Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference West 2011

Many testers mourn the state of their state-undervalued, unrespected, and often excluded from important project conversations. Even though their advice may be dismissed, many testers somehow believe that they are accountable for software quality. Why does this happen? Testers often forget that they are service providers whose role is to provide critical information to the project’s stakeholders.

Much of the focus on agile transitions is on the team. However, the business side of an organization and the managers that lead it are not particularly interested in the mechanisms of agile teams and processes. They want faster time to market, schedule flexibility, predictability, visibility, better quality, and useful metrics. In other words, they want to know about things that help them get to success and that show when they've achieved it. Alan Shalloway describes agile development from an executive's point of view.

Assaults against digital assets are unquestionably on the rise. If you create applications that handle valuable assets, your code WILL be attacked. In addition to lost revenue and productivity, the consequences of compromised systems can include loss of trust, a tarnished reputation, and legal problems. Much like quality assurance, it’s important to have a holistic approach to security that unifies people, process, and technology.

During the past few years, exploratory testing (ET) has gained popularity as one of the most efficient styles of testing for smaller agile development teams. It has a proven advantage of finding defects faster over larger areas of the software. However, exploratory testing is not a mainstay in large-scale, enterprise product testing. Anutthara Bharadwaj explores some of the myths surrounding ET-lack of planning, misconstruing exploration as ad-hoc testing, lack of metrics, deficiency of actionable data in defect reports, and more.