InfoQ Homepage Software Craftsmanship Content on InfoQ
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Oath for Programmers
Our society demands a commitment to professional behavior; we need an oath for programmers as lives and fortunes depend upon the proper construction and execution of software, argues Robert Martin. According to him, this will have to be enforced by membership in an professional association.
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Tackling Technical Debt at Meetup
Continuous product health can be realized by regularly prioritizing the highest impact technical debt items and knocking those off systemically. You need to continuously iterate how you're tackling technical debt to drive more and more impactful results. Going for maximum impact items first and communicating the impact of paying down technical debt is what Yvette Pasqua, CTO of Meetup, recommends.
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Adopting Agile and DevOps at Wyndham Vacation Rentals UK
Embedding agile and DevOps had a positive impact on the role of QA at Wyndham; focusing effort in the earlier lifecycle stages has led to smoother releases with fewer bugs and post-production issues. Business colleagues and customers are more involved throughout the delivery cycle, making testing a shared responsibility .
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Managing Crowdsourced Testing
Crowdsourced testing is a unique way of involving the crowd- meaning the real users/testers- into software testing under real world conditions. It helped Swisscom to find defects very early in the development process and increase the quality of products.
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Putting Quality Back in Agile with Lean
The agile manifesto and lean practices are very complementary; lean can be a useful addition to a very strong agile process to increase quality. Interviewing real clients or client proxies to deeply understand their pain points and visualizing the process by diving into the handovers between departments helps to uncover problems faster and fix those problems more efficiently for a lower price.
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Evan Leybourn of IBM on the Theory of Agile Constraints
Evan Leybourn is talking at the upcoming Agile Indonesia conference. He spoke to InfoQ about his Theory of Agile Constraints, defining value in an initiative, agile budgeting and #NoProjects.
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How Testers Can Become More Technical
Testers who are able to successfully apply technical techniques of the testing craft during testing are more valuable; they increase both the quality and productivity of their teams. To become more technical, testers can learn something about code, and they should know how to manipulate and parse text files and how to use the most important analysis tools for their application platform.
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Bridging the Gap between Legacy Systems and Modern Techniques
Aging platforms that are managed with manual, time consuming processes can be costly. Teams can make a business case to management based on hours lost by repetitive work or re-work caused by human error for introducing modern techniques like automation tools and containers. The result is a predictable and repeatable process with minimal human interaction to deploy more often and more confidently.
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Refocusing e-Commerce with Lean
Auchan:Direct, the online grocery delivery service of Auchan France, decided to apply lean to develop a new e-Commerce website. Their CEO was the first customer and they used continuous and fast feedback from their clients on the new experience to improve website quality using continuous delivery.
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Scaling Lean Startup: Principles over Process
Large organizations want to be like lean start-ups but they need to rethink how they hire, incentivize and manage their staff to become an agile organization. Organizations should reward teams for making low-risk decisions based on what they can learn quickly and build in the value of learning in addition to delivery.
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Automated Acceptance Testing Supports Continuous Delivery
Automated acceptance tests are an essential component of a continuous delivery style testing strategy, as they give an important and different insight into the behaviour of our systems. Developers must own the responsibility to keep acceptance tests running and passing, argued Dave Farley; you don't want to have a separate QA team lagging behind a development team.
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A Crystal Ball to Prioritise Technical Debt in Monoliths or Microservices: Adam Tornhill's Thoughts
At QCon London, Adam Tornhill presented “A Crystal Ball to Prioritise Technical Debt”, and claimed that although the technical debt metaphor has taken the software world with storm, most organizations find it hard to prioritise and repay their technical debt. Key takeaways from the talk included methods to identify ‘hotspots’ of code complexity and churn.
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Mastering Agile Testing
There is general acceptance that adopting agile development practices enables the speeding up of the delivery of software. Without incorporating quality assurance practices directly into the development process, product quality inevitably suffers. In order to consistently achieve high quality, both work practices and team roles need to change to build quality in rather than testing at the end.
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Eric Evans: DDD is Not for Perfectionists
A problem with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) since the beginning has been the too common hunt for perfect designs, but DDD is not for perfectionists. In order to stop that hunt you need to have some idea of how to create software that is well designed, yet not perfect, Eric Evans noted in his presentation at the recent DDD Europe Conference in Amsterdam.
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Approval Testing with TextTest
Approval testing is a test technique which compares the current output of your code with an 'approved' version. The approved version is created by initially examining the test output and approving the result. You can revisit the approved version and easily update it when the requirements change. Approval testing is supported by TextTest, an open source tool for text-based functional testing.