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

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*** Updates ***

Last Articles Published on Methods & Tools Website

SO Planning – Open Source Visual Project Management Software You are making a coding bet any time you start coding a new feature, accept a new task, or go hunting for a bug on a software development project. This article looks at just three different types of coding you can do (there are probably lots of others), examining the nature of the stakes and the rewards for each type of bet. Then, it discusses how this insight might inform the development process. Read more...

*** From The Archives ***

Articles from Methods & Tools' Archives

An Ethnographic Approach to Software Ethnography has made its way from the academic halls of the social sciences, through the varied landscapes of fieldwork, shaken up the world of organizational behavior, and landed firmly in user-centered design research where it is often applied to software. A basic definition of ethnography is a study of people and cultures, but it should be noted that ethnography is both a process and a product. You "do" ethnography to produce "an" ethnography - meaning you use a special set of methods and philosophies to create a written piece of work that describes and interprets a culture or way of life. When "doing" ethnography, the process is not one specific method. Instead it is an approach to conducting research and as such it can utilize a variety of methods. These methods can include participatory observation, contextual inquiry, semi-structured interviewing, and many others. In order to take an ethnographic approach to understanding a group, such as the population that makes up the users of your software, there are three key factors to keep in mind. Read more...

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*** Quote of the Month ***

It never ceases to amuse us that many organizations behave in the same way. For example, organizations attempt to solve problems by creating new roles and assigning the problem to that role. If there is a "coordination" problem, then they create a "coordination role" and assign it the responsibility for "doing the coordination". The person in this role might be called "coordination" manager, but is often called "program manager" or "project manager". Some organizations were told that Scrum does not have a project manager role, but instead of their behavior, they merely renamed the role! We have encountered "feature manager", "item owner", "feature coordinator", "project coordinator", and similar variations.

Why avoid such a role? Is creating a role with clear responsibilities not a good thing? Sometimes. However, a problem is that making one person responsible for something often leads to other people (the Team) not being responsible for it. So, a project manager doing the coordination leads to the team not doing it – resulting in handoff of knowledge and delay.

Source: Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development – Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, Addison Wesley

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*** Software Development Linkopedia ***

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Text: Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern

Text: Limiting Work in Progress (WIP) in Kanban

Video: Improving Software Architecture with Cats

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Video: Serverless Confusion

Video: The Art of Code

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Video: Patterns & Anti-Patterns For Effective Feature Flagging

Tools: Insomnia is a set of open source tools to design and debug APIs. Insomnia Designer is a collaborative API Design tool for designing and managing OpenAPI specs. Insomnia Core is a desktop API client for REST and GraphQL that allows to quickly create and group requests, specify environment variables, authentication, generate code snippets, and more…

Tools: SourceOptics is an open source tool that provides analytics, reports, and graphs about how software engineering teams and projects operate. SourceOptics can work with any public or private git repository, including GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, or SSH hosted repos. Once installed, SourceOptics enables better visibility into activities, improved organizational planning, rewarding of team or individual efforts, elimination of unconscious biases, and more effective hiring.

Tools: Open Source Bug Tracking Tools: Bugs, issue, defect, there are many names to define the problems you have with software, either during the development phase or when the application is already in production. Bug tracking tools are an integrated part of a software quality and software testing strategy and there are many open source tools available. Depending on your needs, you don’t need however to spend a lot of money to use a bug tracking system as there are many open source bug trackers that have many features, a good reputation and a long history.