Have some downtime on your hands? Need a distraction? Check out what our authors have been covering this week in our digest below.

Lean Portfolio Management: Everything You Need to Know

Managing projects in an agile team isn’t an easy task. Whether it’s SAFe, LeSS, or scrum, the idea is to make the team’s goals easily achievable. But what’s the point of easily achievable goals if they don’t meet clients’ needs or aren’t conducive for teams? How, then, do you make sure that your teams complete clients’ jobs at the right time, with the right technology—while also creating a positive environment for the team members? Find out more from Ukpai Ugochi on Plutora’s blog.

Column-oriented databases have seen a resurgence in interest in recent years. The first column-oriented databases appeared decades ago. However, they have never gained a lot of traction in the market. In recent years, though, big data and cloud computing spurred a new interest in these types of databases. The reason for this is that the unique implementation of columnar databases fits surprisingly well into the workloads and applications run in cloud computing. Learn more from Alexander Fridman on Scalyr’s blog.

Service Ownership: What It Really Means and How to Achieve It

Years ago, end-to-end software development involved dividing tasks based on where they fell in the system life cycle. One team wrote the code. Then another team deployed it to production. And yet another team monitored and maintained the service. This led to a lot of friction, needless handoffs, and bottlenecks. Then DevOps came to the rescue, promising to reduce handoffs and improve operations. But without the missing ingredient of service ownership, DevOps won’t be as powerful as it could be. Now, what does it mean to own a service? And how can we support this organizational pattern within our teams? Sylvia Fronczak can answer these and more on OpsLevel’s blog. 

We also updated a few posts recently. In the larger universe of monitoring, HTTP monitor belongs to the category known as synthetic monitoring. That means that, unlike real-user monitoring, synthetic monitoring solutions simulate interactions with the website or app in an automatic way. Find out more on Scalyr’s blog.

CIS 20 Overview and What Not to Miss

We also updated a post on CIS. The CIS is an organization formed with the mission to “identify, develop, validate, promote, and sustain best practice solutions for cyber defense and build and lead communities to enable an environment of trust in cyberspace.” Their free resources aid organizations in identifying places where their own security postures fall short. Learn more on Sqreen’s blog.

What is a Test Automation Tool? Definition and How to Choose One for You

Are you familiar with the term “test automation tool?” If you’re not, you’ve definitely come to the right place. In this post, we’ll define test automation tools, explain why test automation is a worthwhile investment for tech organizations, and share some tips on how to choose the test automation tool that’s best for you. But what exactly is a test automation tool? Find out more on Testim’s blog.