I have been a scrum master twice. The first time was in 2019, but I wasn't satisfied with my work. Fortunately, there came another chance in 2020. This is a story about that second stint as a scrum master, and how I improved our work with three principles.
Author: Lassi Autio
Pull Request Checks to Next Level with Deploys
In the previous blog post I wrote about pull request builds to help keeping the master branch clean. This time I wrote about one level higher check that can be used in Azure DevOps: pull request deploys. We deploy to a temporary site from the pull request and run some integration/UI tests against it. If it doesn't pass, merge can't be done.
Build Already in Pull Request and Builds Won’t Fail
Usually we have builds against the master branch. It is good but now and then builds fail and we have to fix the code. Better way would be to find errors before that. Pull request builds help with that. That way the build pipeline will be one of the "reviewer" in the pull request and doesn't pass the pull request if the build fails. In this blog post I will demontstrate how this can be done in Azure DevOps with Azure Repos.
Azure App Service Settings Task by Microsoft for Azure DevOps
Recently I found this Azure DevOps task by Microsoft to maintain Azure app services' appsettings. It is quite new (only 22 days old) and still in preview. In this blog post I have tried to use it and also give some hints how to manage appsettings from Azure DevOps.
The Evil of Multi-Tasking
Multi-tasking is an evil that reduces our effectiveness. It is true for developers but also for teams. In this blog post, I demonstrate this with the newsletter mailing simulation. It visualizes why multi-tasking takes more time than doing one task at a time. Stop starting, start finishing, and beat the evil of multi-tasking.
C# Code Coverage with Azure DevOps
I wrote this how-to blog post for myself to sort out how to get code coverage for C# in Azure DevOps' build pipelines. There are many blog posts about this but this one guides how to get reports even if there are many unit test projects in Visual Studio solution.
Why We Should Estimate with Story Points, Not Ideal Days?
We usually estimate with ideal days. But we shouldn't because estimating with story points is faster and more accurate. That is not just my feeling, researches tell also so. In this blog post, I've written the reasons for it.
Summary of 2019 – What Did I Learn?
Even if it is already the end of January I still want to summary my past year. After one year at the latest, it is nice to read for yourself how 2019 went and compare it to 2020. Keywords about what I did and learned most in 2019 are Azure, Azure DevOps, and scrum master.
Mock Object Vocabulary
We often talk about mocks, even if should use more precise terms like stub, fake and mock. Correct term for these is test double. In this blog post I introduce these different test doubles with code examples.
Test Automation Pyramid
Unit tests are a powerful and crucial part of programming. But it isn't enough if we want to know better if our code works. Complementing unit tests with service-level/integration and UI/end-to-end tests will make us know that our code really works. The test automation pyramid tells what is the good ratio between different tests.