---

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

---

=== Sponsor ===

---

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.

Start your free trial today!

---

*** Updates ***

---

Last Articles Published on Methods & Tools Website

Introducing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) This article is an introduction to the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) approach. OKRs is a goal-setting framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. OKRs is different from other goal-setting techniques because of the aim to set very ambitious goals. They enable teams to focus on the big bets and accomplish more than the team thought was possible, even if they don't fully attain the stated goal. Read more...

---

Scrumfast - Free Agile Project Management Tool Scrumfast is a free, lightweight alternative to expensive Agile project management tools such as Jira, Trello, Monday and ClickUp. Scrumfast focuses on the basic features of Scrum and offers an intuitive modern user interface. Read more...

---

*** From The Archives ***

---

Articles from Methods & Tools' Archives

Software Testing in Distributed Teams I started writing this article with the idea that I'd talk about technology and practices that help teams succeed with testing even when they're in multiple geographic locations. But as I wrote, two things happened. First, after so many years of working in teams that take a Whole-Team approach to testing, it's hard for me to separate testing from other aspects of software development. Secondly, everything always gets back to team and company culture. The same things that make a co-located team able to deliver valuable software to the business frequently, while maintaining a sustainable pace also enable distributed teams to do the same thing. However, distributed teams will have to be even more disciplined and committed to making their software development process work. 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? 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 ***

---

A team is a group of people working together towards the same goal. The first time Tech Lead might mistakenly see their role leading on all the technical aspects and forget about how the team works together. Although this responsibility may be shared with other roles such as the Team Lead or Project Manager, a Tech Lead must also shepherd the team to move in the same technical direction.

It is all too easy for the first time Tech Lead to ignore heated discussions between two developers, or to ignore how technical team members interact poorly with or disrespect non-technical team members.

The more experienced Tech Lead realizes that the lead part of their role is just as important as the tech, and constantly looks for ways to build trust and relationships between people in the team. They use practices like white-boarding architectural diagrams as a team, establishing coding or architectural principles with the team to guide individual decisions or running regular improvement katas or retrospectives.

Source: Three Common Mistakes of the First Time Tech Lead, Patrick Kua, https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/three-common-mistakes-first-time-tech-lead

---

=== White Papers ===

---

Software Crash That Interfered With COVID Vaccinations Could Be Prevented with PractiTest's Software Testing Management Product: PractiTest, the leader in testing management solutions, announced that its newly-released testing automation management solution update could be used to prevent software crashes similar to the one experienced in Massachusetts when it opened up COVID-19 vaccination appointments to Priority Group 2 Phase 2 residents.

---

5 Minute Quick Scrum Guide – Should I Use Story Points Or Hours?: There is plenty to fret about when you are running or on an agile team, but your measure of estimation should be one of them. In fact, despite what you may have heard from consultants or others, Scrum is not prescriptive about any particular estimation measure, let alone story points. Many practitioners support story points and it is been very in vogue for a while now, you should do whatever you and your team feels most comfortable with.

---

Sprint Poker by Parabol – Agile Estimation for the Remote Age : Parabol is an agile meeting tool that helps remote teams run guided retrospective, check-in and Sprint Poker meetings. Parabol's structured format and built-in templates make it easy for facilitators to run a great agile meeting – no matter if you're a pro or just starting out. It's free to use for up to two teams.

---

Contact us if you want to publish a white paper with ScrumExpert.com or SoftwareTestingMagazine.com.

---

*** Software Development Linkopedia ***

---

Website: How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects How to classify the different type of people participation to software development project. Click on each animal to expand its description.

Text: Four Magic Numbers for Measuring Software Delivery

Text: Reteaming Often (or how to build a great product while on a boat)

Text: Revamping the Android testing pipeline at Dropbox

Text: Does refactoring Legacy Code pay off in your career?

Text: The State of Design Teams: Structure, Alignment and Impact

Text: How To Build A Product Roadmap Everyone Understands

Text: Statistical approaches for performance analysis

Text: COVID Changed Agile, and Agile Changed Us

Text: How Different Are Software and Hardware Testing?

Video: Effective Project Communication in a Remote First World 2020 has seen a seismic shift in how we work across the IT industry. Remote working and project management, previously the choice of a small minority of IT professionals, has become the de facto standard. This trend is likely to strengthen as workers and companies embrace the myriad potential benefits. The companies that will thrive in this brave new world will be those who can adapt most nimbly. Unfortunately, many have lurched into this situation with little deliberate thought on how their approach to communication should evolve to suit this new operating context.

Video: Security Tooling in Your DevOps Pipeline. This talk explores how you can use tooling and automation to include security early on and throughout a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) DevOps pipeline. Scanning the platform for vulnerabilities and the code for 3rd-party components with known vulnerabilities, using static code analysis and performing dynamic security testing are some strategies that you could use to ensure that security can catch up and keep up with the speed of DevOps.

Video: Writing Clean Code with Modern Java. This live Java coding session explores several features in Java 9, 10 and 11 that enable you to create cleaner code. It discusses factory methods for collections, extended streams, updates to Optional, try with effectively final resources, local variable type inference, and HTTP/2 client. It also presents best practices and patterns for using these features in the context of modern Java applications.

Video: Improve Exploratory Testing with Creativity This video explains how to improve your exploratory testing through LESS preparation but more creativity! One of the characteristics of exploratory testing is that you do less preparation and that you decide on the spot what your next test case will be.

Video: Don't Walk Away from Complexity… Run! We constantly hear that change should be affordable and cost-effective with Agile. True, but, in reality, that is easily said than done. Complexity makes change hard. We cannot shy away from the hard problems posed by domains and business needs. So, how can we solve complicated problems without getting dragged into the quagmire of what appears to be an inevitable complexity?

Tools: Pinocchio is an open source Electron powered GUI for Puppeteer test generation with Mocha and Chai. It allows users to identify selectors for tests and preview code in the provided code editor. Once the tests have been created, an exportation of the test suites into the user’s application is only a button click away.

Tools: CodeQuality. CodeQuality is an open source that allows to set up coding style and analysis rules for a high code quality in your C# projects.

Tools: Overview of QuAck Open Source Test Management Tool. QuAck is a web-based open-source test management tool that can store test cases and test suites and execute them. It is based on a pluggable architecture that allows implementation of custom authentication providers, integration with tracking and test executing systems. This article presents the key features of QuAck.

---

*** 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 ***

---

An Agile Crash Course: Agile Project Management and Agile Delivery: Think of this course as Agile for Dummies (or Agile for anyone and Agile for everyone). This Agile course will allow you to master the most important concepts and tools of Agile development, Agile project delivery and Agile project management. This Agile crash course has been designed to enable you to become agile the Agile way, in less than an hour! Step into my classroom and start learning about Agile now. You will learn about powerful tools and concepts that will enable you to become more successful in your projects. We will go beyond the definition of Agile, from rituals and tools, to activities, concepts, examples and reflections. So take the course now to learn what all of this means in more detail and how you can apply it to become and Agilelist.

---

Engineering Practices for Building Quality Software: In this course, you will learn about engineering practices and processes that agile and traditional teams use to make sure the team is prepared for change. In additional, you will also learn about practices, techniques and processes that can help team build high quality software. You will also learn how to calculate a variety of quantitative metrics related to software quality.

---

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