It seemed simple enough-hire the best available technical staff that would work from home to build some great software. Along the way, the team encountered the usual problems: time zone differences, communication headaches, and a surprising regression test monster. Matt Heusser describes how Socialtext built their high-performance development and test team, got the right people on the bus, built a culture of "assume good intent and then just do it," created the infrastructure to enable remote work, and employed a lightweight yet accountable process. Of course, the story has the impossible deadlines, conflicting expectations, unclear roles, and everything you'd get in many development projects. Matt shares how the team cut through the noise, including building a test framework integrated into the product, to achieve their product and quality aims.

Organizations currently are using virtualization in the test lab to eliminate underutilized systems such as physical computers and software. So why not virtualize the costly, overutilized, or completely unavailable elements of the software architecture that have serious access and data issues for testing? These elements required for realistic end-to-end testing-mainframe computers, production systems of record, and computing services hosted by other companies-are often difficult or expensive to access for testing. Rajeev Gupta explains how virtualizing these overutilized systems can make the constraints of capacity, test data, and availability for testing a distant memory. Discover how service virtualization, employed as an adjunct to hardware lab virtualization, eliminates the bottlenecks and data management efforts that stymie many test and development teams.

Users are the ultimate judge of the software we deliver because it is critical to their success and the success of their business. However, as a tester, do you really understand their tasks, skills, motivation, and work style? Are you delivering software that matches their needs and capabilities-or yours? Personas are a way to define user roles-imaginary characters-that represent common sets of characteristics of different users. David shares how his team at Microsoft defined and used one persona named “Ellen” to help them design, develop, and test the first version of a new product. David shares before Ellen and after Ellen examples of the product, showing how the product changed when Ellen joined the team. See examples of the robust test cases and acceptance scenarios they defined from unique insights that Ellen provided.

Charters help you guide and focus exploratory testing. Well-formed charters help testers find defects that matter and provide vital information to stakeholders about the quality and state of the software under test. Rob Sabourin shares his experiences defining different exploratory testing charters for a diverse group of test projects. For example, reconnaissance charters focus on discovering application features, functions, and capabilities; failure mode charters explore what happens to applications when something goes wrong. In addition, you can base charters on what systems do for users, what users do with systems, or simply the requirements, design, or code. Rob reviews key elements of a well-formed testing charter-its mission, purpose, focus, understanding, and scope. Learn how to evolve a test idea into an exploratory charter using examples from systems testing, Scrum story testing, and developer unit testing.