Welcome to my second blog in the series of five quality patterns in Agile development that can help you to deliver the right software with great quality. In my previous blog, I’ve introduced Example Mapping as a method to get to specific examples for scenarios or rules that your user story is made up of. The output of the refinement sessions are your requirements and thus your tests. In this blog, we will take a further look at these test cases and why it is important to automate these acceptance tests. Not just from a development team perspective, but also what they can bring to your business.

In a previous blog, we described a novel way for software QA for refactored code already running in production inspired by the Scientist approach GitHub published in 2016. In this blog we explain how we implemented this QA method for testing AWS Lambda functions and our experiences with that.

Mutation testing promises to help ensure quality tests. It does this by making changes to a code base and running all tests. If all is well, some changes in code should result in failing tests. So making a bunch of changes like inverting the condition in an if-statement, should cause the tests to fail. If not, the test isn’t good enough.

I’ve tried this technique a couple of years ago, and wanted to find out what had changed.

This article describes a situation we found ourselves in during refactoring an existing application running in production, the implementation of a novel QA method dubbed “Scientist”, and advantages and drawbacks of this new approach. A future blog post will detail the architecture of a serverless implementation for this new QA method.

You perceive your time to market for new features to be slow and want to speed up

You experience that things are slow, and it’s hard to finish anything within an iteration. You’ve tried to deliver smaller increments, but it is still a struggle to complete these in a reasonable amount of time. One of the reasons of the perceived slowness might be that wasteful activities and unnecessary handovers are hiding in your development process.

Nowadays, there is an increasing interest and mentioning of socio-technical engineering, socio-technical systems. And although the words do not strike as odd on its own I personally have struggled quite a bit with the different meanings of the terms and understanding the field of socio-technical systems. So in this article, I will provide a layman’s introduction to socio-technical systems. Knowledge about socio-technical engineering can help you to understand what constraints might prevent or help you to succeed in your current project.

By Paul de Raaij & Evelyn van Kelle

Software development is at the core of most companies. We’re all digital enterprises that need to understand how technology is heavily influencing our core business and can make or break our competitive advantage. Making the right decisions when it comes to investing in technology has become a crucial skill for digital leaders. 

When using AWS Lambda functions you typically want to return a response to the client ASAP. However, imagine a situation where you calculate the response for the client and want to do some actions after sending the response to the client (e.g., write some metrics). Since standard AWS Lambda functions do not allow you to execute any actions after returning the response,  the client will experience extra latency due to the other actions which must be completed first. This blog explains how to use AWS Lambda custom runtimes to reduce the added latency and still do the additional processing.

Let me start with a short recap of my previous post. The reason we got to this point. I talked about the difference between being a true expert and relying on expert intuition. Sharing the struggles of a millennial social scientist that often gets asked if we can train our brain to be better at using System 2. Because, well, I’m going on stage talking about this stuff, so I better have an answer and step-by-step guide for how to achieve this.

And then I have to disappoint by saying that there is no such list of exercises and training. That I do have some suggestions, but it does not come in a ‘5 easy steps to reach your full System 2 potential – template’. 

What is happening to product quality?

Throughout my career as a quality engineer, I have developed a deep passion for quality. This passion goes way beyond the quality of software products. It is also about the quality of all interactions, quality of processes, and quality of work and life experience. I strive to bring excellence to every aspect of my life, and it hurts to see when greatness is lacking.

In my working life, I’ve seen the market focus shift more and more from quality to speed. We build more products than ever before; unfortunately, many of them are not up to par.

How IT organizations have tried to fix the degradation of quality until now confuses me sometimes.