These are a set of guidelines that helps everyone to play nice and fair while communicating especially on mediums like Slack, Teams or Mattermost be it at your workplace or other online communities. Remember, while we are communicating over these mediums, neither our body language nor our voice is heard by other individuals who are reading our messages. This requires us to put in an effort while writing replies or initiating new conversations. Direct vs Indirect Messages Always try to avoid direct usage of english. They might find your directness rude and possibly offensive. By adjusting your tone, you are more likely to get a positive response from your reader. Consider these: Direct – You are doing it wrong. Indirect and polite – The way it is being done might not be the right way. Do you mind checking it once? Direct – You are using a non standard practice. You need to follow the steps as documented. Indirect – I’m afraid that what is being followed might not be the standard practic...

Why is that many leaders still don’t get what is story point based estimation? An attempt to explain the basics. What Are Story Points? Story point is a relative value of the size of a story in comparison with another story. For a team we can have multiple such base stories to ease estimation as every team member might not be aware of every type of work. The absolute values we assign are unimportant and what matters is only the relative values. What Values To Use For Story Points? In practice, we can use the fibonacci series (pronounced as fibi-no-chi), which takes these values - 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 What If The Story Point is Higher Than 13? That indicates that the story is actually too big to be handled as a single item. Discuss and work with the product owner and split into multiple stories as functional slices. Do not split into pieces like "Write Code" and "Testing" as two different stories. That introduces waterfall into Scrum. Who Does Story Point Estimates? ...

Many times we get greeted by just Hi or Hey messages from our colleagues and friends in our various messaging systems. Be it Slack, Mattermost, Teams, Hangouts or whatever messaging systems that you use. This is one of the most irritating (sorry to use that word, couldn’t find a subtle one), messages that you can ever receive. Messaging systems are meant for asynchronous messages. Expecting that the person at the other end of the conversation is always available to answer the hi/hey messages is too much of an expectation. Remember messaging someone is NOT like making a phone call. You cannot expect an immediate response there. Follow these simple etiquettes next time you message your friend or colleague. Write the complete content that you are planning to ask the person in a single message (as much as possible) May be you can start with a Hi, but make sure it is a multi-line message with the actual content. There is nothing more irritating than receiving 10 notifications in the mobile ...

I am not the original author of this post’s contents. I recently found this email reply from John Mitchell while discussing the testing aspects of micro services in our project. It is so informative that I didn't want this to get lost in emails. Adding this here. (Names have been changed to keep the focus on the topic under discussion) Hi PersonA, I think our discussions about the Quality Criteria were pretty clear… And to be even more precise, they must be able to be automatically run as part of the appropriate phases in the pipeline. APIs Message / file formats, etc. UI’s which they provide Telemetry which they generate for business/application/operation/etc. monitoring/alerting/tracking/etc. Martin’s slide that you point ed is no excuse to get out of any of the above. He’s pointing out, as I did, that false metrics such as “code coverage” percentages are misleading and inefficient ways to measure actual quality of the software (as opposed to trying to force the team to spend t...

GCViewer developed by Tagtraum Industries is one of the free tools that you can use to visually analyse the garbage collection logs. Running GCViewer The latest version is now maintained by chewiebug and available for download at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gcviewer/files/ Download the gcviewer-x.xx.jar to your local system Launch the viewer by running java -jar path_to_gcviewer-x.xx.jar You need Java version >= 1.7 Using GCViewer Open the GC log file from the test run using GCViewer Adjust the zoom levels (dropdown at the top) so that the graph fits the window and there are no scroll bars (to get an overview) Check the trend of the 'Total Heap' usage of the VM. As long as it does not show an upward trend, VM is considered to be fine. Check the right side of the tool for the information related to the run - Summary, Memory and Pause. Summary 'Number of full gc pauses' are of concern and healthy VM should not generally be doing a full GC (which means it should i...

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I would like to share an excellent write-up by the JIRA Agile Product Manager from Atlassian Shawn Clowes . This was written a while ago, but the depth and detail present in this reply from Shawn for one of the questions in the Answers site still amazes us. This was his explanation about time estimates and story points in the agile context. Here it goes: I'd like to provide a full explanation of why we we've offered 'Original Time Estimate' as an 'Estimate' value and not 'Remaining Estimate'. Some of my discussion refers to agile concepts that anyone reading probably knows well but I've included it because the context is important. Note that the discussion refers to the best practices we've implemented as the main path in GreenHopper, you can choose not to use this approach if you feel it's really not suitable. Estimation is separate from Tracking In Scrum there is a distinction between estimation and tracking. Estimation is typically perform...

 

What is Popchrom and Where To Get It Save time and effort with Popchrom by creating your own shortcuts for text phrases! Whether it's a simple email signature or… To transform your abbreviation place the cursor on it and hit your personal shortcut (default is 'ctrl + space'). Get Popchrom What is Lazarus and Where To Get It Lazarus Form Recovery is a free browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome and Safari that autosaves everything you type into any given web-form. We've all had the frustrating experience of spending ages getting a form entry just right, only to suffer rage and disgust when all that hard work is destroyed, whether it's a website timeout, a browser crash, a network failure, or just a cat wandering across the keyboard. Lazarus makes recovering from such mishaps painless in most cases, and we're working on the rest of them! UPDATE: Lazarus is withdrawn and now we have Typio

  Most times we are in a situation to rollback the database to a good known state before starting our tests (LQ/BQ/Whatever Tests). An  old article directly from Oracle   suggests the following method: To quote from the same: Restore Points Jane proceeds to demonstrate how to use restore points, starting with an example of how Paul's QA team can benefit from this technique. Jane creates a restore point named qa_gold. create restore point qa_gold; This command, Jane reminds them, is new in Oracle Database 10 g  Release 2. It creates a named restore point, which is an alias to the system change number (SCN) of the database at that time. Jane runs one of the QA team's tests, altering the test data. To flash back the database to the restore point she created, Jane shuts down the database, restarts it in mounted mode, and issues the flashback database command. shutdown immediate; startup mount; flashback database to restore point qa_gold; That's it; the database is now "r...