scrum.org

Whilst looking for a course that would allow me to get some professional recognition for my scrum knowledge, I came across scrum.org. Scrum.org was founded c.2010 by Ken Schwaber, one of the original founders of the scum alliance. He resigned from the alliance in 2009 to pursue his belief that a transformation was required in the way the principles and fundamentals of scrum were delivered to users of scrum. There is more about that here.

Scrum.org offers a number of different training and assessment packages with several that are tailored towards developers, focusing on the core engineering practices that developers and scrum masters really need to understand to be successful in a scrum environment.

For more information on scrum visit:

http://www.scrum.org

http://www.scrumalliance.org/

http://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/ 

and have a read of Henrik Kniberg’s Scrum and xp from the trenches:

http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

blazemeter - JMeter cloud testing

I've been using Apache's performance test tool JMeter for many years now, but struggle to find enough time and resource to create a decent distributed network of JMeter engines that can simulate large and realistic load. Today I stumbled upon http://blazemeter.com/ which allows just that. Its a cloud based performance test service that gives you access to multiple instances of JMeter that are geographically distributed on a variety of different server types.

To use blazemeter you either upload your own JMeter scripts or give blazemeter a url and let it write the script for you, you then create your scenarios before finally executing your test. Blazemeter has many great features, including some detailed analysis and test management capabilities that make this a compelling option when it comes to investing in performance testing.

Blazemeter operates a similar business model to browsermob.com (now Neustar Web Performance), where you pay for the number of test engines, different server types, on demand usage, etc.

There is a comprehensive free trial available that will allow you to experiment with features and tests for a couple of weeks.

For more information on JMeter visit http://jmeter.apache.org/.