|
Credibility: Your Key to Success as a Test Manager For test managers and testers, credibility is everything. Without credibility, people won't take you seriously or believe your findings. There are very specific and achievable things every test manager can and should do to make sure the information conveyed to stakeholders is accurate and reliable. Randall Rice talks about the credibility factors you need to exhibit for success: knowledge, attitude, objectivity, accuracy, trust, and attention to detail. With real-world examples, Randall teaches you to build long-term trust with creative ways to document test findings and present to your stakeholders the information they want-when they need to know it. Take away a list of eight credibility killers, and learn how to rebuild you team's credibility once it is lost.
- A template for assessing your team’s present credibility rating
- Ways to deliver accurate and timely information to all project stakeholders
|
Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services Inc
|
|
Inside The Masters' Mind: Describing the Tester's Art Exploratory testing is both a craft and a science. It requires intuition and critical thinking. Traditional scripted test cases usually require much less practice and thinking, which is perhaps why, in comparison, exploratory testing is often seen as "sloppy," "random," and "unstructured." How, then, do so many software projects routinely rely on it as an approach for finding some of its most severe bugs? If one reason is because it lets testers use their intuition and skill, then we should not only study how that intuition and skill is executed, but also how it can be cultivated and taught to others as a martial art. Indeed, that's what has been happening for many years, but only recently have there been major discoveries about how an exploratory tester works and a new effort by exploratory testing practitioners and enthusiasts to create a vocabulary.
|
Jon Bach, Quardev Laboratories
|
|
Your Development and Testing Processes Are Defective Verification at the end of a software development cycle is a very good thing. However, if verification routinely finds important defects, then something is wrong with your process. A process that allows defects to build up-only to be found and corrected later-is a process filled with waste. Processes which create long list of defects are . . . defective processes. A quality process builds quality into the software at every step of development, so that defect tracking systems become obsolete and verification becomes a formality. Impossible? Not at all. Lean companies have learned how wasteful defects and queues can be and attack them with a zero tolerance policy that creates outstanding levels of quality, speed, and low cost-all at the same time. Join Mary Poppendieck to learn how your organization can become leaner.
|
Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC
|
|
The Case for Peer Review The $1 billion bug and why no one talks about peer code review.
It was only supposed to take an hour.
The bad news was that we had a stack of customer complaints. The latest release had a nasty bug that slipped through QA. The good news was that some of those complaints included descriptions of the problem - an unexpected error dialog box - and one report had an attached log file. We just had to reproduce the problem using the log and add this case to the unit tests. Turn around a quick release from the stable branch and we're golden.
|
|
|
Process Perspective: Keep All Re-use in mind in the Software Development Process Software re-use is a worthy and noble ideal to aim for during any development, but why not let's take a bigger picture view of the whole software development environment. Make the goal to set up our process so that as much as possible is re-used on subsequent projects. Here are some thoughts on achieving this.
|
|
|
Principles of Agile Version Control: From Object-oriented Design to Project-oriented Branching In this article, the authors explore translation of object-oriented design principles to codelines, branching, and promotion. In addition, they expand on the concept of moving from task-based development (TBD) to project-oriented branching (POB).
|
|
|
What Links the Requirements to Tests in Development Today? What’s happened to the links between requirements and tests? How do we know what to test and when? How do we, and the customers, know we got the system being built right? What’s the traceability between the two disciplines?
|
|
|
Characteristics of the Agile SCM Solution This article focuses on the characteristics of SCM solutions, tool, and environments that are necessary to for agile development to succeed, particularly about agile SCM striving to be as transparent and "frictionless", automating as much as possible.
|
|
|
Is Continuous Integration Just Another Buzz Word? Last month we wrote that we would be addressing some questions and concerns raised by readers who gave us feedback on previous articles. We still intend to address these concerns. However, since the theme for this month (continuous integration) is one of the core "enabling practices" of agile methods like extreme programming, we felt it necessary to shift our focus this month to cover it instead of what we had originally intended.
|
|
|
ABCs of a Branching and Merging Strategy Branching is both simple and complex. For many, it is challenging to know where to begin. This article hopes to provide a starting point, by highlighting branching concepts, providing reasons for branching, and suggesting an approach to establish a branching and merging strategy.
|
|