Project Management
Articles
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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. |
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More Than a Score: Taking a Deeper Dive into Your Metrics One key benefit of metrics is that they can be measured using a standard process; we can explain the numbers, and leadership can understand what that means. The downside is that it is only a measurement, so issues can easily hide until they become problems, and great work can also go unrepresented. Sporting events are a great example: The end score tells you who won, but not the details of the game. We need to look deeper. |
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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. |
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Testing What You Can’t See: Risk Blindness in Coverage Models The way we think about what necessitates test coverage being “complete” influences how we test and the cases we create. After all, you wouldn't design tests for situations that don't occur to you—and you can't test what you can't see. It's time to take off the blinders. Here's how you can find where the bugs in your products are occurring, and then adjust your strategy to pinpoint them. |
Interviews
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An Open Source Framework for Automation: An Interview with Chris Loder Chris Loder, an automation architect at InGenius Software, talks about his open source framework for automation, as well as why he says he left testing behind and started automating. He also discusses running the Test Lab at STARWEST, where conference attendees can practice their QA skills together to solve puzzles and test code. This year there were new AI features and an Automation Zone, where participants got hands-on experience with automation. |
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Communication Is Everything: A Conversation with Shachar Schiff Shachar Schiff, founder and principal consultant at BadTesting, chats with TechWell community manager Owen Gotimer about the recent rebrand of BadTesting, the four archetypes he uses to help customers, and the universal importance of communication. Continue the conversation with Shachar (@Shak) and Owen (@owen) on the TechWell Hub (http://hub.techwell.com/)! |
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Prioritizing Security Testing: An Interview with Matt Grasberger
Video
Matt Grasberger, a software consultant with Coveros, talks about how security testing is often put off in the development lifecycle until risks are so embedded that it’s a massive undertaking to fix them. Matt highlights two tools that can be used to automate security testing early in the development lifecycle and gives some resources for requirements that you should have as a baseline for your security testing. |
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8 Ways to Ruin Your One-on-Ones: An Interview with Jason Wick
Video
In this interview, Jason Wick, senior manager at MakeMusic, discusses his STAREAST presentation about eight ways you could be making your one-on-one meetings completely useless. He discusses in depth what he feels is the number one way to ruin these meetings: holding back on feedback. He also offers advice on how you can educate your team leader to avoid the pitfalls that lead to ineffective one-on-ones. |
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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AWS Lambda: Best Practices and Common Mistakes
Slideshow
AWS Lambda is a serverless architecture that relieves you of hardware and scaling setup concerns. AWS Lambda functions are used by many organizations for serverless application development and automating DevOps tasks. |
Derek Ashmore
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Using Lean XP to Supercharge Your Agile Delivery
Slideshow
Most teams that do agile development start with Scrum. And why not? Scrum is a proven method for focusing your team, ensuring that work adds value, and minimizing the risk with release. Then, after awhile, Scrum becomes stagnant. |
Jim Collins
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Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into Agilists
Slideshow
Teams can hesitate to adopt agile practices, even when there’s a clear desire for transformation at the executive level. But there are strategies for coaching agile-skeptical teams into an agile mindset. |
Scott Weiner
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Agile Assessment: Helpful Remedy or Harmful Toxin?
Slideshow
Agile is a set of values and a mindset. As such, it can be hard to answer questions that leaders often ask, like: How agile are we? Are we getting more agile? What are the growth opportunities for our team? |
Dan Neumann
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