Better Software Magazine

Everyone has a unique perspective on problems at work. Help your problems make it to the top of the queue by expressing them in terms of business value.

Much like the biblical horsemen of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death, the "Four Horsemen of the Testing Apocalypse" ride into our lives and work bearing great challenges. If the software of tomorrow is to be better than the software of today, we must face these foes directly.

For development, a production application should be fully baked and not in what would be considered a “development” state. Tracy Ragan explains that frequent releases are a basic requirement of rapid development methodologies like agile and this impacts the way in which development teams and production control teams must interact.

Brooke Bowie explains how "adaptive" software testing provides nimble, high-value software test solutions that bend and shift with the changing needs of the market or the environment. High-value testing does not mean that you need to perform all end-to-end testing or run the full suite of tests; this can potentially create a bottleneck and dampen the velocity. Adaptive tests are always targeted at the most relevant business and quality goals.