In the coming years, testers will be placed under ever increasing pressure. Joachim Herschmann describes key future trends including the increasing alignment of development and test with business needs, the integration of traditionally separate disciplines, a shared responsibility for quality, and the increased use of testing technology. Joachim describes the experiences of Borland's Linz development lab as a framework for a broader discussion about these kinds of changes and their cultural impact on the organization. He describes the journey from a waterfall-based methodology to an iterative, sprint-based development approach and the integration of developers and testers into a single team of engineers. They found that agile development provided new levels of productivity and value-and posed new challenges of shortened test cycles and a need for new test skills and tools.

Although many businesses have successfully outsourced software development and testing activities, managing a truly globally distributed test organization comes with a unique set of challenges. Traditional test processes often break down under the pressure of multiple time zones, varying cultures, and numerous technology issues. Communicating standard test procedures, managing exit criteria, and determining release readiness are all more difficult. Anu Kak provides insight into the practices he has employed in his professional career to manage multi-country, distributed test organizations. These practices range from a one-stop portal for communicating goals and status for all phases of development and testing to opportunities for cross-global teams to collaborate on solving test, development, and automation issues.

Many test organizations believe a new methodology or test automation architecture is necessary to fix problems and make significant improvements in how the business values testing. Molly Mahai proves this assumption wrong as she describes one test team's journey from chaos to credibility. She describes how they overcame the challenges of mistrust between development and test, and management’s skepticism and distrust. By using the techniques of empowerment, coaching, delegation, and some creative group activities, Molly illustrates how small changes-implemented over time-resulted in dramatic improvements for the test team and the overall organization. These changes helped foster an environment where developers and testers work together and management trusts the test group’s work and their assessments. These techniques are easy to apply and require neither more budget nor management approval.

As a tester or test manager, you probably have wondered just how important reasoning and rational thinking actually are in many management decisions. It seems that many decisions are influenced by far more-or far less-than thoughtful analysis. Surprise! Testers make decisions every day that are just as irrational as those made by the managers about whom they complain. James Lyndsay presents his view of tester bias—why we so often labor under the illusion of control, how we lock onto the behaviors we're looking for, and how two testers can use the same evidence to support opposing positions. Using demonstrations and entertaining real-life stories, James helps you understand how biases can affect our everyday testing activities. Gain a new perspective on why timeboxes work and why independence really matters.