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 the testing pyramid, project estimation, team productivity, cross-browser testing and how Deming is related to Agile and Lean.
Text: On the Diverse And Fantastical Shapes of Testing. Martin Fowler discusses pyramids, honeycombs, trophies, and the meaning of unit testing.
Text: Yes, You Should Estimate Software Projects. I hear more voices saying there is little point in doing time-based estimations on how long building software will take, and thus we should just stop doing it. “Let’s just use story points and estimate complexity, but not the time” and “Let’s just try #noestimates” are suggestions people around me recently brought up. I’m personally skeptical of both approaches. While I do think that doing time-based estimates is really hard, it comes with so many benefits for those who keep doing it.
Text: Someone is pretending to be me. How remote workers looking for software development jobs pretend to be somebody else like you.
Text: Your Team is Killing Productivity. While working with enterprise organizations, I’ve noticed one common practice that seems to disrupt their ability to conduct a just-in-time development strategy. The ubiquitous belief is that long-lasting teams are more efficient. It seems nearly every organization I have heard about or worked with, is under the impression that efficiency is a result of team cohesion (true), and that team cohesion is a result of long-lasting relationships with environments that foster comradery and fun (partially false).
Text: The Deming Cycle, Lean and Agile. I first worked in an agile team as part of an engineering management team that led a successful agile transition. I wanted to learn more about what agile was, so read widely about lean and agile. I found that the books I read all referred to W. Edwards Deming and often referred to the Deming Cycle. When I studied the Deming Cycle it was very familiar to me, and I found that there was a good reason for this. Scrum uses the Deming Cycle and I was a member of a Scrum team. One of the books I read was by Jeff Sutherland, one of the two co-creators of Scrum, and he said that the Deming Cycle was ‘how scrum product development was done’. The Deming Cycle helps teams to learn and improve across an array of industries.
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Video: Sensible Defaults for Software Project Managers Many software developers promoted to project managers take time to build skills in people management and are given little in the way of guidelines. There is no tech best-practice for how to hire, review performance, grow careers or promote.
Video: Automated Security Testing for JavaScript Apps Traditional security testing for JavaScript apps has focused on the front-end, but actual security issues most often lie in the backing REST API. StackHawk co-founder Scott Gerlach provides a quick overview of why you need to rethink how you test your JavaScript apps and how StackHawk can help you find and fix security bugs fast.
Video: Technical User Stories Don’t Work How do you organize the technical parts of your Agile software development work? Do you create Technical Stories or Technical User Stories alongside your User Stories? If so, we think that you are probably storing up some problems.
Video: Visual Regression Testing with Puppeteer, Playwright and Cypress
This presentation is about visual regression testing components via screenshot matching. It will show how you do that in three different libraries/frameworks. Additionally, it will describe how to use Storybook to extract the components from your JavaScript web application.
Tools: Touca is an open source tool that provides continuous regression testing. Touca helps engineering teams find the unintended side effects of their day-to-day code changes. It remotely compares the behavior and performance of your software against a previous trusted version and visualizes differences in near real-time.
Tools: Cross-Browser Testing Tools (Free, Open Source, Paid) When today’s applications run on various browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc.) on different mobile or desktop devices with specific screen settings. This is why you need to perform cross-browser testing for your automated tests. This article lists the main desktop or online cross-browser testing tools available today.