Because the mobile market is extremely dynamic, maintaining consistent application quality is always difficult. Managing the risk exposures with mobile apps and embedded software requires comprehensive testing of a wide variety of platforms operating on multiple networks. Testers have to contend with short development cycles that require continuous QA efforts. Three key building blocks are required to overcome these obstacles: device-agnostic automation, access to a large selection of handsets and tablets, and ways to seamlessly apply your existing testing tools, skills, and knowledge to mobile. From his experience working with enterprises going mobile, Eran Yaniv shares the do's and don'ts for selecting an enterprise-grade mobile testing and automation platform, and offers his analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches.

The Test Maturity Model integration® (TMMi®) model, developed to complement the CMMI® framework, is rapidly becoming the test process improvement model of choice in Europe, Asia, and the US. Erik van Veenendaal, one of the developers of TMMi, describes the model’s five maturity levels-Initial, Managed, Defined, Management and Measurement, and Optimization-and the key testing practices required at each level. The model’s definition of maturity levels provides the basis for standardized TMMi assessments and certification, enabling companies to consistently deploy testing practices and collect industry metrics. The benefits of using the TMMi model include an improvement of testing methods, reduction in costs, and improved product quality.

If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be missed or glossed over. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and the scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, collecting great examples that explore typical, alternate, and error scenarios. Rob shares many examples of how agile stories can be broken into a variety of test-related tasks for implementing infrastructure, data, non-functional attributes, privacy, security, robustness, exploration, regression, and business rules.

On agile teams, testing is an ongoing activity-not a phase or a role. Even today many agile development teams struggle with this concept. Janet Gregory explains how testing activities are included throughout the agile process and the highest value activities a tester can add to the team. Sharing her extensive work experience, Janet describes the importance of collaboration and simplicity in activities such as automation, acceptance test-driven development, and exploratory testing. Janet uses the agile testing quadrants model to provide a framework for identifying testing needs at all levels-user story, product feature, and project. As Janet presents this overview of agile testing practices, you’ll have an opportunity through discussions and exercises to understand how agile practices fit together.