Project Management
Articles
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Mob Programming for Low-Code and No-Code Development In low-code and no-code development, as the names suggest, developers do less actual coding—they create applications through GUIs and configuration instead of traditional programming. But mob programming is still a useful practice, because the entire team can clarify requirements, discuss development and test strategies, and implement the best ideas. Everyone gets to learn and contribute. |
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A Better Way of Reporting Performance Test Results Reporting the results of functional tests is relatively simple because these tests have a clear pass or fail outcome. Reporting the results of performance testing is much more nuanced, and there are many ways of displaying these values—but Michael Stahl felt none of these ways was particularly effective. He proposes a reporting method that makes performance test results easy to read at a glance. |
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3 Methods for Better Communication and More Effective Testing Successful delivery of software requires the entire team, so it’s imperative that everyone choose their words carefully so they convey what they really mean, are sensitive to others’ feelings, and consider all aspects of a problem. Here are three questions to remember when communicating about your software testing projects to ensure you’re considering the power of words. |
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6 Unexpected Career Tips for Thinking Testers Of course getting training, practicing the skills of testing, moving into the right product line, and learning are all necessary for testers to grow their careers. But when Jon Hagar asked himself what helped him grow as a thinking tester, he came up with some ideas that are more off the beaten path. Consider these six tips and your future will be bright. |
Interviews
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Experiences at STAREAST 2018: An Interview with Michael Sowers
Video
Michael Sowers, TechWell’s IT director and program chair for STAREAST 2018, discusses some of the activities, presentations and networking opportunities at the event. He also discusses what to expect at the all-new Agile Testing Days. |
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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. |
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Achieving a Balance between Manual and Automated Testing: An Interview with Jim Holmes
Video
Jim Holmes, executive consultant at Pillar Technology, discusses tools and methods to effectively communicate with management your goals for balancing manual with automated testing. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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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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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. |
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5 Ways to Pair Developers with Testers Some agile practices stress the importance of pairing team members together to achieve better team performance. Try these five suggestions for pairing key resources. |
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Building Autonomous DevOps Capability in Delivery Teams After setting up a DevOps team and adopting continuous delivery practices, product releases may not be as smooth as they could be. The missing ingredient requires empowerment and autonomy. |
Conference Presentations
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Evolution—Not Revolution: Transforming Your Testing
Slideshow
You may have heard the saying “The only constant on any project is change.” Yet the prospect of change is rarely welcomed—either personally or professionally. How is it that we still believe that these changes apply to others but not to us? Julie Gardiner says that now is the time to re-evaluate and transform how we do testing in order to deliver more value to organizations—from a people, processes, and tools perspective. Join Julie as she shares current experiences of transformations and lessons learned within different organizations. She discusses an automation framework that ended up being thrown away, revamping processes, and tools and techniques to transform your testing. This thought-provoking session will give you the courage and ideas for how you can add even more value to your company. |
Julie Gardiner
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The Art of Software Investigation
Slideshow
Although processes and tools play an important role in software testing, the most important testing tool is the mind. Like scientists, testers search for new knowledge and share discoveries—hopefully for the betterment of people’s lives. More than sixty years ago, William I.B. Beveridge reframed discussion of scientific research in his classic book The Art of Scientific Investigation. Rather than add to the many texts on the scientific method, he focused on the mind of the scientist. Join Ben Simo as he applies Beveridge’s principles and techniques for scientific investigation to software testing today. Learn to discover and communicate new knowledge that matters; to think—and test—like scientists; and to continually prepare, experiment, exploit chance, imagine productively, apply intuition and reason, tune observation, and overcome resistance. |
Ben Simo
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Building a Skilled Testing Practice In an Innovative Digital Agency
Slideshow
Everybody wants to have their projects tested so that they can deliver top-notch products to their clients. But with multiple projects all running in parallel, all with tight deadlines and all needing testing, simply allocating a tester on a project for some time isn’t going to give you quality. This, in turn, can sometimes make our stakeholders question the value of testing. Join Nimesh Patel as he shares his experience in building a test practice and team from the ground up into valued, credible members of a project, in a digital agency where the focus is often on delivering multiple fast-paced projects in parallel. He shares the skills, approaches, and methods that are valuable when engaging with project stakeholders and managers to enable them to make informed project decisions. |
Nimesh Patel
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Managing BDD Automation Test Cases inside Test Management Systems
Slideshow
Behavior-driven development (BDD) has been around for a while and is here to stay. However, the added abstraction levels pose a technical problem for writing and managing tests. While BDD does a great job of marrying the nontechnical aspect of test writing to the technical flow of an application under test, keeping this information under source control becomes problematic. Frameworks such as JBehave, Cucumber, or Robot give subject matter experts that additional ability to write tests, but they are often restricted access from them; because people treat test cases as code, they get stored in source control repositories. Additionally, these given-when-then steps soon can grow to an extent where they are difficult to manage without an IDE, and nontechnical people lose interest. Using management tools, Max Saperstone shows how to manage these nontechnical steps and keep them in sync with the automaton in tools such as Git. |
Max Saperstone
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