user experience
Articles
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Evolve Your Mobile Usability Testing Methods Today’s mobile behaviors and expectations have radically changed, a result of the continuous evolution of mobile technology and the myriad new ways users can now interact with mobile. Because of this advancement in technology and user behavior, testing organizations must also advance their mobile testing solutions to ensure they continue to deliver the most intuitive, up-to-date experience possible. |
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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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Top 10 StickyMinds Articles of 2017 With the rise of technology like AI and practices like DevOps, teams everywhere are looking for ways to speed up testing without sacrificing quality. The articles in 2017 reflect that, with the most popular topics being test automation, testing machine learning systems, next-generation exercises, and the future of software testing. If you're looking for cutting-edge testing techniques, check out this roundup. |
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Has Continuous Deployment Become a New Worst Practice? Software development has been moving toward progressively smaller and faster development cycles, and continuous integration and continuous deployment are compressing delivery times even further. But is this actually good for businesses or their users? Just because you can deploy to production quickly and frequently, should you? |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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The Evolution of Software Monetization End-users are demanding anytime, anywhere access to software apps on their devices. These changes are shifting the way software vendors conduct business. Michael Zunke uses the results of industry surveys to show how software products and services should be licensed. |
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Playing Games to Improve Software You may not have heard about gamification, but instructional designers are now using game principles to help with retention of learned material in many forms of training. Ross Smith and Rajini Padmanaban believe that developers' UX and app design can benefit from gamification. |
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Incorporating User Experience into Early Agile Cycles Chris Nodder explores the emerging need to focus on a software app's user experience. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune to perform some basic user experience analysis as long as it is done early and tested throughout a project’s lifecycle. |
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A Tale of Two Doctors and the Value Stream Johanna Rothman compares the experience a patient has with doctors to software development. Producing value implies that the customer believes the software you create provides an important benefit by taking into consideration the way a user works along with an exceptional user experience. |
Interviews
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Finding Microefficiencies in Agile Practices: An Interview with Melissa Tondi Melissa Tondi discusses retuning your standard agile practices to better engage the project team, enabling them to write code that will pass testing and free testers to assume the role of user advocate. |
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How AI-Assisted Test Automation Can Transform the UI: An Interview with Gil Sever In this interview, Gil Sever, the cofounder and CEO of Applitools, explains the importance of automation in modern testing, why you need to be customer-obsessed, and how your UI can determine the success of your applications. |
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Sprint’s Journey from Testing Organization to Quality Advocate: An Interview with Aaron Haehn
Video
In this interview, Aaron Haehn, the director of quality assurance and release at Sprint, explains how the telecom giant has evolved during its long lifespan. He details the company’s new focus on software quality and how the mobile industry has changed so much over the years. |
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Performance Testing for the Sake of Your Users: An Interview with Andreas Grabner
Video
In this interview, Andreas Grabner of Dynatrace explains why you need to pay attention to your users' needs when you're doing your performance testing. He shares his performance testing approaches and explores the top problem patterns that you can learn to spot in your apps. |
Conference Presentations
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Agile Performance Testing in the Real World
Slideshow
Performance issues substantially impact quality, cost, and customer confidence. Agile teams are challenged to build in performance processes throughout the lifecycle, but it is critical to incorporate performance into your CI/CD pipeline. Join Amit Patel as he shares his recent project experiences and the steps his team took to change processes, leverage different technologies, and align internal stakeholders. He explains how they use production-monitoring solutions to create a real-world production feedback loop in order to ensure they can analyze data and turn the information into actionable defects. As part of this, his team created process and procedures to execute performance tests on a regular basis and pass/fail builds based on thresholds. Join Amit to learn how to build a successful production feedback loop, align internal stakeholders, and implement holistic performance engineering. |
Amit Patel
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No More Shelfware—Let’s Drive
Slideshow
When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be. Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. To be effective engineers, we need the support of a powerful toolset that we understand. Is that what we have? Or do we still have shelfware sitting around expensively doing nothing, because we don’t know how to "clean the spark plugs"? Can we remove the difficulties and make using test automation a better experience, just like driving a car? |
Isabel Evans
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Beating the Feature Factory Mindset
Slideshow
On a human level, we crave outcomes and impact. But in software product development, there is something addictive about the "build more and more features" approach that often leaves people frustrated and unsatisfied. Developers understand the challenges of working in output-focused environments and the adverse effects this has on productivity, morale, and business impact. Join John Cutler as he discusses these "feature factories," why they exist, how they impact your business, and how you can shift the focus to outcomes and impact. John thoroughly makes the case that churning out features is no longer a competitive advantage and can in fact harm your business and disengage your team. Instead, he will show you how to move your organization beyond the feature factory and toward an outcome-based way of working that increases employee engagement and customer satisfaction. |
John Cutler
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Devices and Desires: How Do Humans Experience Software?
Slideshow
We consume and still we desire more—more devices, more apps, more data, more bandwidth, more connectivity. The more we have, the more we want. We assume that to be true—those of us who work in the software industry. But is that true? To understand what is really required of our products, we need to design and test a pyramid of interlocking quality attributes that, together, make for an optimum experience. Isabel Evans discusses why and how we can evaluate UX and what is takes to deliver better UX to our customers. Isabel looks at the needs of the individual software user in conjunction with pressures from the commercial imperatives from the business and external forces from government, the environment, and the needs of society. To test the UX and thus deliver a good experience, we first need to understand the humans who use our products and match their needs and desires to the software’s user experience. |
Isabel Evans
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