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

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=== Sponsor ===

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TimeShiftX - Travel in Time, Test with Ease

TimeShiftX lets you time travel your software into the future or past to temporal test date and time sensitive functionality and code such as year-end, daylight savings, billing, and policies. Employ instant time travel inside Active Directory & Kerberos without changing system clocks, editing code, or isolating servers. TimeShiftX is multi-platform, cloud & container compatible, and supports all applications and databases.

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*** Updates ***

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Last Articles Published on Methods & Tools Website

Linx - Build & Host Backend Applications in Low Code Linx enables the rapid development and deployment of backend software applications like APIs, integrations and automations. Developers design and debug solutions in a familiar procedural style using a drag and drop interface with access to 1000s of ready made functions. Solutions are deployed with one click to servers running in the cloud or on-premise. Read more...

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*** From The Archives ***

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Articles from Methods & Tools' Archives

Exploratory Testing: Finding the Music of Software Investigation As a software testing consultant and musician, I meet a lot of skilled testers who do amazing work. Through experience and a lot of trial and error, they have developed skills they can't easily explain. Unfortunately, with software testing, there aren't as many obvious avenues for skill development as there are for musicians. Many software testers don't realize that there are learnable exploratory testing skills they can develop to help them become even more valuable to software development teams. Read more...

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=== Sponsor ===

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Agile + DevOps West, June 7-12 2020, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Learn from industry experts how your organization can leverage agile and DevOps concepts to bring cross-functional stakeholders together to deliver software with greater speed and agility while meeting quality and security demands. Topics for every member of the team, including leadership, testing, metrics, project management, automation, and more.

Learn More

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*** Quote of the Month ***

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Migrations matter because they are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on technical debt.

Engineers hate technical debt. If there is an easy project they can personally do to reduce tech debt, they'll take it on themselves. Engineering managers hate technical debt, too. If there is an easy project their team can execution in isolation, they'll get it scheduled. In aggregate, this leads to a dynamic where there is very little low-hanging fruit to reduce technical debt, and most remaining options require many teams working together to implement them: migrations.

Each migrations aims to create technical leverage ("your indexes no longer have to fit on a single server!") or reduce technical debt ("your acknowledged writes are guaranteed to persist a master failover"). They occupy the awkward territory of reduced immediate contribution today in exchange for more capacity tomorrow. This makes them controversial to schedule, and as your systems become larger, they become more expensive.

Lore tells us that Googlers have a phrase, "Running to stand still", to describe a team whose entire capacity is consumed in upgrading dependencies and patterns, such that it can't make forward progress on the product/system they own. Spending all your time on migrations is extreme, but every mid-sized company has a long queue up migrations it can't staff: moving from VMs to containers, rolling out circuit-breaking, moving to the new build tool; the list extends effortlessly into the sunset.

Migrations are the only mechanism to effectively manage technical debt as your company and code grows. If you don't get effective at software and system migrations, you'll end up languishing in technical debt. (And still have to do one later anyway, it's just that it'll probably be a full rewrite.)

Source: "Migrations: the Sole Scalable Fix to Tech Debt", Will Larson, https://lethain.com/migrations/

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=== Web Sponsors ===

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This month, the Methods & Tools website is supported by Software Testing Magazine and Scrum Expert. We thank them for their support.

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*** Software Development Linkopedia ***

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Website: The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps. It is a triangulation on ideal practices for app development, paying particular attention to the dynamics of the organic growth of an app over time, the dynamics of collaboration between developers working on the app’s codebase, and avoiding the cost of software erosion.

Text: How I Do (Hopefully) Fair Performance Reviews for Software Developers

Text: Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt

Text: Unclogging the Bug Pipeline

Text: Quality Assurance on large-scaled projects

Text: 5 Principles of Visual Design in UX

Text: Customer KPIs in Agile Software Development

Text: Achieving Solid Mobile Testing

Video: Domain Driven Design Really Matters!

Video: Modernizing Large JavaScript Frontends with Web Components

Video: Building a Bank in the Cloud from Scratch

Video: Continuous Integration & Delivery for Databases

Video: Great UX, Despite Agile

Video: Introducing the Testing Diamond

Video: Meeting Resistance and Moving Forward

Video: An Evolutionary Approach to DevOps

Tools: ProjectForge is an open source project management tool designed to improve the efficiency of projects and project teams from single-person-projects up to large-sized projects. ProjectForge is a Java-based application that works on Windows, MacOS X and Linux

Tools: Ephemeris is an open source system engineering and requirements management application. It allows managing stakeholders, requirements, functions and products in one place and link them together. You can also record requirements and actions trough the “meeting” panel. You can build the project breakdown structure, generate overview diagrams, ERD and mindmaps from the project relations.

Tools: Commercial and Open Source JMeter Plugins. This article presents a list of open source and commercial JMeter plugins. We have added also some utilities and software testing frameworks build around Apache JMeter.

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*** Promoted Software Development Conferences ***

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EPIC Experience, April 19-23 2020, San Diego, CA, USA

STAREAST Testing Conference, May 3-8 2020, Orlando, FL, USA

Agile Crete & SoCraTes, May 20-23 2020, Kolymbari, Greece

Agile + DevOps West, June 7-12 2020, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Agile Alliance Agile2020, July 20-24 2020, Orlando, FL, USA

jconf.dev, September 29-October 1 2020, Chicago, USA

EuroSTAR Software Testing & QA Conference, November 16-19 2020, Antwerp, Belgium

UIArchConf, November 19-20 2020, New Orleans, USA

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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