Design & Code
Articles
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5 Key Factors to Achieve Agile Testing in DevOps Part of the path to DevOps requires adoption of agile methodologies. What does it mean for testing when you switch from the traditional waterfall model, with a few long release cycles per year, to the agile model, with changes occurring every two weeks? Here are five key factors to achieve the agile software testing necessary in DevOps. |
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Agile Development: Focusing on the Health of Your Code In Scrum, the product owner and the ScrumMaster are supposed to drive sustainable development. But there's a third force missing from the formula: the health of the code itself. We often forget that our code is also a member of our team, and we have to be concerned about its health and well-being as much as any other team member. That means using practices to develop good code from the beginning. |
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Picking the Right Branch-Merge Strategy A good branch-merge strategy facilitates processes among multiple developers and is the basis for any well-functioning DevOps pipeline that uses continuous integration. Let’s explore branching strategies, merging strategies, and how you can put them together in a way that’s right for your team in order to bring quality features to production faster. |
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Software Development: An Industry of Amateurs David Bernstein says the software industry is an industry of amateurs. It's a young field, and he doesn’t think it's yet graduated into a true profession. Here, David contrasts the software industry with other, more established fields, and he talks about what software professionals need to do in order for the industry to become accepted and esteemed. |
Interviews
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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. |
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Giving Control Back to Software Developers: An Interview with Mike Faulise
Video
In this interview, Michael Faulise, the founder and managing partner at tap|QA, explains how the move toward DevOps and away from release management is giving control back to developers, then details why major companies often need partners to leverage CI, CD, and other modern techniques. |
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Deciding if You’re Technically Ready for DevOps: An Interview with Sunil Sehgal
Video
In this interview, Sunil Sehgal, the managing partner of TechArcis Solutions, defines DevOps and whether or not your team has the technical savvy to properly adopt its practices. He explains what DevOps means for developers and testers and details what DevTestOps truly is—and why it's essential. |
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Why It’s Critical to Invest in DevOps Right Now: An Interview with Toptal’s Martin Chikilian In this interview, Martin Chikilian, lead director of engineering at Toptal, digs into current DevOps trends and whether DevOps is just a fad. Martin explains why the gig economy is so big for DevOps, why there are so many unfilled positions, and what continuous concepts mean for software. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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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. |
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Supporting Continuous Testing with Automation Create tests that can be used in a continuous testing environment, build the right number of tests, and don’t fall victim to the mistaken belief that everything can be automated. |
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All Customers Are Not Created Equal Software developers may not think they have much to do with customers, but it is wise to consider the customer in all you do, from collecting requirements to design and implementation. |
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Test-Driven Service Virtualization Because enterprise applications are highly interconnected, development in stages puts a strain on the implementation and execution of automated testing. Service virtualization can be introduced to validate work in progress while reducing the dependencies on components and third-party technologies still under development. |
Conference Presentations
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Fighting Test Flakiness: A Disease that Artificial Intelligence Will Cure
Slideshow
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it possible for computers to diagnose some medical diseases more accurately than doctors. Such systems analyze millions of patient records, recognize underlying data patterns, and generalize them for diagnosing previously unseen patients. A key challenge is determining whether a patient's symptoms and history are attributed to a known disease or other factors. Software testers face a similar problem when triaging automation failures. They investigate questions like, Is the failure due to a defect, environmental issue, or nondeterministic test script? Is there current or historical evidence to support one belief over another? Join Tariq King as he describes how test failures and flakiness can be modeled for machine learning (ML) as causal disease-symptom relations. |
Tariq King
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Managing BDD Automation Test Cases inside Test Management Systems
Slideshow
Behavior-driven development (BDD) has been around for a while and is here to stay. However, the added abstraction levels pose a technical problem for writing and managing tests. While BDD does a great job of marrying the nontechnical aspect of test writing to the technical flow of an application under test, keeping this information under source control becomes problematic. Frameworks such as JBehave, Cucumber, or Robot give subject matter experts that additional ability to write tests, but they are often restricted access from them; because people treat test cases as code, they get stored in source control repositories. Additionally, these given-when-then steps soon can grow to an extent where they are difficult to manage without an IDE, and nontechnical people lose interest. Using management tools, Max Saperstone shows how to manage these nontechnical steps and keep them in sync with the automaton in tools such as Git. |
Max Saperstone
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Agile Performance Testing in the Real World
Slideshow
Performance issues substantially impact quality, cost, and customer confidence. Agile teams are challenged to build in performance processes throughout the lifecycle, but it is critical to incorporate performance into your CI/CD pipeline. Join Amit Patel as he shares his recent project experiences and the steps his team took to change processes, leverage different technologies, and align internal stakeholders. He explains how they use production-monitoring solutions to create a real-world production feedback loop in order to ensure they can analyze data and turn the information into actionable defects. As part of this, his team created process and procedures to execute performance tests on a regular basis and pass/fail builds based on thresholds. Join Amit to learn how to build a successful production feedback loop, align internal stakeholders, and implement holistic performance engineering. |
Amit Patel
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Engineering for Compatibility
Slideshow
Modern software development has brought us an incredibly powerful tool: continuous integration and deployment. However, taking advantage of this new system isn’t always straightforward. With powerful new tools come powerful new ways of making mistakes that can take your product down in a heartbeat. Melissa Benua has years of experience making CI and CD work for her, with lots of insights—both good and not so good. Come and learn from her as she shares key tips and tricks for coding and testing for both forward and backward compatibility in software releases. Useful for both traditional testers as well as combined engineers, Melissa provides technical and actionable advice to enable your team to make the right trade-offs and the right time investments, allowing your product to release to your customers safely and successfully. |
Melissa Benua
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