teams

Articles

Building the Right Culture Within Your SQA Team

The concept for development teams in a scrum environment is to be self-organizing, basically managing themselves and holding each other accountable. This poses the question: What do QA managers do with their time? For me, it’s always been about building the right culture—respecting those under you just as much as you respect those above you. It is about finding a way to manage your team without being directly involved with them.

Daniel Garay's picture Daniel Garay
Using a Shared, Centrally Managed QA Environment vs. an Individual Environment: Benefits, Drawbacks, and Personal Experience

Oleksandra Melnikova discusses the benefits and drawbacks of using shared vs individual test environments and provides the results of her survey intended to gather the preferences and reasoning from QA professionals.

Oleksandra Melnikova's picture Oleksandra Melnikova
Agile developers and testers collaborating Testing in Agile: How to Get Started

There is a lot of interest in organizations around a transformation to agility. However, the focus is usually on agile development, so it may not be clear how software testing is done in agile. If you're responsible for leading your testing teams, don't let them be left behind. Here’s how you can make testers part of the transformation, too—step by step, because this is agile, after all.

Balazs Schaffhauser's picture Balazs Schaffhauser
Developers and testers giving each other useful feedback Improve Tester-Developer Relationships with Helpful Feedback

Testers and developers often have a strained relationship. Each side has a certain level of expectations as to what the other side should know and do, while there is little understanding of the constraints, conditions, and requirements that the other team has to work within. But it does not have to be this way. A little effort in giving more specific and helpful feedback can go a long way toward improving attitudes.

Michael Stahl's picture Michael Stahl

Better Software Magazine Articles

Developers and testers 5 Ways to Pair Developers with Testers

Some agile practices stress the importance of pairing team members together to achieve better team performance. Try these five suggestions for pairing key resources.

Jeffery Payne's picture Jeffery Payne
Building Autonomous DevOps Capability in Delivery Teams

After setting up a DevOps team and adopting continuous delivery practices, product releases may not be as smooth as they could be. The missing ingredient requires empowerment and autonomy.

Miiro Juuso's picture Miiro Juuso
Scaling Agile Thinking through Empowered Teams Scaling Agile Thinking through Empowered Teams

Just because a software team adopts agility doesn’t mean they’ll see results. Being flexible has its benefits, but ensuring that the team is given total responsibility to make decisions may be more important.

Bob Costello's picture Bob Costello
Bridging the Bimodal Divide between Waterfall and Agile

Most software developers are in either the agile or the waterfall camp. Agile is required to be competitive, but many enterprise processes still rely on waterfall practices for stability. They can coexist.

Steve Elliott's picture Steve Elliott

Interviews

Gene Gotimer Adapting to Working from Home: A Conversation with Gene Gotimer
Video

Gene Gotimer, principal consultant at Coveros, chats with TechWell community manager Owen Gotimer about the challenges individuals and organizations face while we work from home during this global pandemic and how getting thrown into remote work could shape our future.

Owen Gotimer's picture Owen Gotimer
Hans Buwalda Same-Sprint Automation: An Interview with Hans Buwalda

Hans Buwalda, CTO at LogiGear, discusses how to accomplish same-sprint automation. The testers, automation engineers, and developers are all working in the same sprint, so you can immediately hand off what you are working on and get it into the next phase. Hans also talks about why it’s so challenging to get teams to agree on same-sprint automation, saying the commitment for the sprint needs to come from the team as well as the business.

Owen Gotimer's picture Owen Gotimer
Aprajita Mathur Secrets to a Healthy Work-Life Balance: An Interview with Aprajita Mathur

Aprajita Mathur, bioinformatics software test manager at Guardant Health, discusses how to develop yourself and why it's so important to take the time to do so. She explains that your personal life will always be more significant than any work you need to get done, and she gives strategies for how to talk with your manager as well as your team when you are feeling overworked and need a break. Aprajita believes if you are self-aware and have open communication, then having these conversations will be easier and you can focus on yourself.

Owen Gotimer's picture Owen Gotimer
Chris Loder An Open Source Framework for Automation: An Interview with Chris Loder

Chris Loder, an automation architect at InGenius Software, talks about his open source framework for automation, as well as why he says he left testing behind and started automating. He also discusses running the Test Lab at STARWEST, where conference attendees can practice their QA skills together to solve puzzles and test code. This year there were new AI features and an Automation Zone, where participants got hands-on experience with automation.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine

Conference Presentations

Agile + DevOps East Become the Person Everyone Wants to Work With
Slideshow

Drawing from her own experiences across twenty years in a range of industry roles, Jaimee Newberry shares true stories of at least a dozen tiny but important things she still sees every day that could make all the difference in how people work with you. 

Jaimee Newberry
Agile + DevOps East AWS Lambda: Best Practices and Common Mistakes
Slideshow

AWS Lambda is a serverless architecture that relieves you of hardware and scaling setup concerns. AWS Lambda functions are used by many organizations for serverless application development and automating DevOps tasks.

Derek Ashmore
Using Lean XP to Supercharge Your Agile Delivery
Slideshow

Most teams that do agile development start with Scrum. And why not? Scrum is a proven method for focusing your team, ensuring that work adds value, and minimizing the risk with release. Then, after awhile, Scrum becomes stagnant. 

Jim Collins
Agile + DevOps East Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into Agilists
Slideshow

Teams can hesitate to adopt agile practices, even when there’s a clear desire for transformation at the executive level. But there are strategies for coaching agile-skeptical teams into an agile mindset. 

Scott Weiner

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