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Methods & Tools - August 2021
Sharing global software development expertise since 1993

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=== Sponsor ===

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TimeShiftX - Travel in Time, Test with Ease

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*** Updates ***

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Last Articles Published on Methods & Tools Website

HeidiSQL – Open Source Database Management Tool HeidiSQL is a free open source database management tool that runs under Windows. It provides features to manage on your desktop database actions that range from creating a database to exporting data as a dump file or csv files. It includes an integrated help for the SQL language, allows connecting to multiple local and or remote database servers and can be used with command line parameters. HeidiSQL supports the following databases: MariaDB, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite. Read more...

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*** From The Archives ***

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Articles from Methods & Tools' Archives

Self-Selecting Teams Part 1 - Why You Should Try Self-Selection Self-selection is a facilitated process of letting people self-organise into small, cross-functional teams. We think it is the fastest and most efficient way to form stable teams, based on the belief that people are at their happiest and most productive if they can choose what they work on and who they work with. To avoid confusion, we are not referring here to self-organising teams. Self-organising teams are groups of motivated individuals who work together toward a shared goal and have the ability and authority to take decisions and readily adapt to changing demands. We like self-organising teams, but that's not what this article is about. This article is about self-selection, which is the process you use to set up self-organising teams in the first place. Self-selection happens at an organisational rather than at a team level and is a way to get everyone into teams. Another term for a self-selected team is a self-designed team. Read more...

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=== Sponsor ===

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Advertise with Methods & Tools

Reach an audience of more than 60'000 professional software developers, software testers and project managers publishing with Methods & Tools for as low a $60 / month. Do you want to promote a software development tool? Are you interested in buying a link to your website from a good reference?

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*** Quote of the Month ***

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Software application development is an inexact science. We write code and build software products full of defects. If we are lucky, we are aware of the defects and can catch them before they go to our customers. Engineering teams often feel they are in an epic struggle to build the perfect product while dealing with ever-changing requirements and product specs, framework changes, and evolving infrastructure.

An engineering team's objective is to make forward progress on building their product while keeping their product quality "good enough". The definition of "good enough" is defined by company values and the context surrounding the product. A hardware device with a slow update cycle has a significantly higher bar than an iPhone app that can be updated quickly. Different companies have different quality bars as well—Instagram pays a significant amount of attention to small visual design problems, creating in a product that feels extremely polished and well crafted. This variability in the definition of a quality bar, from company to company or product to product, can be overwhelming. People give up, resulting in the complete lack of a defined bar, or a quality bar where every software bug is a blocker.

[...] A systematic approach to product quality can help produce a product that is a joy to use, a product that feels polished and fast, one that customers keep returning to over and over again. Regardless of how bad things are today, you can institute a framework to pay off your bug debt, while building and pushing features. An SLA system has built-in checks and balances to slow down feature development when things get serious and provides natural incentives for teams to pay attention to the quality of their software, leading to more productive and happier engineering teams in the long run.

Source: Rushabh Doshi, "Software Quality, Bugs, and SLAs", https://rushabhdoshi.com/posts/2019-10-18-software-quality-bugs-and-slas/

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*** Software Development Linkopedia ***

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Text: How to Build Tech You Won't Regret

Text: Creating connected remote teams

Text: Legacy Code May Be The Friend We Haven’t Met Yet

Text: Minimizing Risks in QA Outsourcing

Text: The Cone of Uncertainty in Scrum

Text: How to Become a Bad Developer

Text: Software Development Project Team Alignment

Text: Documentation Used by Software QA Engineers

Video: Project Team Structures Jeff Gallimore, CTIO and Co-founder of Excella, describes how to structure software development teams to optimize flow, the delivery of value, and accountability. Principles from Lean and DevOps inform decisions about team structure.

Video: Testing in Production at LinkedIn If you cannot ship to production with confidence, write tests until you can! This video will help you design a testing strategy for your products. Keep writing great tests!

Video: How to Value User Stories? Business value, business value, business value. This presentation from Allan Kelly explores how to put a value on stories in a backlog while uncovering new requirements, elaborating specifications and valuable opportunities.

Video: Scalable, Harmonious Concurrency for Java Concurrent applications, those serving multiple independent application actions simultaneously, are the bread and butter of Java server-side programming. The thread has been Java's primary unit of concurrency since Java's inception, and is a core construct around which the entire Java platform is designed, but its cost is such that it can no longer efficiently represent a domain unit of concurrency, such as the session, request or transaction.

Video: Simplified Web App Development with Svelte Rather than including a runtime library, Svelte compiles to bundled JavaScript that is very small compared to other approaches. Svelte applications launch quickly because there is less to download. Svelte components achieve "reactivity" without using a virtual DOM.

Video: Scaling Agile with the Spotify Model For a long time Spotify people have tried to convince the world that there is no "Spotify Model" and if there ever was one, Spotify isn't using it anyway, and you shouldn't either. And yet, countless organizations are using the Spotify model to drive their Agile transformations and scale Agile, some of them claiming huge successes.

Video: WebdriverIO Nuts and Bolts This talk presents everything you need to know to run a successful, stable and maintainable WebdriverIO open source browser and mobile testing tool for Node.js. Christian explains you everything from the basic concepts up to complex testing strategies you can do with WebdriverIO like frontend performance testing as well as complex browser interaction with Puppeteer.

Tools: Svelte is a free and open-source front end compiler that converts app code into client-side JavaScript at build time. Svelte applications do not include framework references. Instead, building a Svelte application generates code to manipulate the DOM, which may reduce the size of transferred files as well as give better client startup and run-time performance.

Tools: Orion is born to change the way we implement our acceptance tests. It takes advantage of HCL from Hashicorp t o provide a simple DSL to write the acceptance tests. The syntax is inspired in Gherkin.

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*** Promoted Software Development Conferences ***

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deliver:Agile Live! a series of online sessions by the Agile Alliance

Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, Portland, USA, October 11-13 2021

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Contact us if you want your software development conference promoted here.
Find more upcoming conferences on SoftDevConferences.com, ScrumExpert.com, SoftwareTestingMagazine.com

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*** Software Development Training ***

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Software Development Lifecycle Specialization: This course is designed for people who are new to software engineering. It is also for those who have already developed software, but wish to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying context and theory of software development practices.

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Contact us if you want to your training courses listed in this newsletter and reach 35'000 software development professionals worldwide.