Gathering and presenting clear information about quality-both product and process-may be the most important part of the test manager's job. Join Lloyd Roden as he challenges your current progress reports-probably full of lots of difficult-to-understand numbers-and asks you to replace the reports with a custom Test Manager's Dashboard containing a series of graphs and charts with clear visual displays. Your dashboard needs to report quality and progress status that is accurate, useful, easily understood, predictive, and relevant. Learn about Lloyd's favorite dashboard graphs-test efficiency, risk progress, quality targets, and specific measures of the test team's well being. Learn to correlate and interpret the various types of dashboard data to reveal the complete picture of the project and test progress.

One of the aims of automated functional testing is to run many tests and discover multiple errors in one execution of the test suite. However, when an automated test runs into unexpected behavior-system errors, wrong paths taken, incorrect data stored, and more-the test fails. When a test fails, additional errors, called inherited errors, can result or the entire test can stop unintentionally. Either way, some portion of the system remains untested, and either the error must be corrected or the automation changed before proceeding. Alexandra Imrie describes proven approaches to ensure that the most tests will continue running despite errors encountered. She begins by sharing a specific way of designing tests to minimize the disturbance from an error. Using this test design as a foundation, Alex describes the strategies she exploits for handling and recovering from error events that occur during automated functional tests.

In spite of well-established testing processes, many organizations still are struggling to achieve consistent, reliable testing results. Are testing deliverables completed incorrectly? Is your organization slow to react to change? A Testing Center of Excellence (TCOE) provides oversight of the testing efforts across the enterprise to help provide the best testing services possible and adapt more rapidly to innovations and challenges. Mona Lane shares the strategy Aetna followed to build a successful TCOE. Originally focused on one specific area-test tools-it evolved and continues to expand to encompass all aspects of testing. She shares the checklists they've developed to review testing artifacts for consistency and how these reviews are helping Aetna improve quality.

In their drive to delight customers, organizations initiate testing and quality improvement programs and define metrics to measure their success. In many cases, we see organizations declare success even though their customers do not see much improvement in either products of services. Wenje Lai and J.P. Chen share their approach of identifying quality improvement needs and defining the appropriate metrics that link improvement goals to customer experiences. As a result, the resources allocated to internal quality improvement efforts maximize the value to the business. Their approach is a simple three-step procedure that any test or development organization can easily adopt. It starts with using customer survey data to understand the organization’s customer pain points and ends with identifying the metrics that are linked to the customer experience and actionable by development and test teams inside the organization.