People & Teams
Articles
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Examining Cross-functionality Bias on Software Development Teams Cross-functionality means having all the necessary people and skills on one self-organizing team. Unfortunately, the execution of cross-functionality is often biased. The main traps we fall into are misunderstanding the value of specialization, hero worship, and not “walking the cross-functional talk” as organizations. Let’s examine each of these pitfalls in the hope that your teams may avoid them. |
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Getting Your New Web Test Automation Up and Running So you have the responsibility of a new team and getting an entirely new web automation test infrastructure up and running. Here are the hurdles, pitfalls, and successes one QA director encountered, along with the milestones the team defined to measure success, how they migrated their existing manual tests, and the path they took to establish the new web test automation initiative. |
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7 Ways Monitoring Can Help You Be a Better Tester Monitoring makes your testing work easier, helps you manage certain biases you may have, and lets you learn a lot about the product, users, and even your own processes. Here are seven concrete benefits testers get from monitored data that you can use to convince your team to implement monitoring—as well as realize for yourself. |
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Reporting Automated Test Results Effectively The modern iterative software development lifecycle has developers checking in code to version control systems frequently, with continuous integration handling building and running automated tests at an almost equally fast rate. This can generate an enormous amount of test data. Here’s how you can ensure you are reporting results effectively across your team and realizing all the benefits of that information. |
Interviews
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Testing Your Metal: An Interview with Paul Grizzaffi
Video
Paul Grizzaffi, principal automation architect at Magenic, discusses his keynote presentation, which focuses on changing your perspective to add value and determining where you are spending your time so you can evaluate what can be automated. |
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The Inaccurate Nomenclature of Manual and Automated Testers: An Interview with Michael Bolton
Video
Michael Bolton, principal at DevelopSense, explains why there should not be the perceived division between manual and automated testing. He says they are both just tools in a tester's toolkit, and we should use the tools appropriate to the job at hand. |
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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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Improving Communication and Social Skills: An Interview with Marcia Buzzella
Video
Marcia Buzzella, an independent leadership consultant and strengths coach, discusses the importance of communication and social skills in a business atmosphere. She offers advice on tools to recognize your weaknesses in those areas and how to work toward improving your effectiveness. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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QA Is More Than Being a Tester QA testers often take on more of a role than just testing software code. When the team needs help, QA should lend a hand in assisting with business analysis, customer communication, user experience, and user advocacy. |
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All Customers Are Not Created Equal Software developers may not think they have much to do with customers, but it is wise to consider the customer in all you do, from collecting requirements to design and implementation. |
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The Unspoken Truth about IoT Test Automation The internet of things (IoT) continues to proliferate as connected smart devices become critical for individuals and businesses. Even with test automation, performing comprehensive testing can be quite a challenge. |
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Scrum: Back to Basics So you think you know Scrum? Using the whimsical notion of farm animals and light-hearted visuals, take a refreshing review of the entire Scrum lifecycle as an intuitive set of roles, responsibilities, and handoffs. Particular attention is placed on what the ScrumMaster and product owner are expected to do at each handoff. |
Conference Presentations
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The Fourth Constraint in Project Delivery—Leadership
Slideshow
All too often, the triple constraints—time, cost, and quality—are bandied about as if they are the be-all, end-all. While they are important, leadership—the fourth and larger underpinning constraint—influences the first three. Statistics on project success and failure abound, and these... |
Rob Burkett
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The Five Common Unconscious Biases Affecting Your Team
Slideshow
Are you having a difficult time finding female engineers to join your teams? Are you currently working on a project which seems to be going nowhere? Have you ever engaged in what you thought was customer-driven work only to later discover it was stakeholder-driven? When it comes to... |
Catherine Louis
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Use Mind Maps to Increase Team Velocity and Communication
Slideshow
Ever sit in a strategy review session and get little or no participation from others? Or feel like you left a planning session with a different understanding of what was agreed to? If you feel there must be a more effective way to communicate important information around your strategy and... |
Jennifer Bonine
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Resolve the Contradiction of Specialists within Agile Teams
Slideshow
As teams grow, organizations often draw a distinction between feature teams, which deliver the visible business value to the user, and component teams, which manage shared work. Steve Berczuk says that this distinction can help organizations be more productive and scale effectively, but he... |
Steve Berczuk
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