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How Much of Debugging Software Is a Tester’s Responsibility? Everyone knows a tester's job is to help improve the quality of the software under test. But it gets a little murky when you try to define the boundary between testing and debugging. There's no clear delineation: Some testers would state how to reproduce the bug, write the report, and hand it off, while others learn the code, find the root cause, and even create builds to fix the bugs. How much is useful, and how much is too much?
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Testing to the Usability Standards Our Customers Expect Allowing minor defects to be included in releases impacts our customers’ perspective on software professionalism. We’ll never catch every weird, obscure bug, but there are some design elements where they tend to lurk. By focusing our testing efforts on these areas—or at least not neglecting them—we can catch more issues before our customers do.
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Getting Started with Business Intelligence Testing There’s a bit of hype in terms such as business intelligence, data analytics, and data mining. In testing terms, though, it means working with scripts and databases, often without traditional GUI interaction. But core testing skills—analysis, synthesis, modeling, observation, and risk assessment—will still help you go far in business intelligence testing.
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When the Code Is Too Obvious to Check How many times does something seem too obvious to check? Most of the time this normal human response is a handy shortcut. Your brain tries to save you time—but you can’t always trust it. If your code malfunctions, each of those "too obvious to check" thoughts will bias your thinking about what caused the malfunction. We have to commit up front, before our thinking crystalizes, that the code will have to prove to us that it is correct.
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To Be a Good Tester, Just Do What No One Else Can If you want to have a successful career in testing—and maybe even get beyond the day-to-day at the individual level, and improve the team or division—all you need to do is things no one else can. That means staying ahead as the industry moves on, which takes an intense and continuous investment in learning and practicing new things. Here are some suggestions for what that could look like.
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5 Things That Will Impact the Future of Software Testing From the way we look at software, evaluate risks, think about complexity, design our test approach and strategy, and help to release a stable product to the customer, technology has had an influence on how we test software. And that influence will only continue as technology advances. On a high level, here are five key things we’re already seeing that are going to shape the future of software testing.
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Lessons Learned in Testing CRM Software CRM systems manage a company’s business relationships, including customers’ data, information, and interactions, so there’s a lot that can—and should—be tested. Viktar Sachuk talks about his experience in testing CRMs to provide some tips for dealing with the trickiest parts of CRM testing, specifically focusing on some preparatory measures, functional testing, integration testing, and test automation.
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Solving Production Issues Using Testing Tools Standard web-monitoring tools can ping webpages and verify that they’re responding, but they don’t alert you to an issue. But you can use the technology in load testing to monitor your sites by running an interactive script that can detect issues and generate emails as needed. It runs constantly like a silent sentry, never sleeping or taking a vacation, improving your sites' reliability.
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The Who, What, When, and How of Pair Testing Pair testing can help you speed up your test assignment and provide more quality to your test results. But who can do pair testing, and when should they do it? And what kind of pair testing is best for your situation? This article gives you more information about how you should conduct pair testing in order to maximize its benefits.
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Designing Test Scenarios for Social Media Mobile Apps The definitive features of a mobile social app are the ability to send and receive messages, push notifications, and sharing media such as photos, audio, and videos. While creating a test strategy for such apps, cross-platform compatibility is an important consideration. Here are some scenarios you should include in your test strategy for a social media mobile app.
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