Design & Code
Articles
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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. |
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Why You Need Continuous Testing in DevOps DevOps is more than adopting the right set of tools; it's a cultural shift that incorporates testing at each stage of the agile project lifecycle. Continuous testing is key to unlocking this culture change because it weaves testing activities into every part of the software design, development, and deployment processes, which helps everyone involved communicate more, collaborate better, and innovate faster. |
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Examining Cross-functionality Bias on Software Development Teams Cross-functionality means having all the necessary people and skills on one self-organizing team. Unfortunately, the execution of cross-functionality is often biased. The main traps we fall into are misunderstanding the value of specialization, hero worship, and not “walking the cross-functional talk” as organizations. Let’s examine each of these pitfalls in the hope that your teams may avoid them. |
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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Beating the Feature Factory Mindset
Slideshow
On a human level, we crave outcomes and impact. But in software product development, there is something addictive about the "build more and more features" approach that often leaves people frustrated and unsatisfied. Developers understand the challenges of working in output-focused environments and the adverse effects this has on productivity, morale, and business impact. Join John Cutler as he discusses these "feature factories," why they exist, how they impact your business, and how you can shift the focus to outcomes and impact. John thoroughly makes the case that churning out features is no longer a competitive advantage and can in fact harm your business and disengage your team. Instead, he will show you how to move your organization beyond the feature factory and toward an outcome-based way of working that increases employee engagement and customer satisfaction. |
John Cutler
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DevOps Tools for Winning Agility
Slideshow
With a myriad of tools to choose from—open source, free, paid, and enterprise level—teams and organizations have seemingly endless options. Making the right tool decisions can impact the level of quality and success within DevOps projects. Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman discusses different tools, what tools work best together, and how—even in teams that are in silos—the right choices can make the difference between success and failure in DevOps implementations. Explore tools—such as Ansible, Jenkins, Maven, Delphix, Github, Liquibase, and Terraform—for automating builds and virtualization. Review reasons for choosing open source, “freemium,” or enterprise tools along with different hybrid tool combinations and explore why companies face new challenges as DevOps tools mature. |
Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman
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API Testing: How to Write Tests, Integrate into CI, and Track What You're Testing
Slideshow
Some developers and testers think that APIs, whether internally developed or not, should just work. Unfortunately, without a significant amount of focus on testing API services, one little flaw can spell disaster for your application—especially security vulnerabilities where hackers will target your application. Elise Carmichael discusses the risks of not fully testing APIs, how to be sure that all services are tested fully, and the types of negative testing you need to do on APIs. She shows you a method to organize your tests using Postman, a tool for REST web services testing. During this session, Elise and the participants will write some Postman API tests with variables and then execute the tests with Newman, a command line application for running Postman tests that you can include in continuous integration scripts. |
Elise Carmichael
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Behavior-Driven Development: Real-World Mind Reading
Slideshow
Imagine this scenario: Business users are excited to finally get their hands on an implementation delivery that is on schedule, (mostly) on budget, and passed rigorous testing with flying colors. Unfortunately, when working with the new app or feature, the users realize that the way they described their needs didn’t translate into what they actually needed. Sound familiar? While she may not be able to offer telekinetic mind-reading tools, Kim Tatum is convinced that leveraging a behavior-driven development (BDD) approach helps bridge the gap between domain experts and technical teams. Join Kim to discuss how natural, human-readable language ultimately creates shared accountability and reduces misunderstandings. Review how this framework is implemented on a variety of delivery projects and walk through an implementation approach and leading practices. |
Kim Tatum
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