Best Practice | Read the latest blogs, news and views from Infomentum. (2)

COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down. Just a few weeks ago, companies had to quickly transition all employees to work remotely. As businesses and people are gradually adjusting to the new circumstances and realising the benefits of working from home, many predict that this operation model is here to stay far beyond the crisis. 

At Infomentum we have successfully moved towards a centralised logged infrastructure where systems, application, network and security logs are parsed and made available in one central point. Using components such as Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, our logging infrastructure provides us the ability to apply filters to perform queries and basic trends analysis or counts.

One of the challenges we faced was shipping Windows Server logs from a logfile onto Logstash’s syslog listener, and we found a tool that does exactly that - nxlog-ce-2.9.1716

Part 2: Implementation

In Part 1, we talked about picking the tools for our first foray into the world of headless Content Management System (CMS) architectures, during our project with Fudgelearn. We had other options on our radar, but we decided that WordPress was the CMS that fit in best with our requirements. These were the main ones:

Web development is accelerating at an incredible rate - new frameworks seem to pop up every day. Whilst this is exciting (at least to a front-end geek like me!), it can be difficult knowing which new tools are any good and which ones you should be using.

In my last article, The evolution of test documentation; lessons learned from implementing Cucumber, I explained two things. Firstly, how we at Infomentum have adopted Behaviour-Driven Development to define test scenarios, and secondly, how we use Cucumber JVM as an implementation platform for running these scenarios as automated tests.

The old way

I'm going to let you in on a secret. I learnt my trade in a traditional software testing consultancy - I'm talking a waterfall approach to test planning, test case definition and test scripting. Over the last 5 years at Infomentum, I've evolved and have worked hard to optimise Infomentum's testing practices to suit our agile development environment. 

Wait: you need to read part 1 and part 2 first!

The fun side of cultural change

You’ll remember that last week I discussed the crucial need for a cultural change in how we dealt with time logging. After the CX team’s thorough research, we were ready to take the findings – and our ideas – to our board of directors. 

Hint: you'll need to read part 1 first for this post to make sense.

Phase 2: Imagine

The CX team got together to discuss the problems and carry out an internal ideation workshop to tackle them. We knew that we had 3 key tasks:

• Improve people’s knowledge of why time logging is important
• Create a culture of time logging as a habit; and
• Make the systems they needed to use simpler and clearer while having less of them!

I’ve wanted to write something about Infomentum's scrum board since its inception in late 2012. Now seemed as good a time as any to share the story...

During an end of sprint retrospective, one of our developers Jakub said “I'm bored of the board.” That didn’t surprise me.

Wait! Have you read 'What are microservices' blog posts part 1 and part 2? You need to cover those out before reading on.

When it comes to microservices, the million dollar question is: “How do I decompose my monolith into microservices?”. Well, as you can imagine this can be done in many ways, and here I will be suggesting some guidelines.