Agile
Articles
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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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When DevOps Gets Lost in Translation The waterfall method of developing software is a bunch of translation activities: The design is a translation of the requirements into the language of architecture, the code is another, and a formal test process is a third. And with each translation, there’s the opportunity to introduce error. When your DevOps team is isolated, it creates another handoff, and another point of failure. |
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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. |
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3 Keys to Mastering Test-Driven Development From his decade of teaching thousands of professional software developers how to be effective with test-driven development, David Bernstein has learned that there are three key ingredients for mastering TDD: understanding what it really is, making code reliably testable, and getting hands-on experience. Let’s look at each of these factors to see what it takes to use TDD effectively on your projects. |
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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Time to Make an Employment Change: An Interview with Adam Auerbach
Video
In this interview, Adam Auerbach, Vice President and Head of Assurance Practice at EPAM Systems, discusses the need to create a strategy to achieve career goals, recognizing when it is time to change employers having maximized your contributions and gained the optimal benefits and skills. |
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Why You Need to Take Security and DevOps Seriously: An Interview with Jeff Payne
Video
In this interview, Jeff Payne, the CEO and cofounder of Coveros, explains why major companies just aren’t that good at security. He discusses how you can better protect your business, as well as why DevOps can and should be a key to your success. |
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Discovering the Soul of Agile: An Interview with Selena Delesie
Podcast
In this interview, Selena Delesie, an international leadership and transformation coach and trainer, explains how your team can find the soul of agile, why some agile teams lack creativity, and who on your team should become a leader. |
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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Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders Following agile ceremonies may make an organization feel good, but that’s only a start. “Great big agile” requires leadership at all levels to focus on self-organization and empowerment as a universal framework. |
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Scrum: Back to Basics So you think you know Scrum? Using the whimsical notion of farm animals and light-hearted visuals, take a refreshing review of the entire Scrum lifecycle as an intuitive set of roles, responsibilities, and handoffs. Particular attention is placed on what the ScrumMaster and product owner are expected to do at each handoff. |
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DevOps and the Culture of Code Migrating an organization to continuous integration requires adoption new processes, tools, and automation. DevOps relies on dramatic culture change to encourage total transparency and collaboration among all project stakeholders. |
Conference Presentations
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Being More Agile Without Doing Agile
Slideshow
The most common requests Dawn Haynes gets as a consultant these days is to help testers transition to an agile development process, or to help testers be more effective in “agile-ish” environments. But Dawn recognises that transforming the process and the environment is not enough. Interestingly, the core answer to these questions starts with forgetting the process for a moment and focusing on yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish. Being agile starts with a mindset and an attitude that drive focus, approaches, and solutions. When you start there, the path to improvement can almost always be summarized as “being more agile”—which is surprisingly independent of whether your team follows an agile process. Join Dawn as she shares with you what it means for a tester and a test team to be more agile (whether or not you do agile) and what benefits you can experience if you decide to increase your agility as a tester. |
Dawn Haynes
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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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Delivering the Goods: Harmonizing Regulated and Agile Practices
Slideshow
Agile testing is hard. Testers contend with terse requirements, minimal process, little documentation, continually evolving business, technical and organizational factors. Auditors demand proof of compliance. Some teams have trouble conforming to regulations while preserving agile practices. Griffin Jones, a tenured regulated software testing consultant, says “not only can agile practices blend with regulatory compliance - they can be harmonized with them leading to high quality and more agility.” Griffin feels that regulators are project stakeholders, who join the product owner in defining value. Griffin shares examples, methods and techniques of implementing regulatory compliant testing as a graceful part of an agile workflow. Learn the five-part harmony binding regulated and agile practices. |
Griffin Jones
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Compliance and Agility—How It Can Be Done
Slideshow
Delivering a compliant product is a resource intensive and challenging activity for most teams. Whether a team is trying to adhere to company, industry, or international standards, it needs to produce deliverables under tight deadlines with the right level of quality. When you work with Forensic teams the stakes are high! Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is a new forensic DNA sequencing technology which can result in increased detection ability for degraded and complex mixture samples. It can also provide ancestry and physical trait information which help's narrow down suspects. Join Aprajita Mathur as she shares how her team successfully built the first Forensics, NGS “sample-to-answer” platform at illumina, working in a cross-functional team, using a scrum-based methodology, yet in a compliant environment. |
Aprajita Mathur
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