QA
Better Software Magazine Articles
FAQ: What Should I Do When My Bug Gets Rejected? In this installment of FAQ, SQE Trainer Dawn Haynes answers one of the questions students ask her most often. |
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Product Owners Should Care About Quality Product owners often view quality as an ugly duckling—necessary to ship software, but nerdy and a drag. Instead, they should be guardians of quality. Only when quality meets functionality is lasting value created. |
Roman Pichler
September 9, 2010 |
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Selling To Your Buyer No matter how well you've built it, no users will benefit from your product unless you can convince the buyers to purchase it. Selling to buyers is different than satisfying users—and you have to do both well to succeed. Consider the needs of the buyer as stakeholder. When you have no buyers, you have no users. |
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Working Together—Not Just Working Together People collaborate—and don't—in a variety of ways. Johanna Rothman examines what happens when collaboration isn't working, and how to make it work. Watch for several barriers to collaboration including those imposed on people by the organization itself. |
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QA Is Not Evil A software tester re-examines the role of software testers in quality assurance work, helping implement software development processes. If testers are knowledgeable, helpful, and supportive, they may be in the best possible position to help the team improve its software development process. |
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The State of the Practice While software testing focuses on detection rather than prevention, we can argue that it has become a powerful counter-offensive against bugs. We can equally argue that many of today's software practices impede quality. Ross Collard compares these two positions and invites you to join the discussion. |
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Issues about Metrics about Bugs Managers often use metrics to help make decisions about the state of the product or the quality of the work done by the test group. Yet, measurements derived from bug counts can be highly misleading because a "bug" isn't a tangible, countable thing; it's a label for some aspect of some relationship between some person and some product, and it's influenced by when and how we count ... and who is doing the counting. |
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Do You Know Why You Are Doing That? It's easy to get caught up in the inertia of a project and forget to ask exactly what we are developing, who our customers are, and what their goals with our software might be. Few software projects have the time and budget to figure out what their project is through trial and error. Getting clarity on project focus not only helps productivity, working to create software that people actually need increases our chances for success. |
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The TSA and Software Quality As evidenced by news stories relating blatant failures on the part of the Transportation Security Administration, many organizations fail to learn much from the information testing provides. What can we do to improve the quality of our measurements so we can learn valuable lessons from the results? |
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Keep Non-developers in the Loop Keeping QA members up to date on changes as they happen–through meetings, wikis, and email–can reduce the number of unnecessary bug reports and save you time and frustration. |