What do testers need to do differently to be successful on an agile project? How can agile development teams employ testers’ skills and experience for maximum value to the project? Janet Gregory describes the seven key factors she has discovered for testers to succeed on agile teams. She explains the whole-team approach of agile development that enables testers to do their job more effectively. Then, Janet explores the “agile testing mindset” that contributes to a tester’s success. She describes the different kind of information that testers on an agile team need to obtain, create, and provide for the team and product owner. Learn the role that test automation plays in the fast-paced development within agile projects, including regression and acceptance tests. By adhering to core agile practices while keeping the bigger picture in mind, testers add significant value to and help ensure the success of agile projects.

Although finding and fixing a defect can improve software quality, often its greatest value is to use the defect as a catalyst for preventing a similar problem in the future. If you identify a defect's preventable cause and permanently correct the issue, your organization can quickly recoup the costs to find, fix, and clean-up a defect. Root cause analysis is a powerful technique that has long been used in manufacturing industries to learn from mistakes. Randy Rice presents a simple way to adapt this technique to the software in your organization. Randy recommends practicing root cause analysis on different classes of defects before deploying it on a wider scale. The beauty of this simple approach is that any organization can apply it with minimal investment. Learn the pitfalls to avoid and how to isolate the root cause from other contributing causes to make your defects pay.

Workflow-based Web application security defects are especially difficult on enterprises because they evade traditional simple point-and-scan vulnerability detection techniques. Understanding these defects, and how and why black-box scanners typically miss them, is the key to creating a testing strategy for successful detection and mitigation. Rafal Los describes the critical role that application testers play in assessing application workflows and how business process-based testing techniques uncover these flaws. Rafal demystifies the two main types of workflow-based application vulnerabilities: business process/logic vulnerabilities and parameter-based vulnerabilities. As the complexity of Web applications continues to increase, learn how to adjust your testing strategy to make sure you don’t miss these unique types of defects.

Test automation efforts frequently fail because of unrealistic expectations, often the result of choosing poor objectives for automation. Dorothy Graham explains the pitfalls of a number of commonly-held objectives for automation and describes characteristics of good automation objectives. These objectives seem sensible at first and are common in organizations-find more bugs, run regression tests overnight and weekends, reduce testing staff, reduce elapsed time for testing, and automate x% of the testing. Finding more bugs is a good objective for testing, but not for automation, especially automation of regression tests. Running tests outside working hours is only worth doing if the tests are worth running. Reducing testing staff is a management issue, not an automation objective-in the majority of cases, more staff is needed, not less!