Though automation is often mentioned in the same breath as behavior-driven development, they are not equally important. If you want to use behavior-driven development, do just that: Work on getting the approach right, and forget about the automation at first. Here's why you should think of automation as more of a bonus to the BDD process.

To cover your bases when testing performance, you may try writing a "performance equation" so you can check each factor. But the individual pieces do not always equal the whole picture. It can be easy to overlook performance-affecting components. Testing is much more about the discovery of systems’ behaviors than verification of a few samples of expected behavior.

In the tech industry especially, you have people of many ages who need to work together. Young people are joining all the time with new ideas and ways of doing things, and this can create barriers with established employees who have more experience. Both sides need to think about where the other's coming from and focus on demonstrating value.

Containers support the timely delivery of a quality software application. However, the change to a DevOps process involving containers will require testers to adapt to this new, more agile environment. What does that mean for testers and the work they do? Here's how testers can embrace these changes, containers, and DevOps.