Requirements
Articles
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Getting Started with Business Intelligence Testing There’s a bit of hype in terms such as business intelligence, data analytics, and data mining. In testing terms, though, it means working with scripts and databases, often without traditional GUI interaction. But core testing skills—analysis, synthesis, modeling, observation, and risk assessment—will still help you go far in business intelligence testing. |
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Lessons Learned in Testing CRM Software CRM systems manage a company’s business relationships, including customers’ data, information, and interactions, so there’s a lot that can—and should—be tested. Viktar Sachuk talks about his experience in testing CRMs to provide some tips for dealing with the trickiest parts of CRM testing, specifically focusing on some preparatory measures, functional testing, integration testing, and test automation. |
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Requirements Mapping Using Business Function Test Suites On this team, testers were overcommitted, avoidable defects were surfacing, and documentation was hard to find. Worse, trust and morale were low. Upgrading tools was out of the question, so the testers decided to take matters into their own hands and create incremental change themselves. Here's how a team added a new type of traceability to its requirement test case world. |
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Slim Down Your Test Plan Documentation Test plans are essential for communicating intent and requirements for testing efforts, but excessive documentation creates confusion—or just goes unread. Try the 5W2H method. The name comes from the seven questions you ask: why, what, where, when, who, how, and how much. That's all you need to provide valuable feedback and develop a sufficient plan of action. |
Interviews
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Shifting Left on Your Journey to Continuous Testing: An Interview with Adam Auerbach
Video
In this interview, Adam Auerbach, the senior director of technology for advanced testing and release services for Capital One Financial Corporation, shares his company's experience implementing continuous testing and describes its core principles. |
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The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Testing: An Interview with Jason Arbon In this interview, Appdiff’s Jason Arbon explains what the rise of artificial intelligence means for the world of testing. He covers how manual testers can work with AI, the role of automation, and the type of companies that testers can now start. |
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The "Show Me the Money" Approach to Software Development: An Interview with Michael Harris
Podcast
In this interview, Michael Harris, the president and CEO of David Consulting Group, explains his five-step Value Visualization Framework. He discusses how he came up with the idea, how it can help your team right now, and its similarities to the agile methodology. |
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STAREAST 2015 Interview with Rob Sabourin on Exploring Usability Testing for Mobile and Web Technologies
Video
In this interview, Rob Sabourin talks about his STAREAST presentations. These cover how to elicit effective usability requirements with storyboarding and task analysis, and how to blend the requirements, design, and test cycles into a tight feedback loop. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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10 Lessons Learned in Cross-Platform Development Building an app for a single platform is difficult, but designing, implementing, and testing an app targeting multiple operating system platforms can be next to impossible. The secret balances upfront design with customer feedback. |
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Pitfalls of Developing for the IoT The Internet of Things (IoT) enables amazing software-powered devices designed to make our business and personal lives easier. Lev Lesokhin discusses four fundamental practices you'll need when developing sophisticated software for the IoT. |
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Six Ways to Use Business Analyst Superpowers in Agile There are those agilists who believe there is no place for a business analyst on their team. Joy Beatty and James Hulgan, both experienced agile consultants, refute this belief and explain how business analysts can enhance the effectiveness of most any agile team. |
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Painful Lessons I Learned from Bootstrapping a Startup If you are considering leaving the nest to self-fund your own endeavor, you may want to read about Mike Botsko's experience creating a cloud-based, bug-tracking app called Snowy Evening. What started out as a lot of fun quickly turned into a tough journey. Don't worry—it has a happy ending! |
Conference Presentations
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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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Mission Critical Automation Testing
Slideshow
When critical subsystems fail, the resulting losses can be catastrophic. In the insurance industry, if premiums are miscalculated, defect costs can reach well over a million dollars. In this session, Mike Keith and Dom Nunley draw on their practical experience with insurance systems testing to provide an overview of combinatorial automation testing for high-risk backend system areas—i.e., features that absolutely must work correctly. They share a process for categorizing requirement risk levels to determine which requirements warrant combinatorial testing. Mike and Dom illustrate various combinatorial testing techniques such as N-FAT, N-Wise, and RANDOM, which can be used to automatically generate test cases. These methods are used to ensure coverage against risk while controlling the number of tests that run. |
Mike Keith
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The Five Biggest Mistakes Your Team Is Making in Requirements Definition
Slideshow
Google pioneer Alberto Savoia offered this sage advice: Build the right "it" before you build It right. But few software companies take the time to define, much less build, the right "it." The problem starts with a poor requirements definition process. In this session, join Kathryn Campbell as she examines the five most common mistakes that software companies make during requirements definition—and how to avoid them. First Kathryn defines thinking too small as a huge problem and shows you how to broaden your perspectives. Next, she exposes being stuck in the past, with legacy systems maintaining too much control of our innovation. The third mistake is assuming too much about your customers. Kathryn shares guerrilla techniques for gathering rapid, inexpensive customer feedback at every stage of your requirements and design process. |
Kathryn Campbell
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Behavior-Driven Development: Real-World Mind Reading
Slideshow
Imagine this scenario: Business users are excited to finally get their hands on an implementation delivery that is on schedule, (mostly) on budget, and passed rigorous testing with flying colors. Unfortunately, when working with the new app or feature, the users realize that the way they described their needs didn’t translate into what they actually needed. Sound familiar? While she may not be able to offer telekinetic mind-reading tools, Kim Tatum is convinced that leveraging a behavior-driven development (BDD) approach helps bridge the gap between domain experts and technical teams. Join Kim to discuss how natural, human-readable language ultimately creates shared accountability and reduces misunderstandings. Review how this framework is implemented on a variety of delivery projects and walk through an implementation approach and leading practices. |
Kim Tatum
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