Articles
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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. |
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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. |
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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? |
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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. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
Interviews
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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. |
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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. |
Conference Presentations
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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
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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
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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
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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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Recommended Web Seminars
| On Demand | Building Confidence in Your Automation |
| On Demand | Leveraging Open Source Tools for DevSecOps |
| On Demand | Five Reasons Why Agile Isn't Working |
| On Demand | Building a Stellar Team |
| On Demand | Agile Transformation Best Practices |
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