Design & Code

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From One Expert to Another: Markus Gärtner From One Expert to Another: Markus Gärtner

Markus Gärtner is a tester and the author of ATDD by Example. In this interview with Zeger van Hese, Markus talks about his new book, the software craftsmanship movement, and “Beyond Testing,” a workshop he’ll be delivering later this year.

Zeger van Hese's picture Zeger van Hese
Moving Beyond Basic Load Testing True Performance: Moving Beyond Basic Load Testing

Basic load testing is valuable, but it's important to move past simplistic efforts. Here are some ways to gain more accurate metrics from your load tests.

Jim Holmes
The Skeptical Tester

Testers are people who ask questions, think critically about the answers, and then ask more questions—repeatedly. Fiona Charles reminds testers that their success depends on maintaining a healthy skepticism.

Fiona Charles's picture Fiona Charles
Story map with color-coded sticky notes Story Mapping the Wrong Way

When Lisa Crispin’s team got an opportunity to put the story mapping ideas she picked up from Jeff Patton into practice, they excitedly rushed into it and missed a few steps. Find out what happened, what didn't happen, and what they learned from it all.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
The Two Metrics that Matter

This article is designed to provide specific steps for understanding your development effectiveness. Getting this right will help move your software development group toward being a true business partner, if it is not already.

Neil Fox's picture Neil Fox
Helping the Customer Stick to the Purpose of a User Story

Lisa Crispin writes that you need to understand the purpose of a user story or feature. Start with the "why." You can worry later about the "how." The customers get to decide on the business value to be delivered. They generally aren't qualified to dictate the technical implementation of that functionality. It's up to the technical team to decide the best way to deliver the desired feature through the software.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
The Agile Success Factor: Continuous Integration

Kirk Knoernschild discusses the subtle though significant ways that continuous integration can be leveraged—from helping to align IT with the business to enforcing architectural constraints—and shows that this fundamental aspect of agility is the defining and necessary element of a truly agile development experience.

Kirk Knoernschild
Load Test Your Website Before Your Customers Do

When you release a website or web application, it’s going to face a lot of very public load testing. If it performs poorly, there’s a good chance that you’re going to lose a lot of customers. Colin Mason offers some tips for load testing in order to ensure a better customer experience.

Colin  Mason's picture Colin Mason
photo from pair programming sessions Pair Programming in the Clink

In this personal experience story, Daryl Kulak relates the day he spent behind bars. He was there to participate in a program that pairs prisoners with software developers “from the outside” to explore the art and science of agile software development. “It’s like a code retreat,” Kulak notes, “except it’s inside a prison.”

Daryl  Kulak's picture Daryl Kulak
Continuous Integration and the Automated Database Update Process

Developers must have good feedback to ensure productivity. Most shops have a continuous integration (CI) build process that allows the developer to quickly know if a build failed, and some shops have an automatic deploy of the CI build to provide website feedback. Lance Lyons writes about an approach to automating the update of databases in a CI environment.

Lance Lyons

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