Insight and analysis from thought leaders in agile development and testing, DevOps, security, test automation, and more.
One of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto is “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” Unfortunately, many associate that practice with performing team retrospectives at the end of a sprint, or periodically in kanban. But if you seek to build a high-performing team, there are more improvement activities you should consider adopting.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. The cultures that are trying to adopt agile are usually command-and-control, because most organizations are. This means that there’s a boss who tells their subordinates what to do, and then those subordinates tell their subordinates what to do. Agile attempts to flip that script upside […]
For many organizations, traditional testing groups are separated from the IT security group. But having traditional testers perform some security testing efforts is a great way of achieving a balanced approach to shifting left while being mindful of staffing and budgetary challenges. It also has some great advantages.
Today in class, one of my students asked the seemingly straightforward question, “what is agile?”. This got me thinking – what is the most fundamental aspect of agile? My unorthodox view is that agile is simply the name given to the bundle of values and principles that result in more successful outcomes in software development. […]
Introduction This is the second part of a series of tutorials focused on the process of creating, deploying, and consuming a Node.js REST microservice. In part one of this series, I walked through the initial creation process. I demonstrated how to leverage Node.js and just a few modules to create a functioning REST microservice. While […]
With the advent of agile and DevOps, organizations are moving from specialized roles to cross-functional teams—and that means cross-functional sharing of the specialized tools used in each silo. So it’s not unreasonable for a tester to need access to the tools used in those other silos, such as Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a scalable, production-grade container […]
At Agile+DevOPs 2018 @ryan.ripley kicked off a UX fishbowl panel session about no estimates. To be honest I have been skeptical about no estimates since I first heard about it. I think I have been skeptical about it for a couple of reasons including: Committing to work and achieving it in the sprint has been […]
In my past articles I’ve written about using custom listeners as part of getting desired reporting, or making your tests do what you want. I’ve always referred offhandedly to these listeners, never paying them direct attention. I figured it was finally time to actually write a full fledged post about listeners, and some useful tricks. What is a […]
Recently I wrote an Ansible playbook to extract data from an Informatica PowerCenter repository. The data was then compressed and uploaded into Nexus Repository Manager. I used the command line utility, pmrep, to execute the commands needed to connect to the Informatica repository and to extract the data. A specific Informatica user had been given […]
A common refrain Brian Hicks hears from management in organizations transitioning to agile is, “if the teams are self-directed and get to choose how much work they do, how can i be sure they are working hard enough?”
