development & deployment

Articles

Don’t Discard Test-driven Development in the Cloud
Developing software for the cloud can make test-driven development more complicated, but not impossible. Arin Sime offers advice for continuing good development practices in the face of challenges from cloud hosting and distributed computing.
Branching to Distraction
Branching can be an effective solution for managing change, enabling parallel development and improved productivity. But, working on a branch is a distraction and can decrease agility, productivity, and code robustness. Learn when the value of working on a branch outweighs the cost.
Decrease Your Debt with Technical Debt Sprints
Technical debt is one of the primary impediments to long-term software product success. Every team feels the pressure to deliver value frequently to the business. At the same time, we know that we need to keep our code clean and supported by tests to operate at a sustainable pace. Regular technical debt sprints are one way to make our “interest payments.”
Kill By Wire
Linda Hayes has worked in the software industry for a long time and through a lot of changes. But a series of recent events has led her to question whether the industry has changed for the better or worse. In this article, she recommends some attitudes we should lose and some we should adopt in order to save our software and--in some cases--our lives.

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Better Software Magazine

Alternative JVM Languages For Java Projects

Java Virtual Machine has become a successful platform for applications written in many languages, not just Java. Alternatives like JRuby, Scala, Clojure, and Groovy can be more concise and offer new ways to approach problems.

Copeland on Weinberg

Lee Copeland and Jerry Weinberg have crossed paths—both on page and in person—many times over the years. Here, Lee reflects on some of those meetings and their valuable lessons.
 

A Release Without a Tester

In this article inspired by an unfortunate video store rental, Lee Copeland invites software organizations that think testing is expensive to try the alternative.

Testing the Contract Metaphor

A contract represents a service agreement between two parties, the bounded provision of service by one party to the other. This metaphor also applies to how we can think about the relationship between unit tests and code. A contractual mindset encourages test names and partitioning based on clear propositions, backed up with executable examples.

GUT Instinct

Whether or not a unit test is considered good is not simply about what it tests: It is also very much about "how" it tests. Is the test readable and maintainable? Does it define the expected behavior or merely assume it? To be sustainable, the style of a unit test is just as important as the style of any other code. Perhaps a little surprisingly, the most commonly favored test partitioning style does not meet these expectations.

The Trouble with Derivation

This article discusses the dark underbelly of derivation: the fragile base class. It's possible to modify a base class in such a way that, even though you've improved its implementation and all your tests work just fine, you've nonetheless damaged the derived classes, perhaps fatally.

A Path to Readable Code

Test-driven development is usually presented as a developer process. On the other hand, acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) is a communication process between the customer and the developer. In ATDD, the tests provide the terminology in customer-understandable terms. The customer's terminology suggests abstract data types that make code more readable.

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Interviews

Effective Risk Management: An Interview with Payson Hall
We recently sat down with Payson Hall ahead of his upcoming 2012 Better Software Conference East presentation titled "Twelve Risks to Enterprise Software Projects - And What to Do about Them" in order to learn more about his experise in the field of risk management.

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TechWell Stories
How Acknowledging Work Effort Increases Productivity and Motivation
To Estimate or Not to Estimate—That Is the Question
Removing Waste in Software Projects
Create a Vendor Contract While Keeping Agile
How Agile Teams Use DevOps for Deployment

Recommended Web Seminars

May 29 How to Integrate Performance Testing into Agile and Hybrid Environments
Jun 11 Test Infrastructure Changes as Easy as Pressing Play
Jun 18 Adopting Agile and Moving into the Future
Jun 20 Where Has All the Tester's Time Gone?
On Demand 7 Habits of Highly Effective Agile Teams

Featured Resources

» An Innovative Approach to Integration Testing | IBM Rational
» Improve Quality and Decrease Time to Market with Requirements Management | PTC
» Performance Testing in the Cloud | J9 Technologies
» Perfection Just Became Mobile: An Easy-to-Use Solution for Mobile App Testing | Micro Focus
» Improving Test Automation for Visual Studio Projects | LogiGear

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