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What to Do When You Find Yourself Overloaded As much as you might want to multitask, there is a limit to how much work in progress can be handled at once. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed—whether due to your own commitments or because management keeps piling on more projects—assess the situation and see what you can do to improve your condition without letting your work suffer.
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How Collaboration Changes the Way Testers Think It can be easy for testers to get into the mindset that they are the “Quality Police” solely in charge of when a product gets released. But when you share responsibility, ask questions, and talk to developers, customers, and stakeholders, you can really expand as a tester. Lisa Crispin details how collaboration has helped her grow.
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Clean Up Your Bug Tracker and Keep Numbers Manageable A good team likely is trained to consistently report defects as accurately and promptly as possible. This means that over time the bug backlog builds up, and looking for what bugs to fix starts to seem like searching for a needle in a haystack. The best way to keep your tracker under control is to improve the quality curve earlier.
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What Your High School Basketball Coach Can Teach You about Teamwork If a team is going to be a winner, players need to trust one another and learn how to work together. Just as your high school basketball coach made everyone work on team-building drills before you could develop your own personal skills, software teams also have to collaborate in order to succeed.
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A Tester among Developers: Life beyond the Code Tester Anastasia Kotsevich got the chance to work side by side with her company’s coders. This experience opened her eyes to some problems she wasn’t aware of before, and some solutions: designating a common team goal and opening clear lines of communication.
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Crowdsourced Testing Lets Your Apps “Go Wild” It simply isn’t feasible to test every possible user scenario with a new app, and the testers who already know how the app should perform can't approach using it the same way as someone unfamiliar with the process. Enter crowdsourced testing, where you gather a customizable pool of people from outside your organization to test your apps for defects and usability.
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Managing Acceptance Criteria Plans Some of the hardest and most crucial instances in any project execution are the user acceptance test phases. But having a thorough and clearly documented process for evaluating acceptance and exit criteria that you previously agreed on with the end-user will help you handle expectations and plan on results.
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8 Simple Ways to Improve Distributed QA Teams Geographically distributed QA teams and the challenges that they face are a common and ongoing topic in the software development world. In this article, Kevin Wilson focuses attention on eight simple solutions that can help maximize the effectiveness of your distributed QA team.
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Avoid Becoming a Lonely Cowboy Performance Tester In the Wild West movies, the cowboys do not typically have a lot of friends; they follow no rules but their own, and their way of settling an issue is by shooting each other. In the wild world of software performance testing, without the support from people around and above you, it will be impossible to get anything done. You don’t have to be a lonely cowboy.
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Are We Being Innovative Yet? While becoming a more innovative organization is not complicated, it requires more than brainstorming sessions and creativity exercises. It’s about putting ideas into action. Kenton Bohn and Ryan McClish discuss how to build a workplace culture that empowers employees to try on new ways of thinking and follow their creative instincts.
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