software architecture in the age of Agile and DevOps.
Video: Resilience & Agility through Evolutionary Change & Kanban Maturity Model. Agility is the ability to adapt to changing situations. Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity. As organizations have discovered, agility alone is not sufficient; resilience is needed as well. Both are fundamental to the Kanban Method.
Video: 4 Maps of DevOps. Are you struggling to work out where to start or where to go next with their adoption of DevOps? Although DevOps practices deliver incredible benefits to organizations looking to improve their software delivery practices, the larger positive impact of DevOps to delivering value is often harder to realize. This video presents a set of practices that could help organizations and is called the 4 Maps of DevOps.
Video: Spring Cloud Gateway: Resilience and Security. Do you want to use a microservices software architecture? Are you looking for a solution to manage access to single services from clients? How can you ensure resilience and security for your entire system? Spring Cloud Gateway is a project based on Reactor, Spring WebFlux, and Spring Boot which provides an effective way to route traffic to your APIs and address cross-cutting concerns.
Video: The Hidden Costs of Poor Database Access. Software developers love to try new programming languages, use different frameworks or experiment with new software architectures. But when it comes to databases, they pretty much have been using the same database access approach for the past 30 years.
Video: Reducing Appium Tests Execution Time. This talk shares the mistakes made in the initial software testing phase while creating automated tests for mobile apps using Appium, the reasons behind those mistakes, and the solutions which helped to reduce Appium tests execution time by 50%.
The Product Owner Demystified. There is often a vacuum between the company vision and the final outcome of software development projects, causing late validation and low value. This vacuum is present in pretty much all companies, caused by a wrong and ill-conceived product delivery approach.
Tools: Lerna is an open source tool for managing JavaScript projects with multiple packages. It optimizes the workflow around managing multi-package repositories with git and npm. Lerna can also reduce the time and space requirements for numerous copies of packages in development and build environments – normally a downside of dividing a project into many NPM packages.
Tools: WebPageTest is an open source web performance tool providing diagnostic information about how a web page performs under a variety of conditions. It offers an online version where each test can be run from different locations around the world, on real browsers, over any number of customized network conditions.
Tools: Automate REST API Tests with Cerberus Testing Framework. Welcome to this Cerberus Testing step-by-step tutorial for testing REST APIs. This guide will help you understand the test automation workflow and good practices supported by the Cerberus Testing open source framework.