Opinion

In a blog series about Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CD), I described the process of CI and CD at a high level. In this blog, I will talk about the 5 pillars of Continuous Integration and the tools associated with these 5 pillars. I will explain how the interaction of these tools along with an Agile mindset will help you embark on a journey to continuously deliver value to your customers.

In the final instalment of this blog series, I will share some of my ideas that will help you in the journey towards Shift Left testing. I have used and applied these in various roles across my career.

In the previous blog, I covered the principles of Shift Left testing and also shared an overview about the test pyramid. Now, I will turn to a curated set of blogs and articles to address various problems with each test type described in the test pyramid.

Modern software products are being delivered as a service (SaaS) using cloud technologies. This secular move to cloud and SaaS has changed the way software is developed and deployed. SaaS products give you the means to deliver features and functionality to all your customers very quickly and very often. This also means that any quality issues or outages of your SaaS product will result in large number of unhappy customers. If you look at the root-cause analysis (RCA) of quality issues and defects, you will find that most bugs could have been caught during the design and coding stages. In order to meet the tough quality criteria for SaaS products, we need to test early and test often. This movement towards testing early is what is being called “Shift Left”.

The Agile Scrum methodology suggests that small scrum teams are more effective in attaining their goals. Amazon’s two-pizza rule also highlights the benefits of smaller teams. The underlying principle is that small teams lead to better collaboration and more agility in execution. There is also a mathematical and social basis for the effectiveness of small teams. In this blog, we will explore the Dunbar numbers and see how these numbers related to the size and effectiveness of software development teams.

Have you come across a situation when you want to continue reading an interesting online article but do not have enough time? Have you felt the need to add a “reminder to read it later” and block out specific time on your calendar? If the answer to these questions is a Yes, then I will show a simple way to do this using Google Calendar. Before I give a step by step guide to adding a URL to Google Calendar, here are some details about the solution:

In the next installment of “What I learnt today” or WILT, I briefly touch upon Network Namespace. I came across Namespace as part of my ongoing study of OpenStack networking. Namespaces are powerful constructs in Linux that allows you to create a copy of the TCP/IP network stack -all the way from the Ethernet interfaces (L2), routing tables etc.

Most of us have “cloud storage” accounts to keep our important files backed up in a central location and yet be accessible across devices. But these accounts have limits unless you are willing to shell out more money. Also the network traffic for big files will eat up into your monthly broadband quota (especially in India). Therefore it is still common to have a “backup” store at home. Most people are probably using USB hard disk drives for this.

Like previous years, I want to continue the habit of sharing my goals around blogging and learning experiments. Clearly, this update for the first half of 2014 is already late. In addition, I did slip up on the important goals of 2013.

One of the biggest differentiation for various social networks is their usability. Let us look at some real world examples of how usability of social commenting can be improved with a simple solution.