QA
Articles
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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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Test Everywhere: A Journey into DevOps and Continuous Testing A move to DevOps creates an opportunity to shift the testing process to the left. But what if you went further? DevOps supports continuous testing, so you can advocate for a constant focus on quality, with testing permeating the entire software development process. Here's how you can actually have a faster testing process when the software is tested throughout the lifecycle, by developers, testers, and automation alike. |
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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. |
Interviews
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Data Visualization in Test Automation: A Conversation with Greg Paskal
Video
Greg Paskal, test automation lead at Ramsey Solutions, talks about data lakes and how to effectively use data visualization. Done well, data visualization should help practitioners, managers, and stakeholders easily consume, understand, and act on the information the visual displays. |
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Understanding the Role of QA in DevOps: An Interview with Gene Gotimer
Video
Gene Gotimer, senior architect at Coveros Inc., discusses understanding the role of QA in DevOps, DevOps educational tools, trusting your team, and paid and open source security tools. |
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Use Service Virtualization to Increase Test Coverage and Improve Quality: An Interview with Kenneth Merkel
Video
In this interview, Kenneth Merkel of CA Technologies explains how service virtualization has changed the way organizations handle their testing. He also details how improved coverage can lead to better quality, a happier QA team, and remove any blockers preventing you from release. |
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Embedding Performance Engineering into CI/CD: An Interview with Anj Dubey
Video
In this interview, Anj Dubey, director of performance engineering for McGraw-Hill Education, discusses the need to shift left and embed your performance engineering into your CI/CD pipeline in order to ensure that every line of code is going to meet your performance requirements. |
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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Achieving Continuous Improvement and Innovation in Software There is tremendous pressure on software development teams to deliver software faster, better, and cheaper. Quality engineering with a focus on innovation is the answer |
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The Power of Thinking Upside Down Software developers can become bogged down trying to keep up with agile process and procedures. Get better results by rethinking your approach to balancing focus, agility, management, and testing. |
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Alternate Testing Models: A Tale of Veggies and Precious Gems As if working at Lego isn’t fun enough, Sherri Sobanski delights in finding new ways to test. Faced with a situation requiring a complete product redesign, she shares the route her team took to overhaul testing. |
Conference Presentations
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Who Owns Quality in Agile?
Slideshow
What do you mean, who owns quality? The quality assurance team, of course—the kings and queens of quality, the masters of the tests, the lords of the sign-off. People often used to look down on quality assurance as less technical, the last to get their hands on the code, and the first to be blamed when things go wrong, but of course, agile adoption has changed the industry. These days we have cross-functional teams and develop test automation. But we also do "Scrummerfall" and have hardening sprints and stressful deadlines. Despite all of that planning, testing still often comes as an afterthought. We talk about teamwork, but generally, we see developers and testers as two different breeds. Join Katy Sherman in an exploration of quality as we try to imagine the future of our industry. What kinds of engineers will populate our teams, what skills will they have, and, most important of all, who will own quality? |
Katy Sherman
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The Era of Intelligent Testing
Slideshow
Existing QA solutions were built for a world where software changed infrequently. Highly adopted tools such as Selenium, Appium, and JUnit require a specialized skill set and too much maintenance, once you start factoring in the brittle nature of tests and the infrastructure required to run tests at scale. But there is still hope for QA in machine intelligence. Next-generation AI tools are here to help QA keep up with the agility of modern software delivery practices in two ways: by enabling manual testers who don't know how to code to automate, and by easily automating repetitive tasks so that development teams can ship software faster while QA teams increase test coverage. Join Dan Belcher to learn exactly what AI strategies are being employed to make this possible, and what intelligent testing looks like for the future of QA. |
Dan Belcher
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Disrupt Your Career and Discover True Quality Engineering
Slideshow
One of the best things Melissa Tondi did for her career was disrupt it. She'll talk about what disruption means, how it can take form, and how it can help build out a team model that is more adaptable to change than ever while still focusing on the traits quality engineering brings to the table within project teams. Even if physically disrupting your career is not an option, in this session you will discuss how you can develop the mindset of a quality engineer and how a career disruption—whether planned or unplanned—can enhance your quality engineering career development. Melissa will take a deep dive into the traits that emphasize quality engineering and show how a highly functioning quality engineering organization operates. [video:https://youtu.be/hogDFVvK-ng width:300 height:200 align:right] |
Melissa Tondi
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No One Really Cares about Testing: A Perspective from a Billion-Dollar App Team
Slideshow
When is the last time you read a five-star review in the App Store or Play Store that raved, “This app is so well-tested! Their quality assurance team really knows what they’re doing. Their test automation must fit so well into their CI pipeline that they can find all sorts of issues in a snap”? The fact is most end-users don’t care about all the things we do in testing on a day-to-day basis. Instead, they care that our applications solve their problems in the way that they expect them to or in a new way that delights them. Andrew Bardallis will challenge you to first think about how your application makes the end-user’s life better and how you can then make better testing decisions centered around those needs. |
Andrew Bardallis
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