Tools
Articles
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Using Decision Tables for Clear, Well-Designed Testing Decision tables are used to test the interactions between combinations of conditions. They provide a clear method to verify testing of all pertinent combinations to ensure that all possible conditions, relationships, and constraints are handled by the software under test. If you need to make sure your test cases cover all outcomes in a scenario, read on to learn how to use decision tables. |
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Why You Need Continuous Testing in DevOps DevOps is more than adopting the right set of tools; it's a cultural shift that incorporates testing at each stage of the agile project lifecycle. Continuous testing is key to unlocking this culture change because it weaves testing activities into every part of the software design, development, and deployment processes, which helps everyone involved communicate more, collaborate better, and innovate faster. |
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Solving Production Issues Using Testing Tools Standard web-monitoring tools can ping webpages and verify that they’re responding, but they don’t alert you to an issue. But you can use the technology in load testing to monitor your sites by running an interactive script that can detect issues and generate emails as needed. It runs constantly like a silent sentry, never sleeping or taking a vacation, improving your sites' reliability. |
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Designing a Valuable Stress Test If you're in a line of e-commerce that sometimes experiences site-crashing levels of volume, executing periodic stress tests is part of a good business plan. Nels Hoenig works for an electric company, so for his site, the main source of stress is power outages. Here, he details his search for a stress-testing tool, what he learned from the tests, and how he convinced others of the value of these tests. |
Interviews
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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. |
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Why Testers Should Take Control of the AI Narrative: An Interview with Tariq King and Jason Arbon
Video
In this interview, Tariq King, the senior director and engineering fellow for quality and performance at Ultimate Software, and Jason Arbon, the CEO of test.ai, explain the role artificial intelligence plays in modern testing and why you should establish a foundation right now. |
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Create an Accurate Test Estimation Model: An Interview with Shyam Sunder
Video
In this interview, Shyam Sunder, a manager for operations, quality, and testing at Sidra Medicine, explains how you can take different test estimation models and use them for your own real-world scenarios to greatly decrease the variation on your everyday testing. |
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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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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Risk Based Testing: Communicating WHY You Can't Test Everything
Slideshow
The idea of testing everything is a popular one—in fact many stakeholders think that’s exactly what their quality teams do. It usually isn’t and can’t be; but how can teams communicate this? Join Jenny Bramble as she helps to pave the way using the language of risk-based testing. By defining risk in two simple parts, the team and project have a tangible and usable metric. She shares how to apply this metric and use it to determine where the team should focus testing, making it more effective and efficient whilst communicating that effort through the creation of a risk matrix. As a result, risk becomes the right language for the team to communicate clearly and concisely with everyone involved in the project by using agreed-upon words and definitions. Take away a set of tools that can be used to facilitate both better testing and better communication though precise use of language and risk matrixes. |
Jenny Bramble
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Automate Your Application Test Deployments with Docker
Slideshow
In a busy world, testing teams are asked to adopt new approaches to increase speed and flexibility of change. What methods and tools can help? Artem Golubev has seen many testing teams being told to use Docker. But for testers, this brings confusion. What it Docker and why is Docker useful to testers? How can Docker be used to increase confidence in our releases? To help you answer those questions, Artem shares his experience using this popular tool and approach. Starting with terminology Artem shares what is meant by Dockerfile, Docker Image, Docker Container, Compose, Kubernetes, and then explains the advantages and limitations of Docker. He shows how to build a Docker-based deployment in this session and gives Hands-on help. He shows how to add Docker to your own current project on your own machine and how-to setup Kubernetes on Google Compute Cloud. |
Artem Golubev
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Engineering for Compatibility
Slideshow
Modern software development has brought us an incredibly powerful tool: continuous integration and deployment. However, taking advantage of this new system isn’t always straightforward. With powerful new tools come powerful new ways of making mistakes that can take your product down in a heartbeat. Melissa Benua has years of experience making CI and CD work for her, with lots of insights—both good and not so good. Come and learn from her as she shares key tips and tricks for coding and testing for both forward and backward compatibility in software releases. Useful for both traditional testers as well as combined engineers, Melissa provides technical and actionable advice to enable your team to make the right trade-offs and the right time investments, allowing your product to release to your customers safely and successfully. |
Melissa Benua
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