Project Management

Selecting a testing tool is hard work. If you look on vendor websites, you'll get marketing material promising the world. If you look on forums, you'll mostly get people trying to solve their own problems. Justin Rohrman tells you why you might choose Selenium as your UI testing tool, based on real experience with real software projects—rather than a marketing page.

When developing products, features, and enhancements, you have to have your customers’ best interests at heart. “We’re not just creating software,” speaker Jeff Patton said. “We’re changing the world.” You need to better understand the people you’re building things for, and the only way to do that is to spend more time with them.

When it came to security testing, Sylvia Killinen noted that her company's most frequent difficulty wasn't the testing itself. Instead, it was the communication that provided problems, in part because of the words used to explain what would be performed. If you take care with how you describe your process, you may get more support while executing tests and repairing systems.

As much as you might want to multitask, there is a limit to how much work in progress can be handled at once. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed—whether due to your own commitments or because management keeps piling on more projects—assess the situation and see what you can do to improve your condition without letting your work suffer.