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Methods & Tools - September 2022
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*** Updates ***

Last Articles Published on Methods & Tools Website

Focalboard Open Source Project Management Tool Focalboard is an open source project management tool that can be used as a desktop. It provides a simple board approach to project management that is similar to tools like Trello, Asana, Clickup or Notion. It is also available 15 different languages and can integrated into the Mattermost platform, a company that support the development of this open source tool. Read more...

*** From The Archives ***

Articles from Methods & Tools' Archives

Impact-Driven Scrum Delivery Impact-Driven Scrum Delivery brings together Scrum's capacity to deliver working software, with the ability of Impact Management to define actionable metrics, and to evaluate outcomes well before the production of working software. The idea of "outcome over output", lately emphasised in the Agile community, can now be realised in all types of projects - not only those where it is feasible to do the measuring by releasing the proposed new solution to a small percentage of real-time users. Finally, Impact-Driven Scrum Delivery solves "the Product Owner's dilemma", and makes the management ideal of "pivot or persevere" an inherent capability of the process. Read more...

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Optimizing Testing: Testing Realities

How much are software testing and software quality assurance important in today's software development world. This article explores this topic and how organizations could get the most out of software testing.

Learn why you can’t start testing early enough

*** Quote of the Month ***

I’m a big believer in ‘it depends’ as an all-purpose answer to questions on engineering and management. How should I decide what to work on? It depends. How do I get promoted? It depends. How should I store this data? It depends.

In the case of giving general advice to an audience that you don’t know well, this is still the best short answer (followed by a bunch of questions to tease out something more specific). But I’ve realized that I fall into a related trap too often as a manager. I provide very little structure, requirements, or processes to my team to help them figure out how to do things. After all, it depends! If your team is in heavy execution mode, spending a bunch of time in meetings talking about strategy and filling out vision docs isn’t useful. And who am I to care about how you track the work your team is doing? As long as it’s getting done and hitting goals, I don’t care about your Jira structure!

Well, surprise surprise, this has its limits. It doesn’t help people figure out what is important to you. And worse, you deny your managers a powerful tool to use with their own teams: the threat or reward of attention from their senior manager.

Source: Gaining insight and preventing misalignment without micromanaging, Camille Fournier, https://leaddev.com/culture-engagement-motivation/gaining-insight-and-preventing-misalignment-without-micromanaging

=== White Papers ===

Truly Connect with Your Team – Retros & Radars with Trune : This article presents the retrospective & health radar tool, Trune. There are many Scrum retrospective tools out there, and the number is growing by the day. So why do companies like Intuit, IBM, Airbnb, Volvo, and Starbucks choose Trune as their retrospective tool for their Agile teams?

*** Software Development Linkopedia ***

Text: How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack Like all technology companies, Slack wants to make sure we catch revolutions at the right time, while limiting the energy we spend chasing fads. What strategy can we follow to ensure this? This post outlines our approach to this problem, which we continue to refine and apply through our practice at Slack.
Text: Product Vision, Agile, and Going to the Moon Unfortunately, agile is often confused with “starting to do stuff without a plan.” That is a fallacy that causes huge problems. The manifesto and the principles do not say that you should start writing code without having any idea where the product is going. In fact, beginning with a clear vision is a fundamental of “Agile Project Management 101,” but it is also an often forgotten first step.
Text: Specification by Example, 10 years later In the book Specification by Example, Gojko Adzic documented how teams back then used examples to guide analysis, development and testing. During the last two months, he has been conducting a survey to discover what’s changed since the book came out. Some findings were encouraging, confirming that the most important problems from ten years ago have been solved. Some findings were quite surprising, pointing at trends that prevent many teams from getting most out of the process
Text: How to make effective decisions by comparing alternatives “React.js is so much better than Angular”. “Java sucks, no one uses it anymore… we should use Golang”. “Pineapple is the worst pizza topping”. You’ve probably heard one of these very straight opinions. One option is the best, the other is the worst, X is better than Y and so on. But Java is still one of the most popular languages in the world. Angular gives a decent fight to React.js. Pizza with pineapple… well, that’s Ewwww. Does that mean that more than half of the people are clueless? Or don’t know how to tell which technology is better or make the right choices? Maybe we should stop using terms like “better”, “worse”, “best” and shallow comparisons when evaluating alternatives. Instead, we should focus on the benefits of each solution, the disadvantages, and which one is a better fit for our specific problem.
Text: Challenges for Black Box Testing and how to solve them Black Box Testing is always more complicated than if you have full control over the application to test. But for all these challenges, there are solutions available. Some of them are easy, some of them a little bit more complicated.
Text: How to Approach Risk Management in Scrum Framework With its iterative approach, the Scrum framework enables teams to minimize risk and manage risks confidently. Risk can creep into various elements when managing a project and prevent you from delivering a valuable project. But it takes much more than risk awareness to head off these risks.
Text: Spike Testing vs Performance and Load Testing If you ask two software testers, you will get three different definitions for each software testing term. This article discusses spike testing and how this type of testing relates to performance and load testing.

Video: Deliberate Software Architecture Step back from your system and take a look at its software architecture. Are the major structures and technology choices the result of conscious decisions, or have they emerged as the system has evolved?
Video: Object Oriented Programming (OOP) Revisited There are many programming paradigms. One of them is the object-oriented programming. But… Do you really take advantage of it? Are you brave enough to say that you have real ‘objects’ in your project? Having classes and creating something from them is not enough… Have you heard about SOLID (single responsibility, open-closed, Liskov substitution, interface segregation and dependency inversion) or GRASP (General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns) principles? This presentation investigates those and some other rules to make your code really object-oriented.
Video: How Can Java Applications Be Modernized or Developed as a Cloud-Native Solution To define where you want to go, first, you need to see where you are. The next step would be to define a plan. Let’s discuss a strategy that supports corporations using Java in the adoption of cloud technologies. With several options of cloud services and the different architectures such as multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud, how can Java applications be modernized or developed as a cloud-native solution?
Video: Limiting Work-in-Progress (WIP) for Software Developers The idea of limited work-in-progress (WIP) is coming from Lean methodologies. At its core, it means that software developers should start new tasks only when the current piece of work is done and delivered. Finding the right work-in-progress limit can increase overall system (organization) throughput. This idea can be applied on many levels, including writing code.
Video: Mocking Framworks Considered Harmful? Software development without test automation can no longer be considered professional. However, you might have existing code bases or want to rely on external libraries that may make writing effective and fast unit tests hard or even near to impossible. A typical work-around for these situations is to introduce test stubs for such external dependencies to make your code testable.
Video: A Simple Agile Approach to Managing Complexity We often find ourselves in complex situations without recognizing what makes them complex. Fortunately, understanding the context can help us to benefit from the situation by reducing or even increasing the complexity.

Tools: EvoMaster is an open-source AI-driven tool that automatically generates system-level test cases for web/enterprise applications. This is related to Fuzzing. Not only EvoMaster can generate inputs that find program crashes, but also it generates small effective test suites that can be used for regression testing.
Tools: Joindesk is an open source project management tool that can be an alternative to JIRA, Confluence and many other similar tools. This tool is built using Spring Boot, Angular and Postgres.

=== Web Sponsors ===

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

*** 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.