Articles

Sign reading "Duh!" When the Code Is Too Obvious to Check

How many times does something seem too obvious to check? Most of the time this normal human response is a handy shortcut. Your brain tries to save you time—but you can’t always trust it. If your code malfunctions, each of those "too obvious to check" thoughts will bias your thinking about what caused the malfunction. We have to commit up front, before our thinking crystalizes, that the code will have to prove to us that it is correct.

Steve Poling's picture Steve Poling
Monitoring dashboard with criteria set up Solving Production Issues Using Testing Tools

Standard web-monitoring tools can ping webpages and verify that they’re responding, but they don’t alert you to an issue. But you can use the technology in load testing to monitor your sites by running an interactive script that can detect issues and generate emails as needed. It runs constantly like a silent sentry, never sleeping or taking a vacation, improving your sites' reliability.

Nels Hoenig's picture Nels Hoenig
Car steering wheel photo by Nicolai Berntsen A Case for Test-First Development

You may feel you don't have time to write unit tests, but you really don't have time not to. Steve Poling makes the case that writing tests first not only will yield better code, but will help you get that code working right sooner. Here's how using a test-first approach changes your thinking about coding, lets you see mistakes immediately, and helps you create more testable code.

Steve Poling's picture Steve Poling
telescope Agile Trends to Watch in 2018

With 2018 well underway, it seems like a good time to look ahead and think about what we hope to accomplish this year. Find out which agile trends these software experts are most looking forward to in the coming months.

Heather Shanholtzer's picture Heather Shanholtzer
Image of lock over code DevSecOps: Incorporate Security into DevOps to Reduce Software Risk

DevSecOps is a growing movement to incorporate security into DevOps practices in order to ensure flaws and weaknesses are exposed early on through monitoring, assessment, and analysis, so remediation can be implemented far earlier than traditional efforts. By failing fast with security testing, organizations reduce risk of a security incident and decrease the cost of rework.

Alan Crouch's picture Alan Crouch
Metrics dashboard on a tablet For Great Performance, Rethink Your Load Testing

The word concurrency is often used to define workload for load testing, as in concurrent users. Too often, it's the only input defined. In reality, there are a number of factors that contribute to workload and affect concurrency, and they all contribute to your load testing abilities—and, ultimately, the performance of your product.

Tim Koopmans's picture Tim Koopmans
Infinity symbol Has Continuous Deployment Become a New Worst Practice?

Software development has been moving toward progressively smaller and faster development cycles, and continuous integration and continuous deployment are compressing delivery times even further. But is this actually good for businesses or their users? Just because you can deploy to production quickly and frequently, should you?

John Tyson's picture John Tyson
Legos 100 Percent Unit Test Coverage Is Not Enough

Many people equate 100 percent unit test coverage with high code quality, but that is not enough. Code coverage tools only measure whether the tests execute the code; they make no judgment on the effectiveness of the tests. Testers should review unit tests, even if they have high coverage levels, and either help improve the tests or supplement them with extra tests where necessary.

John Ruberto's picture John Ruberto
Continuous delivery Test Coverage in the Age of Continuous Delivery

Test coverage is a strategy to help us spend scarce testing time on the right priorities. When things were tested last, how much automation coverage we have, how often the customers use the feature, and how critical the feature is to application are all factors to consider. Here are some ideas for keeping quality high when you're transitioning to continuous delivery.

Matt Heusser's picture Matt Heusser
Service virtualization Overcome Test Automation Plateaus with Service Virtualization

With complex enterprise test automation systems, at least some of the many required dependencies are commonly incomplete, unavailable, or operating incorrectly at the time of test execution. The result is timeouts, incomplete tests, false positives, and inaccurate results. Service virtualization can help you overcome this plateau and increase test automation rates.

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