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Methods & Tools - September 2020
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.

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*** Updates ***

Last Articles Published on Methods & Tools Website

Functional Architecture For IoT Platforms This article presents an IoT platform functional architecture and provides definitions for each category and microservice. While each IoT deployment is unique, MachNation has attempted to create an architecture and definitions that capture the most common and relevant IoT platform functionality. Read more...

*** From The Archives ***

Articles from Methods & Tools' Archives

Understanding the Scrum Burndown Chart The Burndown chart is such a fundamental metric for Scrum teams. The Burndown chart is very simple. It is easy to explain, easy to understand. But there are pitfalls observed in many agile workshops and adoptions. Read more...

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*** Quote of the Month ***

If you're writing an all time top five list of controversial engineering management topics, I can almost guarantee that the question of whether managers should be coding will find a place on the list. I'm very firmly in the camp of managers who do, and believe they should, code but it's entirely understandable why so many people come down on the other side of the issue.

According to a recent study published by Harvard Business School, employees are happier when managed by someone who can do their job. To borrow from an old NASA engineer's rules "Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.". When teams are building new software they're operating in the margin between the possible and impossible, and that margin is entirely defined by the capabilities of the people and technology in play at the time. The further a manager gets from the underlying technology (or the further the architect gets from the people) their strategic thinking is weakened by the loss of of an intuitive sense of one half of the capability dynamic. The backlash against managers who code is largely driven by the incredibly common phenomenon of new managers screwing up their promotion by burning out doing their old job instead of learning how to do their new job. Managers should keep coding but they must not keep doing their old job, and it's easy to mix up those two things without the right framework to decide which code to write and how to write it.

Source: How (and why) Should Managers Code?, John Barton, https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-and-why-should-managers-code-323751799664

=== White Papers ===

5 Benefits of API Testing for Your Business Application: Agile software development refers to methodologies and principles of effective, iterative, and collaborative programming. In software applications, an API (Application Programming Interface) is typically used to provide smooth communication between different software components. In this article, Olga Ezzheva discusses five benefits that implementing well-designed automated API testing provides for a successful software QA strategy.

Top 3 Enterprise Requirements for IoT Performance Testing Tools : pCloudy is a cloud based continuous testing platform designed to enhance the quality of the mobile application under test. Your Internet of Things (IoT) solution is unique and you will quickly realize that testing end-to-end IoT performance is hard. This article explains what you should require in an IoT performance testing tool to solve these problems.

*** Software Development Linkopedia ***

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Text: Two hours per team

Text: Scrum of Scrums: How to Succeed in 4 Simple Steps

Text: How To Test Web Forms for Usability?

Video: How to Become a Great Software Architect

Video: Responsible AI for Software Engineers

Video: Is Team Self-Selection an Obvious Choice in Scrum?

Video: Testing API Following the Test Pyramid

Video: Migrating Microservices from Java to Kotlin

Video: How Much Can You Trust Your Scrum Team

Tools: CATS is a tool that generates tests at runtime based on a given OpenAPI contract. It will also automatically run those tests against a given service instance to check if the API has been implemented in accordance with its contract. Think of it as a tool that eliminates the boring testing activities from contract and API testing, allowing you to focus on creative activities.

Tools: Ionic Framework is an open-source mobile app development framework that makes it easy to build top quality native and progressive web apps with web technologies. It provides a powerful cross-platform UI toolkit for building native-quality iOS, Android, and Progressive Web Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Tools: Free Online Scrum Tools. This article presents some online tools that are based on Scrum and Agile approaches, that implement specific practices (backlog management, burndown chart) and that are freely available (no commercial/paid version!) on the web for distributed Scrum teams.