testing

Articles

Estimation Roller Coaster

The estimation roller coaster can provide an unwelcome burst of adrenaline to an otherwise smoothly running project. Adapting estimates over time lets you plan and deliver value at a sustainable pace.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
Weekend Testing Comes to the Americas

Inspired by the success of India’s Weekend Testing movement, Michael Larsen saw a need for a group closer to home. The Weekend Testing Americas chapter invites testers from across the Western Hemisphere to join an informal, distributed group of their tester peers to learn and perfect their craft.

Michael Larsen's picture Michael Larsen
Fuzzing Through the Side Door

Fuzz testing, or "fuzzing,” is an approach to test automation that attempts to uncover weaknesses in a system using tool-generated data. In this article, Jonathan Kohl recounts how he used this technique on a published web services interface to test “through the side door”—those testable, in-between areas like messaging APIs.

Jonathan Kohl's picture Jonathan Kohl
Thoughts from Mid-Project

My team is in the middle of one of the hardest projects—we call them "themes"—we’ve ever tackled. We’re a high-functioning agile team that has helped our company grow and succeed over several years now—we “went agile” in 2003. Here’s one thing I know for sure: No matter how many problems you solve, new challenges will pop up.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
The Impact of Automation on Development

If you're thinking of introducing test automation to your process, you may have a plan for how it will affect your testers. But what about the development side of things? In this article, Linda Hayes takes a look at how automation changes the relationship between test and development organizations and offers a way to handle it.

Linda Hayes's picture Linda Hayes
Acceptance Testing: What It is and How To Do It Better-In Context

When test engineers use the term "acceptance testing," they might be saying and thinking profoundly different things. Acceptance testing can mean one of at least a dozen approaches to the testing of a product and serve one or more of at least thirty different customer roles in a project. Tests and testing approaches that are appropriate in one context can be unacceptable - even disastrous - in another. When someone asks you to do user acceptance testing, what should you do? When should you do it? How do you determine success? Michael Bolton outlines the ways in which testers and test managers use context-driven thinking to better serve the mission of acceptance testing and develop skills to handle dramatically different testing situations.

Michael Bolton's picture Michael Bolton
Channeling Your Inner Salesperson

You might think of salespeople as workers in a very distant part of your organization, but there's probably a need for one much closer than that—maybe even at your own desk. As Linda Hayes explains in this article, if you want to win or keep a project, you might just need to try channeling your inner salesperson.

Linda Hayes's picture Linda Hayes
Getting to Know Conformiq CEO Antti Huima

Antti Huima is president and CEO of Conformiq. In this interview, he discusses what brought him to where he is now, his company's strategy, and his current interests.

Suzanne Douglas
We're All in the Same Boat

Lisa Crispin dives into the "we're all in the same boat" theory and explains how it can't be more true in the software development world. From the need for common goals to going beyond taking responsibility for the team's actions, each team must know that you're going to fail or succeed together.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
Transitioning to Agile Testing

Your developers are already working feature-by-feature in iterations, but your testers are stuck with manual tests. How do you make the leap to agile testing when the nature of agile's iterative releases challenges testers to test working segments of a product instead of the complete package? In this column, Johanna Rothman explains that the key challenge resides in bringing the whole team together to work towards the completion of an iteration. Only then will the testers—and the entire team—know how to transition to agile.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman

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