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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.

Companies that want to reduce testing costs usually try working with fewer people, or even cutting back on the amount of testing done. But with those approaches, quality usually suffers. Releasing a critical bug and suffering the subsequent pain usually costs multiple times what testing would. There are better ways to save money, and it can be done just by being smarter about our test cases and their structure.

Chris Loder, automation architect at Upland InGenius, chats with TechWell staff about how test automation and laziness can help drive quality within organizations.

Coveros CEO Jeff Payne discusses the growth of the STARWEST conference, including new networking opportunities and ways to engage with your peers throughout the event. Jeff talks about how the software testing conference has become extremely collaborative and provides so much for attendees to take back to their companies and teams.

The higher you climb in the organization, the less information you get: An executive might only see red, yellow, and green for a project. Any time different teams need to communicate complex information, there is bound to be some information loss, and maybe some information control. We just need to understand where and why that happens, and—hopefully—how we can mitigate it.

DevOps does speed up your processes and make them more efficient, but companies must focus on quality as well as speed. QA should not live outside the DevOps environment; it should be a fundamental part. If your DevOps ambitions have started with only the development and operations teams, it’s not too late to loop in testing. You must integrate QA into the lifecycle in order to truly achieve DevOps benefits.

As your QA team grows, manual testing can lose the ability to focus on likely problem areas and instead turn into an inefficient checkbox process. Using machine learning can bring back the insights of a small team of experienced testers. By defining certain scenarios, machine learning can determine the probability that a change has a serious defect, so you can evaluate risk and know where to focus your efforts.