Requirements
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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Overcoming Challenges to Good Test Documentation Getting good test documentation is a consistent challenge. Agile proposes that you should go very light on documentation, and while test documentation does not need to be heavy, it does need to be clear and cover all that the product is intended to do so you can ensure testing is consistent and results are recorded. Here's how to overcome some major barriers to getting good test documentation. |
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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. |
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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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. |
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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Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos
Slideshow
Example mapping is a collaboration technique used by teams to help refine requirements. Every team should have a set of “ready” criteria that includes some kind of workshop for development team members to establish a shared understanding. In a time-boxed example mapping session, rules will summarize examples or constraints about a user story, and the team will document questions about outcomes or dependencies for future refinement. The end result is requirements written as user behavior, with a shared understanding among all roles on the agile team. Join Thomas Haver to participate in a live example mapping session and learn how to implement the workshop within your own team. |
Thomas Haver
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By the Reader, for the Reader: The Wall Street Journal’s Secrets to Customer-Centric Experiences
Slideshow
Readers of The Wall Street Journal have seen many stories about companies shutting their doors after years of success. These companies failed to adapt to rising customer expectations and new technologies—they lost touch with what their customers wanted. The Wall Street Journal didn’t want to become one of these cautionary tales. Sumeet Mandloi explores how The Wall Street Journal aligned its engineering, design, and product teams to shift to a quality engineering organization focused on customer-centric experiences. As part of this transition to quality engineering, the company started testing technologies like augmented reality with its actual customers across seventy countries. |
Sumeet Mandloi
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Exploring Our Love-Hate Relationship with Metrics
Slideshow
Businesses rely on data to make decisions, and metrics allow them to roll up data into bite-sized morsels for managerial consumption. But while metrics can help leaders make good business decisions, sometimes the numbers are “massaged” in a way that doesn’t realistically portray what’s happening. Ultimately, there’s validity on both sides of the debate: Sometimes metrics imply something totally different from reality, but other times, they provide valuable insights that can guide efforts with better questions and decisions about how projects or teams should proceed. Shaun Bradshaw—aka the Minister of Metrics—will discuss various aspects of metrics, particularly how they relate to product quality. We'll explore the dysfunctions arising from “objective” metrics, as well as what makes metrics useful and how they can be used for good. |
Shaun Bradshaw
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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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