quality management

Articles

Score being shown at a baseball game More Than a Score: Taking a Deeper Dive into Your Metrics

One key benefit of metrics is that they can be measured using a standard process; we can explain the numbers, and leadership can understand what that means. The downside is that it is only a measurement, so issues can easily hide until they become problems, and great work can also go unrepresented. Sporting events are a great example: The end score tells you who won, but not the details of the game. We need to look deeper.

Nels Hoenig's picture Nels Hoenig
"Wrong Way" road sign To Get Quality Software, Let Them Fail

As an advocate for quality, you look at the product, take into account time, budget, and other business constraints, and recommend fixes to ship a product with the best possible quality. ... And the businesspeople in production don’t want to fix it. How can you communicate bugs and risk to people who don't want to listen? Instead of getting frustrated, you need to frame issues in a meaningful way—and, if you have to, let people fail.

Matt Heusser's picture Matt Heusser
Identical bugs under a magnifying glass When Testers Should Consider a Bug a Duplicate

When can a bug report be considered redundant because it is already reported in the bug management system? If you ask the developers, if two bugs are caused by the same mistake in the code, it’s enough to report one of them. But Michael Stahl has good arguments from a tester's perspective about why it's better to err on the side of over-reporting bugs.

Michael Stahl's picture Michael Stahl
Testing code Hybrid Verification: Mixing Formal Methods and Testing

The ability to verify contracts either statically or dynamically, coupled with recent advances in proof technology, has opened up a new and promising approach to verification. Critical code can be proved with formal methods, and less critical code can be verified using traditional testing, with a clear separation at the interfaces between the two.

Ben Brosgol's picture Ben Brosgol

Better Software Magazine Articles

Achieving Continuous Improvement and Innovation in Software

There is tremendous pressure on software development teams to deliver software faster, better, and cheaper. Quality engineering with a focus on innovation is the answer

Michael Sowers's picture Michael Sowers
handstand The Power of Thinking Upside Down

Software developers can become bogged down trying to keep up with agile process and procedures. Get better results by rethinking your approach to balancing focus, agility, management, and testing.

Paul McMahon's picture Paul McMahon
Quality Assurance Is a Process, Not a Department

QA is often considered that lonely department of testers whose job is to find defects before the customer does. It's not always glamorous, but QA deserves to be recognized as a key cog in the testing  machine. To achieve business goals, it is Susan Bradley's view that the QA process needs to be embraced throughout the entire software development lifecycle.

Susan Bradley's picture Susan Bradley
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

Amir Rozenberg Implementing Digital Transformation: An Interview with Amir Rozenberg
Video

In this interview, Amir Rozenberg, director of product management at Perfecto Mobile, says the success of a business depends on taking advantage of web apps that improve and simplify the customer experience, addressing options that will yield a successful implementation.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Sam Kaufman Why Bug Reporting Is More Important than Ever Before: An Interview with Sam Kaufman

In this interview, Sam Kaufman, the founder and CTO of BugReplay, explains why most teams don’t put enough emphasis on bug reporting—even though agile and DevOps have made it even more important than before. He also details where DevOps can improve and where he sees it in five years.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Annette Ash Motivate and Inspire Software Quality Goals: An Interview with Annette Ash
Video

In this interview, Annette Ash, a coach and trainer with SolutionsIQ, talks about the dirty term in the room: quality metrics. She reveals whether tracking metrics is beneficial, what it accomplishes, and what should be tracked with regards to software quality.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Effective Software Quality Management The Blueprint for Effective Software Quality Management: An Interview with Neeraj Tripathi

In this interview, Neeraj Tripathi, vice president of Global QA at Infor, goes over the principles of effective software quality management. He explains how to measure customer satisfaction and how active QA involvement eliminates defects early and shifts quality left.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin

Conference Presentations

STARCANADA 2019 Enabling Enterprise Quality
Slideshow

Too often quality is identified as solely owned by the quality assurance team. By taking a broader approach to roles, tools, and ideology, you can restructure your vision of how to provide rapid, frequent releases that empower all delivery team members.

Mike Cullen
Scaling Quality through Community Leadership
Slideshow

Modern software development organizations often build teams around features. Unfortunately, these teams tend to become siloed, building tools and processes without being aware of how other teams have solved the same problems.

Philip Daye
STAREAST Disrupt Your Career and Discover True Quality Engineering
Slideshow

One of the best things Melissa Tondi did for her career was disrupt it.

Melissa Tondi
STARCANADA Ditch Your Bug-Tracking Tool: 3 Solid Tactics to Minimize Bug Counts
Slideshow

A bug-free product release is an ideal that testers, developers, and project managers strive for, but when it comes to the go/no-go decision, the balance is often struck between "good" and "good enough," leaving behind a rotting to-do pile in the bug-tracking tool that is rarely acted upon...

Jerry Penner

StickyMinds is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.