development
Articles
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Picking the Right Branch-Merge Strategy A good branch-merge strategy facilitates processes among multiple developers and is the basis for any well-functioning DevOps pipeline that uses continuous integration. Let’s explore branching strategies, merging strategies, and how you can put them together in a way that’s right for your team in order to bring quality features to production faster. |
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3 Keys to Mastering Test-Driven Development From his decade of teaching thousands of professional software developers how to be effective with test-driven development, David Bernstein has learned that there are three key ingredients for mastering TDD: understanding what it really is, making code reliably testable, and getting hands-on experience. Let’s look at each of these factors to see what it takes to use TDD effectively on your projects. |
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For Sustainable Test Automation, Look beyond the Surface When it comes to achieving sustainable test automation, having an appropriate test automation team structure in place is the most important first step to take. This article has some proven practices for a few different test automation adoption scenarios—led by an automation team or a regression team, and with agile adaptations—that have helped organizations enjoy long-term test automation success. |
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A Case for Test-First Development You may feel you don't have time to write unit tests, but you really don't have time not to. Steve Poling makes the case that writing tests first not only will yield better code, but will help you get that code working right sooner. Here's how using a test-first approach changes your thinking about coding, lets you see mistakes immediately, and helps you create more testable code. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Supporting Continuous Testing with Automation Create tests that can be used in a continuous testing environment, build the right number of tests, and don’t fall victim to the mistaken belief that everything can be automated. |
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All Customers Are Not Created Equal Software developers may not think they have much to do with customers, but it is wise to consider the customer in all you do, from collecting requirements to design and implementation. |
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DevOps and the Culture of Code Migrating an organization to continuous integration requires adoption new processes, tools, and automation. DevOps relies on dramatic culture change to encourage total transparency and collaboration among all project stakeholders. |
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5 Ways to Pair Developers with Testers Some agile practices stress the importance of pairing team members together to achieve better team performance. Try these five suggestions for pairing key resources. |
Interviews
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Giving Control Back to Software Developers: An Interview with Mike Faulise
Video
In this interview, Michael Faulise, the founder and managing partner at tap|QA, explains how the move toward DevOps and away from release management is giving control back to developers, then details why major companies often need partners to leverage CI, CD, and other modern techniques. |
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Overcoming the Hurdles of Continuous Delivery: An Interview with Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan
Video
In this interview, Jeff Morgan, the chief technology officer and cofounder of LeanDog, explains how continuous delivery and continuous deployment have changed how software teams do business. He breaks down funding projects versus teams and validating quality as you build your product. |
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How to Adapt to the New Age of Testing and Development: An Interview with Melissa Benua
Podcast
In this interview, Melissa Benua, a senior technical lead at mParticle and senior backend software engineer at PlayFab, explains how the speed of development and testing has changed, as well as how to adapt to the new era of software. |
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Testing as the Driving Force of DevOps: An Interview with Adam Auerbach
Podcast
In this interview, Adam Auerbach, vice president of quality and DevOps engineering at Lincoln Financial Group, explains how the role of testing has changed thanks to DevOps. He also talks about how testers can lead the DevOps movement through the power of automation. |
Conference Presentations
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Managing BDD Automation Test Cases inside Test Management Systems
Slideshow
Behavior-driven development (BDD) has been around for a while and is here to stay. However, the added abstraction levels pose a technical problem for writing and managing tests. While BDD does a great job of marrying the nontechnical aspect of test writing to the technical flow of an application under test, keeping this information under source control becomes problematic. Frameworks such as JBehave, Cucumber, or Robot give subject matter experts that additional ability to write tests, but they are often restricted access from them; because people treat test cases as code, they get stored in source control repositories. Additionally, these given-when-then steps soon can grow to an extent where they are difficult to manage without an IDE, and nontechnical people lose interest. Using management tools, Max Saperstone shows how to manage these nontechnical steps and keep them in sync with the automaton in tools such as Git. |
Max Saperstone
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Building a Modern DevOps Enterprise Testing Organization
Slideshow
The DevOps movement is front and center across enterprises. Companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, development organizations have been filled with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. Adam Auerbach says this has to change. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding in order to stay relevant and add more value to the business. Based on his experiences at Lincoln Financial and Capital One, Adam explores what the DevOps movement is all about, its core values, and proven patterns for how testing must evolve. |
Adam Auerbach
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What's an API and How Do I Test It?
Slideshow
API-based applications have become ubiquitous in the past few years. Yet many of us still really don't know what an API is from the inside out. Moreover, many of us don't know much about how to comprehensively test them! Join Paul Merrill to learn what everyone is doing and talking about, related to APIs: microservices, REST, endpoints, requests, request methods, and responses. Paul demonstrates four free tools you can use to directly interact with a simple API: curl, the browser, Postman, and Java (with Rest Assured). Learn techniques for testing APIs at the service level and how to test APIs faster with greater coverage and quicker test automation. Walk away with an understanding of what JSON is, how APIs use JSON, and how to go about verifying that it is correct. With new knowledge and skills, you’ll do a better testing job and give more valuable feedback to the API designers and developers. |
Paul Merrill
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Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need
Slideshow
Successful agile testers collaborate with programmers as code is written, isolating problems, troubleshooting defects, and debugging code all along the way to getting the product to done. But modern systems are scaling beyond what traditional teams are able to understand using familiar tools. New appreciation for systems and complexity theory, as well as disciplines and tools around emerging areas such as observability and resilience engineering, are offering solutions that allow teams to actively debug their systems and explore properties and patterns they have not defined in advance. Chris will share the basics of the theory of these new ideas, as well as some tools that support this type of work. He'll show how dynamic analysis can be used to isolate and understand puzzling system behavior. |
Chris Blain
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