Articles

A ScrumMaster's Superpower of Observation in Virtual Teams

ScrumMasters rely on observational skills, but does that mean we only use vision? What happens when we are all remote? Can we leverage other senses to “observe” how teams are surviving (or thriving)? We may not be able to sit together with our team for a long time, and it may never be the same due to the long-term effects of the coronavirus. What skills might we adapt or create for virtual teams? And, how can we still reflect back on the observations so the team can decide how to improve?

Mark Kilby's picture Mark Kilby Savita Pahuja
portfolio Agile Portfolio Management—A Preferred Approach When Investment Dollars Shrink

As you adopt Agile principles it is important to understand the critical difference between Agile Project Management and Agile Portfolio Management—and that you can have one without the other.

Matthew Muldoon's picture Matthew Muldoon
5 Tips to Take Your DevOps Pipeline Beyond the Basics

The goal of a DevOps pipeline is to create a continuous workflow that includes the entire application lifecycle. But too often, people focus only on the tools and automating everything, not stopping to think whether their processes could further improve performance and efficiency. Let's look at some common challenges to continuous delivery and then learn five tips for refining your DevOps pipeline and taking it to the next level.

Gilad David Maayan's picture Gilad David Maayan
Person taking a sticky note with testing activities on it off a backlog wall Tackling Testing Challenges in an Agile Transition

Even though jumping onto the agile bandwagon is tempting for businesses, it is not always easy, and a transition to agile is likely to come with a slew of challenges for testing in particular. In order for agile to enable delivery of quality products at speed, testing has to begin much earlier in the process than ever before. Enabling certain practices will help your organization achieve a more successful transition to agile testing.

Hemanth Yamjala's picture Hemanth Yamjala

Better Software Magazine Articles

Using Agile and DevOps to Achieve Quality by Design Using Agile and DevOps to Achieve Quality by Design

When software nears completion, it is the wrong time to focus on quality. Product delivery improves if you invest in a plan, validate in small increments, and focus on continuous testing.

Michael Sowers's picture Michael Sowers
Building Autonomous DevOps Capability in Delivery Teams

After setting up a DevOps team and adopting continuous delivery practices, product releases may not be as smooth as they could be. The missing ingredient requires empowerment and autonomy.

Miiro Juuso's picture Miiro Juuso
handstand The Power of Thinking Upside Down

Software developers can become bogged down trying to keep up with agile process and procedures. Get better results by rethinking your approach to balancing focus, agility, management, and testing.

Paul McMahon's picture Paul McMahon
Reshaping Agile Transformation Reshaping Our View of Agile Transformation

Transforming a software development team to agile may not go as planned. The real change requires a phased approach to earn agile acceptance. That mindset must extend beyond the team to the entire organization.

Jason Little's picture Jason Little

Interviews

Finding Microefficiencies in Agile Practices: An Interview with Melissa Tondi

Melissa Tondi discusses retuning your standard agile practices to better engage the project team, enabling them to write code that will pass testing and free testers to assume the role of user advocate.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Tanya Kravstov Identify Bottlenecks in Your Agile and DevOps Processes: An Interview with Tanya Kravtsov

In this interview, Tanya Kravtsov, a director of QA at Audible, explains why identifying bottlenecks is so critical when you’re turning to agile and DevOps, as well as how automating manual processes can lead to better quality.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Naga Jayadev Accelerate Testing and Development with Continuous Delivery: An Interview with Naga Jayadev
Video

In this interview, Naga Jayadev of CA Technologies digs into continuous delivery, continuous testing, DevOps, and virtualization. He explains what he does at CA Technologies, the trends when it comes to testing, and the value of velocity within your development lifecycle.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Agile Isn't Enough to Deliver Exceptional Software: An Interview with Sven Peters

In this interview, Sven Peters, the lead evangelist for Atlassian, discusses whether making software has become harder. He tackles whether being agile is enough in the current landscape and questions if we're sacrificing quality for the sake of speed.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin

Conference Presentations

Agile DevOps East You Can't Improve What You Can't See
Slideshow

From value stream mapping to burndown charts, making things visible is a core component of the continuous improvement process. But even with all this visibility, much of the data surrounding how your teams work is either not captured or not understandable. This data represents a great opportunity for insights and improvement. Think about it: Your management team tells you that your velocity is too low. What do you do? First, you need more information. What does “too low” mean? Why was the velocity low? Did the team deliver value? Brandon Carlson will share one team’s surprising insights when they analyzed previously invisible data. He'll also tell you how to discover what the highest risk areas of the system are for enabling the most cost-effective regression test strategy. It's all there, only tucked away where no one can see.

Brandon Carlson
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Unlocking Retrospectives
Slideshow

Retrospectives empower teams to learn and improve. But many teams fail to reach their true learning potential. Ryan was part of a team that held retrospectives for a year and a half to fix one line of code. Through the story of this team, he will show you how they turned their retrospectives from a meeting with meaningless action items to one that accomplished a meaningful improvement. Ryan will explore the resistance that was met and how it was overcome. He will show how to shift to a hypothesis-driven retrospective that to guides specific improvements and learning goals. His team made significant changes to their retrospectives and were rewarded with a radical improvement. Breaking through their retrospective impediments and finally embracing a learning mindset empower Ryan's team to fix the legacy line of code that had held the team back for over year.

Ryan Latta
Better Software West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Innovation: The Art of Being Wrong
Slideshow

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Stefana Saxton
STAREAST 2018 Migrating from Test Cases to Real-World Telemetry Measures
Slideshow

Ken Johnston sees today’s software ecosystem in the light of Everything as a Service (EaaS). Operating systems like Windows, Android, and Chrome OS all ship regularly like a service. Browsers automatically update every few weeks, and apps are constantly updating through all the app stores. Although getting a test to pass once and signing off has gone by the wayside for software testing, still we run test cases over and over again. Ken shares how Microsoft took millions of test cases—yes, actually millions—and turned the important ones into measures based on real world telemetry. Massive amounts of data coming in from real devices and real users measure product quality and tie it to key customer satisfaction metrics.

Ken Johnston

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