Some people believe branching and pull requests are inherently bad. True, branching done poorly can slow down a team, but advocating for avoiding branching altogether can lead you to ignore the more important goal of an agile process: rapid integration of changes. First, make sure you're considering the right metrics.

With a week full of sessions, tutorials, training classes, and events, the Agile + DevOps East software conference had plenty of takeaways. Here are four highlights, including discussions about agile estimation, finding your ideal job, some challenges to advancing test automation, and leading self-organizing teams.

Since the inception of load testing, the approach has been mostly the same: simulate the traffic of an application by creating load at the API level. But there have been market shifts that make load testing with browser-level users more feasible—allowing us to test with real load and measure true user performance.