Articles
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Balancing Speed with User Needs: How to Avoid Sacrificing Good UX in Agile Projects User-Centric Agile Development integrates UX research and design into the agile process to ensure user needs are met throughout development. This article debunks myths about UX in agile and outlines strategies for achieving a balance between speed and user-centered design, emphasizing the importance of communication, user-value focus, and continuous improvement. |
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3 Ways Distributed Design Teams Can Stay Agile Having a design team an ocean away presents some challenges, including misunderstandings that often result from cultural and linguistic differences, occasional time zone conflicts, and difficulty always keeping everyone in the loop regarding decisions that are being made. How do we combat those challenges? Here are three strategies that can help keep your distributed design team on track. |
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Focus on Agile Engineering Methods in Your Digital Transformation Organizations undergoing a digital transformation must adopt new and meaningful ways of working. For a successful transformation, in addition to agile processes, teams must also leverage agile engineering techniques and models. Continuous focus on agile engineering principles will provide a solid ground for teams to enhance their agility and deliver better software, faster. |
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Find Your Metaphor for Agile Software Design How you think about software design can have a big impact on how effective you are when you do it. All of us have different criteria for success, and some of them aren’t even conscious. We have to figure out what resonates for us so that we make the right choices, and we can get a clue about the right choices for us by looking at the metaphors we use when we talk about software. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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10 Lessons Learned in Cross-Platform Development Building an app for a single platform is difficult, but designing, implementing, and testing an app targeting multiple operating system platforms can be next to impossible. The secret balances upfront design with customer feedback. |
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Reducing the Risk of Failed System Updates As software applications become more powerful and complex, users are demanding seamless and automatic updates. There is nothing worse than a “bricked system” after a failed update. The selection of a reliable file system is a vital component of the software update process. |
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Seven Guidelines for a Great Web API Web APIs have opened up a brave new world for app collaboration. James Higginbotham presents a series of guidelines that every programmer should consider in the design and implementation of a great API developer experience. |
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Incorporating User Experience into Early Agile Cycles Chris Nodder explores the emerging need to focus on a software app's user experience. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune to perform some basic user experience analysis as long as it is done early and tested throughout a project’s lifecycle. |
Interviews
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Testing in the Agile Age: An Interview with Alon Girmonsky
Podcast
In this interview, BlazeMeter founder and CEO, Alon Girmonsky, digs into why modern businesses must adopt agile methodologies. He talks about the advantages agile has over waterfall as well as how shorter iteration windows within the testing process affect manual hand-offs. |
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Agile's Dilution and Evolution: An Interview with Jeff Morgan
Podcast
In this interview, LeanDog cofounder Jeff Morgan talks about both the current state of agile and how we can shape its future. He digs into the different ways that people are watering it down, as well as the possibility for some other methodology to break out in the near future. |
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How Configuration Management Is Changing: An Interview with Joe Townsend
Video
Joe Townsend has been working in the configuration management field for fifteen years and is a regular contributor to CMCrossroads. In this interview, Joe discusses how configuration management has changed over the years, the trouble with tools, and trends in IT. |
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For Maximum Awesome: An Interview with Joe Justice
Video
Joe Justice is a consultant at Scrum Inc. and inventor of the Extreme Manufacturing project management method. He also is the founder of Team WIKISPEED, an all-Scrum volunteer-based, "green” automotive prototyping company. |
Conference Presentations
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Using Design Thinking to Create Better Test Cases
Slideshow
Designing good test cases can be described as an art. With test cases being written with a focus on business, testers should be part of the discovery and design phase of the project, and the business drivers should dictate test case design. But how can we ensure we are focusing on the user and bringing the biggest value possible in this phase? Larissa Rosochansky will describe what design thinking is, how it relates to the testing methodology, and how to use it in the design phase of your project. She will also show you how to better frame the business drivers and select the persona and most important exercises from a wide range of possibilities. After this introduction, Larissa will demonstrate how to apply the exercises, create the agenda for a design thinking workshop, select the team to ensure you have a diverse and multidisciplinary group, and document the results. |
Larissa Rosochansky
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Devices and Desires: As Humans How Do We Experience Software?
Slideshow
We consume and still we desire more. More devices, more apps, more data, more bandwidth, more connectivity. The more we have, the more we want …. We assume that to be true – those of us who work in the software industry. But is that true? To understand what is really required of our... |
Isabel Evans
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Testing Imprecise Requirements
Slideshow
Articles on abc.net and elsewhere reported that Volvo has recently discovered a non-traditional requirement: Any self-driving vehicle approved for use outside Australian cities must recognize kangaroos on or near the roadway and take proper actions. The kangaroo’s bounce confused the large animal detector! In this session, industry expert David Gelperin shares a new perspective on the value of imprecise requirements and explores the nature of testing them. Excess precision may hamper the development of optimal solutions by excluding effective designs. Imprecise statements reduce the risk of excess precision and signal the need for analysis to understand their deeper meaning. Intentionally imprecise requirements entail a mixture of research and development and are a valuable supplement to traditional requirements. |
David Gelperin
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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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