People & Teams
Articles
Risk Coverage: A New Currency for Testing In the era of agile and DevOps, release decisions need to be made rapidly—preferably, even automatically and instantaneously. Test results that focus solely on the number of test cases leave you with a huge blind spot. If you want fast, accurate assessments of the risks associated with promoting the latest release candidate to production, you need a new currency in testing: Risk coverage needs to replace test coverage. |
||
Transforming a Test Automation Maintenance Nightmare into Success Best practices for test automation emphasize reliability, portability, reusability, readability, maintainability, and more. But how can your existing automated test suite adopt these qualities? Should you address these issues with your current tests, or create an entirely new set of tests? Here are some questions that will help you determine if your test automation maintenance program is operating as it should be. |
||
7 Agile Testing Trends to Watch for in 2020 With 2020 upon us, software development firms seeking to increase their agility are focusing more and more on aligning their testing approach with agile principles. Let’s look at seven of the key agile testing trends that will impact organizations most this year. |
||
Top 10 StickyMinds Articles of 2019 Teams everywhere are looking to speed up testing without sacrificing quality, so once again, some of the top articles last year were about continuous integration, machine learning, and—of course—how to best implement and use test automation. But readers were also interested in what they shouldn't be doing, with two high-ranking articles about test practices we should stop and a tool you may be misusing. |
||
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. |
||
A Simpler Way of Using Machine Learning to Shift Testing Left The advantages of shifting left and testing as early as possible are obvious. But as you automate more testing, the test suite grows larger and larger, and it takes longer and longer to run. Instead, just automate the process of finding the right set of tests to run. The key to that is machine learning. This isn't AI bots finding bugs autonomously without creating tests; this is a different way to use machine learning, and it’s far simpler. |
||
Whole-Team Testing for Whole-Team Quality Whole-team testing means the whole team understands and participates in testing, using testing education as a tool to support quality efforts. And to be able to support testing in a meaningful way, team members must experience how testing is done by professional testers. Understanding skilled testing can help non-testers realize what quality criteria should be there and what elements of a product contribute to great quality. |
||
Dealing with a Test Automation Bottleneck The test team uses the test automation system to execute thousands of test cases because … why not? The tests are running automatically, for free, so there is no incentive to improve test efficiency. Just run them all! But eventually, as more and more tests are added, the system becomes overloaded. Test runs are delayed and you get a bottleneck. Don't throw more money—or new systems—at the problem; do this instead. |
||
To Get Quality Software, Let Them Fail As an advocate for quality, you look at the product, take into account time, budget, and other business constraints, and recommend fixes to ship a product with the best possible quality. ... And the businesspeople in production don’t want to fix it. How can you communicate bugs and risk to people who don't want to listen? Instead of getting frustrated, you need to frame issues in a meaningful way—and, if you have to, let people fail. |
||
The New Role of Test Assurance Officer and Test Coach Testing has changed a lot in the last ten years. Although some traditional techniques are still useful, many testing activities are being done by developers, users, and other nonprofessional testers. Consequently, the role of test manager has changed into more of a test assurance officer and coach. The way this new role is implemented can differ from situation to situation. Here’s how it can be useful. |