Thanksgiving

Take a break from your pie and your turkey this week and catch up with these posts from our authors below.

The Software Toolchain: A Definition With Clear Examples

Historically, software development moved slowly. Companies might ship out a new suite of tools once a year—and that’s only if they were lucky. Fast-forward to today, and software developers face a whole new challenge. Today’s leading organizations are increasingly embracing the DevOps approach to software development. As a result, engineers now need to ship software updates frequently. Meeting the DevOps demand for velocity, however, requires a robust set of tools. Find out more from Justin Reynolds on Plutora’s blog.

AWS Lambda is a way to run code without thinking about servers. But even though you may not have to think about servers, you do have to think about how you program for AWS Lambda. You see, AWS Lambda—not to be confused with Java lambdas—is a stateless runtime environment. And on Scalyr’s blog, you can find out how to create AWS Lambda functions with Java. Learn more from Phil Vuollet here.

What Is a Data Quality Audit? Ensuring Your Data Integrity

Companies maintain huge volumes of data. This data may contain codes, test data, and financial information as well as a customer database. However, maintaining this data can be costly. This is because for storing huge data you have to get the services of a data center. The worst case being you may have many pieces of unused data like former customer information, for example. You may also have archived audit reports, which are no longer of any use. But how do you check what kind of data is useful and what isn’t? The answer is by carrying out a data quality audit. Find out more from Arnab Chowdhury on DataOps’s blog.

Test Automation Pyramid: A Simple Strategy for Your Tests

Does your development team spend too much time waiting on their test suite to run? Do they constantly rerun the test suite after failing tests because “rerunning magically fixes it”? If your developers have these problems, there’s a good chance their test suite doesn’t follow the test automation pyramid. And here’s your chance to learn about the test automation pyramid from JT Wheeler on Testim’s blog.

Your Essential TEM Checklist

“Test Environment Management Checklist.” Yep, that sounds like a mouthful, but don’t let that discourage you. The idea here is quite simple—adopting a checklist to evaluate the soundness of your test environment management approach. Even though the idea sounds simple enough, the execution won’t necessarily be as smooth. There are lots of potential questions. What should the items on this checklist be? Who’s responsible for authoring and maintaining it? Even the definition of “test environment management” might be fuzzy. But Carlos Schults can help you with your checklist on Enov8’s blog.

AWS Fargate Monitoring

As companies evolve from a monolithic architecture to microservice architecture, some common challenges often surface that companies must address during the journey. And Samuel James is here to discuss one of these challenges: observability and how to do it in AWS Fargate. Find out more on Stackify’s blog.

Visual Studio Extensions: 7 You Should Check Out

If you’ve been a .NET developer for any reasonable amount of time, then you’re surely aware of what Visual Studio extensions are. If you haven’t, well, they’re pretty much what it says in the name: pieces of software (plugins, if you will) that you can add to your Visual Studio IDE to extend its capabilities. And Carlos Schults’s post for SubMain’s blog features a list of seven extensions that are worth your time. Check it out here.

Spring AOP Tutorial With Examples

You may have heard of aspect-oriented programming, or AOP, before. Or maybe you haven’t heard about it but have come across it through a Google-search rabbit hole. You probably do use Spring, however. So you’re probably curious how to apply this AOP to your Spring application. Luckily, Mark Henke is here to tell you what AOP is and break down its key concepts with some simple examples. Find out more on Stackify’s blog.

Agile Methodologies: How They Fit Into Data Science Processes

Agile methodologies are a set of frameworks that help manage projects in an iterative fashion. These methods focus on communication and getting products out there, instead of spending months on gathering requirements. This software development framework creates opportunities for teams to constantly assess their project’s direction in the development cycle. There are many different examples of agile methodologies. This includes Scrum, Kanban, and extreme programming (XP). Ben Rogojan is here on ASPE’s blog to introduce how these frameworks can play a role in your next data science project.

What Is MTTF? Mean Time to Failure Explained in Detail

“What is MTTF?” That’s the question Carlos Schults is here to answer for you. Yep, the article’s title makes it evident that the acronym stands for “mean time to failure.” But that, on its own, doesn’t say anything. What does “mean time to failure” actually mean? Why should you care? Find out more on XPLG’s blog.

What Is a Content Security Policy (CSP) and Why Is it Important?

Trust is the fundamental currency of the internet. You trust your service provider that they’ll continue to maintain your internet access. Your developers trust your architecture provider when they say that your servers will stay up. Customers trust that you’re safely securing your data. They also trust that when they visit your website, what they’re seeing is what you want them to see. A common attack vector against public websites is injecting content which claims to be from that website. Luckily, you can visit Sqreen’s blog and learn from Eric Boersma about tools to protect you from these attacks. 

Change Advisory Board (CAB) and Release Management: The Connection

We also updated a few posts, like this one on CAB. For mature organizations, change management is a critical process. The business relies on software operating correctly to perform critical business functions. They also rely on software updates. Whether those updates bring shiny new features or critical security updates, the business needs them. The business also needs to ensure those updates don’t break existing business functions. The process of ensuring that a software update doesn’t break business functions is called change management. Learn more about change management on Plutora’s blog.

QA Environments: Why Do You Need So Many?

Here’s another we updated on QA environments. Test environment managers are often asked to audit everything. If there is a question about budgets they need to quickly identify opportunities to reallocate infrastructure and environments. Hardware is expensive, and resources are limited so when a business looks at the numbers and asks, “Why do we spend so much on hardware?” it means that CTOs and CIOs are asked to scrutinize spend quickly. As technology improved over the years some organizations have adopted tools and systems that can automate the creation of this environment inventory, but in many companies, this is still a manual process. Find out more about QA environments here on Plutora’s blog.

Test Environment Management Best Practices

Finally, we updated a post on test environments. If you have operated a software system that saves anything, you’ve probably dealt with test environments. When preparing for a launch many concerns about these environments, normally hidden, come forth. You may hear things like “please don’t deploy to staging, some clients are load testing on it” or “can you refresh the user data so that our consumer can regression test on it?” These sorts of requests come through ad-hoc communications, like Slack and e-mail. Learn more about the importance of an efficient and reliable test environment management process in supporting application on Plutora’s blog.