Methods & Tools Software Development Magazine

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Scrum Expert - Articles, tools, videos, news and other resources on Agile, Scrum and Kanban


Methods & Tools - February 2014


=== Sponsor ===

Test Data Generation for Big Data

Today there’s a lot of interest in building and working with Big Data applications. But how do you build scalable test data to thoroughly test your Big Data applications when you’re dealing with terabytes of complex data? Enter GenRocket, a powerful test data generator that can rapidly generate huge amounts of synthetic test data by splitting data generation across multiple GenRocket instances while guaranteeing referential integrity.

Checkout a short video demonstrating how this powerful feature was used to rapidly generate 100 million rows of user test data.

*** News ***

M&T Industry Press Releases Channel

Follow press releases from software development tools vendors

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=== Sponsor ===

ScrumDesk – project management board that help your teams to do Scrum right

[Plan | Track | Improve] + Learn to be Agile. Look at the board and hear the truth. Because this Scrum management board speaks. All Scrum ceremonies in one package. With the best electronic card. Plus, help identify improvements of your agile practices according to more than 70 rules coming from real life agile coaching. Free for small teams.

*** Numbers ***

NoSQL Databases Adoption

Our current poll: Is your organization using NoSQL databases (MongoDB, CouchDB, etc)? Go to our web site to participate and to see intermediate results.

*** Jobs ***

Featured Jobs

Scrum Master, Product Information, Target, Minneapolis, MN

Software Engineer - Hotel Cache, Priceline.com, Norwalk, CT

Senior Front End Developer (UX Developer), MarketShare, Los Angeles, CA


Find more than 45 developer, project manager and software tester jobs on SoftDevJobs.coms

*** Books ***

Getting Value Out Of Agile Retrospectives

Esther Derby writes in the foreword: "Effective retrospectives help teams short-circuit ingrained patterns of thinking. They broaden each team member’s perspective, and help teams think, learn, decide, and act together". Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives is a free e-book written by Luis Gonçalves and Ben Linders that offers guidance to help Agile and Scrum teams make the most out of retrospectives.

Read the complete review of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives

Reference: Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives – A Toolbox of Retrospective Exercises, Luis Gonçalves and Ben Linders, LeanPub

You can download this book from https://leanpub.com/gettingvalueoutofagileretrospectives


Executable Specifications with Scrum

Executable Specifications with Scrum starts with a strong statement: "This book aims to solve the recurring challenge encountered by many software development teams: They do not build the right software." This is an ambitious goal, especially when you want to achieve it in a little bit more than 100 pages.

Read the complete review of Executable Specifications with Scrum

Reference: Executable Specifications with Scrum – A Practical Guide to Agile Requirements Discovery, Mario Cardinal, 151 pages, ISBN: 978-032178413

Get more reviews on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more reviews on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

*** Linkopedia ***

Software Development Linkopedia February 2014

Web site: Google Java Style Guide

Blog: Long-Range Planning with User Stories

Blog: Why Contrasting Scrumban and Kanban Belies a Lack of Understanding of Both

Blog: Finding Bugs: Debugger versus Logging

Article: Save Your Software from the Start: Overcoming Skewed Thinking in the Project Planning Stage

Article: The Kanban Sandwich: A Bite-Size Recipe for Agile Work Flows at Scale

Article: The Reciprocity Principle: Give Before You Take in Web Design

Article: Developing a Model to Evaluate and Improve Mobile User Experience

Tools: Selendroid - a test automation framework for Android

Tools: KADOS - a web-based tool to manage Scrum and Agile projects

Video: Programming Diversity

Video: Agile and UX Can Be Friends and Lean UX is the Way

Video: Complexity of Complexity

Video: Testing All The Way To Production

Video: Examining Agile Myths with Metrics

Find more interesting links on the software development tools web site, the software development articles web site, the software development blogs or the software development videos web site.

*** Quote of the Month ***

The maddening thing about most of our organizations is that they are only as good as the people who staff them. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get around that natural limit, and have good organizations even though they were staffed by mediocre or incompetent people? Nothing could be easier—all we need is (trumpet fanfare, please) a Methodology.

A Methodology is a general systems theory of how a whole class of thought-intensive work ought to be conducted. It comes in the form of a fat book that specifies in detail exactly what steps to take at any time, regardless of who's doing the work, regardless of where or when. The people who write the Methodology are smart. The people who carry it out can be dumb. They never have to turn their brains to the ON position. All they do is start on page one and follow the Yellow Brick Road, like happy little Munchkins, all the way from the start of the job to its successful completion. The Methodology makes all the decisions; the people make none. The organization becomes entirely deterministic.

Source: Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams, Third Edition, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister,


*** Conferences ***

DevOps Summit: Fundamentals of DevOps, February 27 2014, London, UK

Business Efficiency through Process Improvement, February 27 2014, London, UK

Application of ALM for Today's Business Requirements, February 27 2014, London, UK

Wearables DevCon, March 5-7 2014, San Francisco, USA

Belgium Testing Days, March 17-20 2014, Bruges , Belgium

Big Data TechCon, March 31-April 2, Boston, USA

Software Testing Analysis & Review Canada Conference, April 5-9 2014, Toronto, Canada

Optional Conference, April 8-9 2014, Budapest, Hungary

SPTechCon, April 22-25 2014 , San Francisco, USA

STAREAST, May 4–9 2014, Orlando, USA

The Reliable Software Developers Conferences, May 20 - June 5, UK

The Android Developer Conference, May 27-30, Boston, USA

GOTO Amsterdam 2014, June 18-20, 2014, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Agile on the Beach, September 4-5 2014, Falmouth in Cornwall, UK

PNSQC, October 20-22 2014, Portland, USA - Call for Papers

*** Our News ***

Methods & Tools Article Pipeline

In our future quarterly PDF issues, you will find articles on:
* Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
* Chopping Onions Instead of Layers in Architecture
* Scrum: The Done Principles
* KADOS open source Scrum tool

 
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