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Methods & Tools - December 2020
Sharing global software development expertise since 1993


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*** Updates ***


Last Articles Published on Methods & Tools Website

Cerberus Testing - The Open Source Test Automation Framework Cerberus Testing is an open source low-code test automation platform that supports testing Web, iOS, Android and API (REST, SOAP and Kafka) applications. The platform allows the creation of automated test cases through an easy to use web interface without any need for development skills. Thus automated tests implementation and management now becomes available for all elements of the development, quality and business teams. Read more...


*** From The Archives ***


Articles from Methods & Tools' Archives

Agile Coaching Tips An agile coach works with software development teams to help improve their effectiveness and get the benefits of applying agile principles to their work. But it is not surprising that people to get confused about what agile coaching is because the term coaching is used widely in non-software contexts, both in sports and also self-help techniques. As Tobias Mayer recently commented "Being a consultant, and adding 'Agile' in front of the term doesn't magically make one a coach. There is more to it than that." Read more...


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*** Quote of the Month ***


According to the Scrum Guide, a Scrum Master's primary job is to help the team be effective in their use of Scrum. In practice, the Scrum Master serves three customers: the Product Owner, the Development Team and the Organization. […]

Why Serve the Organization?

If Scrum is about helping teams address complex problems, why is the Scrum Master focusing outward at all? Shouldn't they be laser focused on the members of the Scrum Team?

Yes, the team is important, however, teams exist within a greater organization. For the team to be successful, the organization needs to "understand which of their interactions with the Scrum Team are helpful and which aren't." (see The Scrum Guide.)

To expand on this idea further, it helps to step back and consider the essence of Scrum. Coming out of the software development space, it's easy for people to see Scrum as nothing more than a way to improve development practices. In reality though, Scrum, and by extension Agile overall, is a framework for Organization Change.

"Organizational change refers to the actions in which a company or business alters a major component of its organization, such as its culture, the underlying technologies or infrastructure it uses to operate, or its internal processes." - Harvard Business School

If we compare traditional development practices like waterfall to Scrum, I would be hard-pressed to say we were not altering the internal processes, how the organization operates or even its culture - moving from command and control to self-organization. To be effective, a Scrum Master needs to be a change agent who helps the organization around their Scrum Team to adapt to the new way of working that Scrum promotes.

Source: Embed a Learning Mindset with Communities of Practice, Joel Bancroft-Connors, https://appliedframeworks.com/embed-a-learning-mindset-with-communities-of-practice/


=== White Papers ===


Benefits of Test Automation in Salesforce: Salesforce is a major software player in the field of customer relationship management (CRM) and customer service. This article discusses the specific challenges of testing Salesforce applications and provides best practices for implementing test automation in this domain.

Contact us if you want to publish a white paper with ScrumExpert.com or SoftwareTestingMagazine.com.


*** Software Development Linkopedia ***


Text: Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Professionals

Text: Testing in Production: the hard parts

Text: Not everyone is a manager (And that's OK)

Text: 2020 State of DevOps Report

Text: You're Not Managing a Team of Software Engineers, You're Managing a Team of Writers

Text: (Remote) Pairing 101

Text: On Exactitude in Technical Debt

Video: Modernizing an Existing System With a Domain-Driven Approach. Domain-Driven Design (DDD) seems "straight-forward" when looking at green field development. Implementing that in an existing legacy enterprise system, however, is daunting. This presentation goes over some of the refactoring patterns that support this change and demonstrates the steps necessary to refactor a non-DDD SOA-based system using DDD approaches. You will learn the kinds of decisions that have to be made, when they need to be made, and what those decisions look like in the grand scheme of your application refactoring project using Domain-Driven Design.

Video: Programming Paradigms Lost. It is very easy to get stuck in one way of doing things. This is as true of programming as it is of life. Although a programming paradigm represents a set of stylistic choices, it is much more than this: a programming paradigm also represents a way of thinking. Having only one way to think about problems is too limiting. A programming paradigm represents a set of patterns of problem framing and solving; it contains the ingredients of software architecture. As Émile Auguste Chartier noted, there is nothing more dangerous than an idea when you have only one idea.

Video: Build Test Automation Engineers From Scratch Creating test automation engineers from manual testers is hard. Even if your testers are willing, they have a lot of hurdles to get over to feel like the same kind of subject-matter experts in automation as they are in manual testing.

Video: Agile Coaching Toolkit for Remote Teams As most organizations have moved from in-person to remote team Scrum coaching, the Agile coaching tool-set has had to adapt. This talk presents experience that has been gained so far and what are the tools that are most often used.

Video: Distributed Tracing with .NET Core. When something goes wrong in a single .NET application, we get a nice stack trace. In a distributed system, we get almost nothing! We add some logging, but now we have to comb through logs to understand what led to failures. Enter distributed tracing, which provides a true end-to-end view of an operation in our system.

Video: Security Tooling in the DevOps Pipeline In the quest to be first to market, DevOps has been a strategy of choice to improve agility in development teams. As these teams push code to production faster and faster, slow and manual security assessments need to be replaced with new ways for application security assessments. This presentation explains how to deal with security considerations with demos of tools and integrations in action.

Video: Pull Requests: Merging With Your Team Working as developers in Scrum teams, we continuously submit our code to be scrutinized by our peers. With written language being fragile and easy to misunderstand, pull requests can quickly become a breeding ground for demotivation and resentment.

Tools: Mockaroo is a freemium test data generator and API mocking tool. It lets you create custom CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel datasets to test and demo your software.

Tools: Pokrex is an open source tools that allows making agile estimates and planning easy with Scrum planning poker. It offers multiple story point schemes and custom point schemes to meet different requirements for users: Fibonacci, 0-8, T-shirt (XS-XXL), customized point schemes. You can easily import tickets from JIRA to Pokrex and update points back to JIRA with one click.

Tools: Open Source Kanban Tools If most of the open source projects for Scrum tools have ended being transformed in a limited offer that supports a main commercial product, this has not been the case for Kanban. The simplicity of the Kanban approach has allowed open source software developers to create and maintain Kanban tools based on various platforms.


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