Articles

Timelapse photo of cars speeding down a road How to Accelerate Your Release Cycles with Agile Testing

With the traditional waterfall method of testing, achieving quality and faster time to market is difficult. Agile testing has emerged as an alternative, where development and testing take place simultaneously instead of operating in their respective silos. Let’s look at what it means to perform agile testing, what practices are necessary, and how agile testing can benefit your software releases.

Akshaya Choudhary's picture Akshaya Choudhary
Checkers game Teach DevOps Software Development with a Game

The core idea of DevOps is the various roles working together to create a stable software system. People can hear that, or read about it, or even observe it, but often, the best way for a team new to DevOps to understand it is to just do it. When you're starting out, that can lead to failures on a real system, so a simulation is a good idea. Try playing a game to introduce your team to DevOps.

Matt Heusser's picture Matt Heusser
Testing Requirements Redistributed Testing: A Shift to Refine Requirements

In short, redistributed testing is a shift in the emphasis and responsibility for testing. Testers are reassigned to work closer to the business with users or business analysts or are embedded in the development team.By being involved in story and scenario writing, the testers help to refine requirements and improve their quality. How could your systems benefit from redistributed testing?

Paul Gerrard's picture Paul Gerrard
Release Management—Making It Lean and Agile

Release management is an awesome responsibility that plays a vital role in the success of a software development project. Releasing is often considered to be an activity that happens near the end of the process—a necessary evil, perhaps, but no more.

Robert Cowham's picture Robert Cowham

Better Software Magazine Articles

Failed system update Reducing the Risk of Failed System Updates

As software applications become more powerful and complex, users are demanding seamless and automatic updates. There is nothing worse than a “bricked system” after a failed update. The selection of a reliable file system is a vital component of the software update process.

Thom Denholm's picture Thom Denholm
Do You Give Your Manager What She Wants or What She Needs?

High-stress situations arise when you have to respond to management's never-ending tough questions regarding product delivery. According to Johanna Rothman, you can properly set expectations without stress simply by understanding your manager's point of view.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
The Danger of Testing "Only" Stories

Finding defects late is a common issue when teams don't consider levels of precision or detail. You must take into account how stories and features fit into the system. In this FAQ column, Janet Gregory tells you how you should remember the big picture—even while testing the small stuff.

Janet Gregory's picture Janet Gregory

Interviews

Prathap Dendi discusses continuous delivery How Continuous Delivery Improves Mobile App Quality and Speed: An Interview with Prathap Dendi
Podcast

In this interview, Ship.io general manager Prathap Dendi explores continuous delivery and the explosion of mobile development. He explains how we've applied the lessons learned from mobile development elsewhere, plus the most exciting trends now and looking forward.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Mathew Bissett Testing Early and Often: An Interview with Matthew Bissett

In this interview, Matthew Bissett, the test manager responsible for the integration and testing of his area's flagship system for Her Majesty's Government, shares his thoughts with us on the importance of early testing in order to rapidly speed up software releases.

Noel Wurst's picture Noel Wurst

Conference Presentations

STAREAST 2018 Release Automation: Yes, Testers Should Care
Slideshow

Agile DevOps focuses on moving changes through the pipeline as quickly as possible, which means that more operational tasks—like software deployment—will occur earlier. As a result, testing teams will begin assuming more responsibility in managing those deployments in order to perfect reputability. Tracy Ragan provides an overview of release automation as it relates to testing and explains how automation is key to achieving faster and leaner testing cycles. She discusses why deploying new code across diverse environments can be really tricky and slow, and how properly implemented release automation will streamline code deployments across the lifecycle. Release automation may sound like a topic important to production control teams, but as processes are shifted left, testing teams will take on more responsibility in continuous deployment and associated infrastructure components.

Tracy Ragan
An Interview with Sanjiv Augustine: ADC-BSW 2013 Interview Series
Video

Committed to covering the latest trends and approaches for anyone investigating or implementing agile development practices, processes, technologies, and leadership principles, Agile Development & Better Software Conference West offers their 2013 interview series. 

Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Reduce Release Cycle Time: Nine Months to a Week - Nice!
Slideshow

Picture this scene from three years ago: Employing the corporately mandated processes, a software engineering team is delivering system updates about once every nine months. When their senior user suddenly demands the next delivery in twenty-two weeks-half the current cycle duration-the team realize that they must quickly change development practices. Mathew Bissett describes how Her Majesty's Government did precisely that-and much, much more. First, they reduced delivery cycles from unpredictable dates every nine months to predictable releases every six weeks. Then, they cut releases cycle time to once every week. By identifying and mitigating risks early in the work intake process, enforcing quality gates, executing multiple test levels concurrently-and more-they dramatically increased throughput with the same or better quality. Today, these new processes provide their teams the best balance of structure versus agility.

Mathew Bissett, UK Government
STARWEST 2012 Keynote: State-of-the-Art Cloud Testing: Experiences with Bing Search
Video

The cloud is penetrating every technology organization and almost every software product or service. The cloud affects everything inside development, bringing profound changes to how engineers build, test, release, and maintain software and systems.

Ken Johnston, Microsoft

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