---

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

---

=== Sponsor ===

---

5 Ways to Time Travel Test [Whitepaper]

Temporal testing is critical for date sensitive business rules such as insurance rates, billing, and enrollment. Efficient time travel testing can increase your test coverage, accelerate development, and improve software quality.

Read our whitepaper to learn the 5 ways to time travel software!

---

*** Updates ***

---

Last Articles Published on Methods & Tools Website

Six Key Event-Driven Architecture Patterns Learn six key patterns of an event-driven messaging architecture design that have facilitated creating a robust distributed system used by more than 1400 microservices. Some of the patterns here are more commonplace than others, but they all share the same principles. By using an event-driven pattern, you get less boilerplate code and more resiliency. In addition the microservices are much less coupled to one another as the producer does not need to know who consumes its data. Scaling out is easy as adding more partitions to the topic and more service instances. Read more...

---

Testim AI-powered UI & End-to-end Test Automation Tool Testim Automate was the first AI-powered UI and end-to-end test automation solution enabling fast test authoring and stable tests. The Testim UI makes it easy for any user to write and configure tests quickly. Developers can extend flexibility through coded JavaScript steps that run inside or outside of the browser, network mocking, API testing, and more. A free account is available. Read more...

---

*** From The Archives ***

---

Articles from Methods & Tools Archives

Using Entropy to Measure Software Maturity In a software development project change is one of the only constant factors. Requirements can change, as can the technical considerations and environmental circumstances. Our jobs as software project managers and engineers is largely managing this ability to change. As software projects grow, the ability to change often diminishes. This is in contrast to the rate of change, which generally increases through the first releases until a project enters maintenance mode and is eventually End-Of-Life. This difference makes software projects unpredictable and has given rise to methodologies like Agile, Scrum and Lean to streamline the rate of change. These methodologies do not, however, help increase the ability of a software project to support this rate of change. Entropy is a metric that you can use to measure a software project's ability to keep up with the rate of change. Read more...

---

=== Sponsor ===

---

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 on our website? Are you interested in buying a link to your website from a good reference?

Contact Methods & Tools today to advertise with us!

---

*** Quote of the Month ***

---

The folks leading complex companies are quite capable of understanding the underlying work, but they can only afford to play this card sparingly. There are so many demands on their attention, and metrics become the great filter to prioritize which areas to observe from afar, and which to drill into.

It takes some time for an organization to gain the new competencies to fulfill this insatiable need for metrics. Good metrics require a deep understanding of the data underneath, and building that familiarity is real work. The beginning of the metrics-era is characterized by churn in metric selection. Each learning inspires a refinement across your catalog of metrics, and most new metrics requires new instrumentation, pipelines, and sanitation.

This takes time, and is difficult work, but it's predictable work. You put in more time, learn more, and your metric selection becomes a durable, useful materialization of the reality underneath.

Well, that's how it usually works, anyway. As I've gotten more experienced in defining and using metrics, more and more of my time is spent dealing with areas that defy easy measurement. Areas that I've at times been tempted to describe as unmeasurable.

When I meet new infrastructure leaders, one of my first questions is usually one of:
* "How do you measure security at your company?"
* "How do you measure productivity on your team?"

Answers vary, but generally the state of measurement for both leaves a lot to be desired.

Source: Metrics for the unmeasurable, Will Larson, https://lethain.com/metrics-for-the-unmeasurable/

---

*** Software Development Linkopedia ***

---

Text: The "Clash of Styles" Series – FP vs. OOP as a Daily Choice

Text: Software Premortem — how to save the patient after they died?

Text: How to increase the performance of QA Analysts through indicators

Text: How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You

Text: Test Data Factory: Why and How to Use

Text: Embed a Learning Mindset with Communities of Practice

Text: ScrumMaster Checklists

Text: The Role of Quality Assurance Engineers in Software Development Teams

Video: Achieving Technical Excellence in Software Project Teams The software development project industry has a problem: we are not lacking software methodologies, programming languages, tools or frameworks, but we need great software engineers. Great software engineer teams build quality-in and deliver great software on a regular basis. The technical excellence of those engineers will help you escape the "Waterfall sandwich" and make your organization a little more agile, from the inception of an idea till they go live.

Video: Lean Code Lean has been applied as a toolkit to fine-tune software development processes and organizational workflow, but what does it mean when we apply the practices to the detail of the code, the practices used to develop it and the people who develop it? What does Lean Code and its creation look like?

Video: Common Mistakes When Moving to Microservices This video presents some of the common mistakes when moving to microservices are discussed in this presentation, with provided solutions.

Video: Modern Java API Design As Java software developers, we build on the shoulders of giants – using APIs developed by others to propel ourselves further forward. Frequently, we also find ourselves in the position where we must provide our own APIs for other software developers to use. Building a Java API is not without perils.

Video: Why Product Thinking is so Hard Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is one of the most misunderstood, misused, and abused terms in contemporary software development. In this talk, Jeff Patton explains the misunderstandings made by thought leaders that lead to the confusion we all deal with today.

Video: Agile Without Dedicated QA In the early days of Agile, methods such as Extreme Programming advocated for shipping without a QA phase. In fact, they often didn't have dedicated software testers or even bug-tracking systems. And yet there are stories of these teams producing an order of magnitude fewer defects than normal. What did these teams do, and why did it work? And what role does that leave for QA?

Tools: SQLfuzz is an open source tool that allows loading random data into SQL tables for testing purposes. The tool can get the layout of the SQL table and fill it up with random data.

Tools: Open Source Planning Poker Tools This article presents a list of free and open source planning poker tools and plugins that are also directly available as online tools.

Tools: Commercial and Open Source JMeter Plugins Apache JMeter is an open source load testing tool developed by the Apache Foundation that can be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources. It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server and also some functional testing. JMeter has an open architecture that can be extended with plugins.

---

*** Promoted Software Development Conferences ***

---

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

Agile2021, July 19-22 2021 - Online

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

---

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

---

*** Software Development Training ***

---

---

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.

---

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