On an agile team everyone tests, blurring the lines between the roles of professional developers and testers. What's so special about becoming an agile test professional? Do you need different skills than testers on traditional projects? What guides you in your daily activities? Lisa Crispin presents her "Top Ten" list of principles that define an agile tester. She explains that when it comes to agile testers, skills are important but attitude is everything. Learn how agile testers acquire the results-oriented, customer-focused, collaborative, and creative mindset that makes them successful in an agile development environment. Agile testers apply different values and principles-feedback, communication, simplicity, continuous improvement, and responsiveness-to add value in a unique way. If you're a tester looking for your place in the agile world or a manager looking for agile testers, Lisa can help.

Many of the misunderstandings within software development organizations can trace their roots to different interpretations of the role of testers. The terms quality control (QC), quality assurance (QA), and quality analysis are often used interchangeably. However, they are quite different and require different approaches and very different skill sets. Quality control is a measurement of the product at delivery compared to a benchmark standard, at which point the decision is made to ship or reject the product. Quality assurance is the systematic lifecycle effort to assure that a product meets expectations in all aspects of its development. It includes processes, procedures, guidelines, and tools that lead to quality in each phase. Quality analysis evaluates historical trends and assesses the future customer needs as well as trends in technology to provide guidance for future system development.

Performance testing that is done once or a few times as part of the system test is not the right approach for many systems that must change and grow for years. Rex Black discusses a different approach--performance engineering--that is far more than performing load testing during the system test. Performance engineering takes a broad look at the environment, platforms, and development processes and how they affect a system's ability to perform at different load levels on different hardware and networks. While load testers run a test before product launch to alleviate performance concerns, performance engineers have a plan for conducting a series of performance tests throughout the development lifecycle and after deployment. A comprehensive performance methodology includes performance modeling, unit performance tests, infrastructure tuning, benchmark testing, code profiling, system validation testing, and production support.

Do you need to execute and then quickly re-execute manual test cases under tight timelines? Do bugs marked as "Cannot Reproduce" bouncing back and forth between developers and testers frustrate your team? Would you like to have more realistic, production-like test data? Join Tanya Dumaresq as she explains the hows and whys of developing and using pre-created, reloadable test data for manual testing. By planning ahead when designing test cases, you can cut test execution time in half and virtually eliminate those "works on my machine" bugs. Learn how to create and load test data in different formats and choose the one that is best for your application under test. Sometimes, you can even use the application itself to create the data! You'll end up with test data and an environment far more representative of your users' world than if you create data on the fly during test execution.