Tools
Articles
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Inverting the Test Automation Pyramid A growing company was tasked to develop a test automation program from scratch, change its coding practices, and build a continuous testing toolchain. Martin Ivison details how they did it, including realizing that implementing the traditional test pyramid wasn't going to work—it would have to be turned upside down. They found out that small is beautiful, cheap is good, and cultural change matters. |
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Brew vs. Pip: Which Package Installer Should You Use? A command-line package installer is a handy tool that installs your desired software package without a fancy UI, yet it often proves to be more effective than some tools integrated into expensive IDEs. Brew and Pip are two of the more popular options for package installers when using the script language Python. But what’s the difference between them, and which makes more sense for your use? Here’s an introduction to Brew and Pip for testers. |
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Why You Shouldn't Use Cucumber for API Testing Many people misunderstand the purpose of Cucumber. Because it seems to yield clearer, plain-language test scripts, testers want to use Cucumber as a general-purpose testing tool, including for API tests. But its true purpose is as a BDD framework. You may be thinking, what’s the harm? Here’s why it makes a difference—and why you should choose another tool for API testing. |
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Lessons Learned Switching Manual Tests to Pytest If you want to start automating your test cases, László Szegedi makes an argument for using the popular Python and Selenium combination. Here, he gives a test script you can use after every release to find any serious regression bugs in the system, to be executed automatically. Integrate it with your existing development pipeline and you get a pretty useful tool for continuous improvement. |
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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Mining a Data Lake to Improve Analysis of Your Test Automation Data: An Interview with Greg Paskal
Video
In this interview, Greg Paskal, a technology innovator in quality assurance, discusses a new open source tool from Elastic Stack that creates a “data lake” that can be mined to analyze the data coming from test automation on a more effective level than pass/fail. |
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Automated Security Scanning in Your Delivery Pipeline: An Interview with Matt Grasberger
Video
Matt Grasberger, a software consultant at Coveros Inc., discusses shifting left security scans that you can do quickly and easily and the open source tools that are available to utilize early in the application development process to ensure you are not introducing new vulnerabilities. |
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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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The Amazing Benefits of Integrated ALM Tools For years, developers have struggled with using individual lifecycle management tools, but no longer! Joe Farah walks you through a history and benefits of an integration of ALM tools that every team should seriously consider. |
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Why NoSQL Matters and What Configuration Management Experts Need to Know About It NoSQL is a new approach to data storage that addresses many problems associated with relational databases. Many highly popular websites—including Facebook, Netflix, and Digg—are using NoSQL to crunch large volumes of data. Eugene Dvorkin gives us insight into why NoSQL is important and what CM experts need to know about it. |
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Practical Security Testing for Web Applications It seems like every week the press has yet another story about security breaches or stolen data at some of the world’s largest companies or government agencies. Sometimes the responsibility for ensuring thorough security resides with an IT security group, and other times it gets outsourced altogether. The responsibility seldom falls to testing teams. However, this is changing. Having trained and experienced testers hunt for security bugs will make web applications safer from hackers and will further protect consumers, corporate assets, and brands.. Scott Aziz offers some practical techniques that will help you get started. |
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Traditional Test Engineering, Your Days Are Numbered In the first installment of this article, Dr. James Whittaker discussed turning testing on its head—to revitalize and improve the value of late-stage testing. James also discussed ideas behind empowering your dogfooders, testers, and the crowd to significantly and efficiently improve software quality. In part two, Jason Arbon discusses the research and engineering experimentation behind realizing these ideas into new tools and processes. |
Conference Presentations
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Building Quality into Your Release Pipeline
Slideshow
Decreasing the time to market has become critical for many organizations. This heightened focus on speed has fundamentally changed the way software is designed, developed, released, and tested. Not long ago, it would have been common to see release testing efforts that took weeks or even months. Today, in many instances, QA instead only has days or hours to complete their testing efforts. Stepping up to this challenge is not easy, but it's essential. Troy Walsh will talk about adding quality to your release pipeline, starting by looking at what a release pipeline is and how it works. Building on that, Troy will explore how you can plug in automated and manual testing efforts, and then look at some of the tools that can make plugging into this pipeline relatively painless. Finally, he will walk through a fully built-out release pipeline so you can see how these concepts and tools can be leveraged in a real-world setting. |
Troy Walsh
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Escaping the 9 Circles of Agile Hell
Slideshow
Does it feel like you're toiling away in agile hell? Fear not—you don't have to be confined there for all eternity. Dave Bujard and Chris Stemen will describe the nine circles of agile hell, each an example of a problem that exists in many programs. They'll discuss the underlying issues that often are the cause and how to deal with them. Bring your smartphones—during the first five minutes, Dave and Chris will ask the audience to prioritize their pain points via an interactive app. During the presentation, they will focus on the six agile hells closest to participants' experiences. Threaded throughout the presentation, you will be engaged to poll your experiences as Dave and Chris convey specific, real examples of “escaping” from each agile hell. Learn to expand your toolbox of techniques to help your organization ascend from the agile underworld in simple, achievable ways. |
David Bujard
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Building Healthy Agile and DevOps Teams
Slideshow
The tools and technologies our teams rely on to build solutions are changing faster every day. New frameworks, new tools, transformations to DevOps, and migrations to public cloud are all putting strain on our teams. These changes drive a natural entropy as key-person dependencies form, hurting quality and throughput and leading to morale issues and attrition. Lee Eason has been watching this happen over the past several years and has developed a tool and an approach to address it. You will learn practical approaches to help you build a culture of continuous learning within your teams in order to meet these challenges head on. With a thoughtful approach, you can build a team of T-shaped professionals who use technology innovations to the organization's advantage. |
Lee Eason
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Dig In: Get Familiar with the Code to Be a Better Tester
Slideshow
Maybe you’ve been testing the same application for a while and your rate of finding new bugs has slowed. Or you’re trying to find more ways to figure out what your devs are doing day to day. You have the tools at your disposal—you just need to dig in! Hilary Weaver-Robb will share tools and techniques you can use to take your testing to the next level. See everything the developers are changing, and learn how you can find the most vulnerable parts of the code. These strategies can help you focus your testing and track down those pesky bugs! Take away a better understanding of tools to conduct static analysis on the code, and use these results to find potential bugs. You'll discover ways to use commit logs to figure out what’s being changed and understand why it’s helpful to dig into the code of the application under test. |
Hilary Weaver-Robb
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