Letter to the City Council of Austin, Texas, in appreciation for action taken this week in response to both the killings of George Floyd and others at the hands of police, and the heavy-handed tactics employed against peaceful protestors.

Should bugs and spikes receive story points to aid in sprint capacity planning? Some teams will estimate all work items by time during sprint planning in order to find the right commitment. Many teams hate this and/or spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about time. Those that abandon time may be tempted to put points on these unplanned, non-productive items, but there is a cost: the completed velocity will overstate the projected release timeline for the remainder of the release backlog.

Motivation

Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the principle of configuring systems through code instead of mouse clicks (cf Packer Tips and Lessons Learned for another example). TeamCity, the popular continuous-integration (CI) server from JetBrains, enables IaC through writing scripts to interact with its REST API, or by storing projects settings in version control. This article will share some lessons learned in using the Kotlin DSL for project settings. These will include:

Soon the Ed-Fi Alliance will release version 2.0 of our Analytics Middle Tier, welcoming it to the “big kids’ table” as a fully supported add-on to the ODS.

Spurred on by the goal of giving a brown bag tech talk on the subjects of test-driven development and SOLID object oriented design principles, I’ve finally collected all of the “wisdom” I’ve learned over the years into one place: Best Practices in Test-Driven, Object Oriented, Green- and Brownfield Development. I plan to keep this as a living document, adding or modifying as I continue to deepen my knowledge through feedback, study, and further experiments.

Entity Framework Core has a few changes that impact unit testing, particularly with respect to EntityEntry.State management. My previous unit testing techniques also did not take into account the use of async methods. In this article I’ll present a few techniques used in the context of a POC exploration of IdentityServer4. Although .NET Core 3 is now fully available, these examples are based on .NET Core 2.2.

The most popular request at the 2018 Ed-Fi Summit’s tech town hall was for an option to run the Ed-Fi ODS / API on an open source database solution. Historically, the Operational Data Store (ODS) database has been developed on Microsoft SQL Server, matching the preference of educational agencies that rely on heavily discounted licensing terms for on-premises operation of SQL Server. The advent of cloud-based hosting has changed that dynamic, especially since Microsoft ended the “bring your own license” (BYOL) practice.

In Making a Mockery of Extension Methods - way back in 2014 - I wrote about a technique for a code workaround that would facilitate replacing extension methods (global static methods) with mock objects for unit testing. Over the years I’ve used this technique a few times and found two major problems:

If data lands in the ODS and no one uses it, does it empower educators?