Articles
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Helpful Tips for Hiring Better Testers Isaac Howard describes how his experience in hiring staff taught him to interview better and recognize who are the best picks for a standout team of testers. According to Isaac, the best job candidates are driven to learn and capable of adapting to change, two traits crucial to testing. Remember, testing is learning and relearning software every day. |
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How Pervasive Leadership Can Help You Manage Successful Projects Jean Richardson shares a story about how the idea of pervasive leadership can help you manage a successful project. In order to practice pervasive leadership, one must change one's mental model of "I" and "thou," act locally and think holistically, and enact empathetic stewardship. |
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The Three Pillars of Positive Psychology Positive psychology encourages positive and effective behaviors that help to bring out desired traits, and it applies well to many business and technical situations. Leslie Sachs explains the third pillar of positive psychology, which is related to organizational psychology and is of great interest to anyone who wants to be part of an effective institution. |
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Operations Teams and Learned Helplessness Leslie Sachs writes how dysfunctional operations teams are often a consequence of a dysfunctional organizational culture that breeds distrust and results in employees who just sit back and allow disasters to occur. If you want your organization to be successful, you need to ensure that you drive out any aspect of learned helplessness and embrace a positive culture that enjoys a can-do attitude! |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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All Customers Are Not Created Equal Software developers may not think they have much to do with customers, but it is wise to consider the customer in all you do, from collecting requirements to design and implementation. |
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Saying No to More Work We’ve all been placed in the situation where a boss asks you to perform more work than you can possibly handle. Johanna Rothman knows firsthand that there is a better way to respond that benefits you and your manager. |
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Cracking the Code on Millennials Our latest generation of programmers, project managers, and testers is perceived to be uninterested, unmotivated, and difficult to manage. Jason Garber presents innovative techniques you can use to lead your next rising star. |
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Planning to Performance Test Your App? Think Again! To complement functional validation, software teams are expected to validate performance. But, according to Jun Zhuang, you must be prepared to invest time, personnel, and resources to benefit from performance testing. |
Interviews
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8 Ways to Ruin Your One-on-Ones: An Interview with Jason Wick
Video
In this interview, Jason Wick, senior manager at MakeMusic, discusses his STAREAST presentation about eight ways you could be making your one-on-one meetings completely useless. He discusses in depth what he feels is the number one way to ruin these meetings: holding back on feedback. He also offers advice on how you can educate your team leader to avoid the pitfalls that lead to ineffective one-on-ones. |
Conference Presentations
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The Reality Distortion Field of Testing
Slideshow
The reality distortion field (RDF) is a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computers in 1981 to describe Steve Job's charisma and its effect on the developers working on the Macintosh project. |
Lloyd Roden
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Agile Distributed Teams: Oxymoron or Viable Option?
Slideshow
Many surveys indicate that more teams work in distributed environments. But agile approaches work best when people collocate, huddle around a problem, and closely collaborate on the best solutions that will deliver value. Is collocation the only option these days? Does distributed always imply “dysfunctional”? Does technology help or hinder? Maybe the problem is how we think about the working environment. Mark Kilby will share key principles of successful distributed agile teams that help define better working environments. Understand how the principles apply to different types of distributed teams, and discover how agile practices change in distributed teams and how they may vary from team to team. You'll take back ways to assess your current distributed team environment and generate ideas for improvement. |
Mark Kilby
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Why Military Veterans Make Exceptional Testers
Slideshow
Hiring trained talent has been a challenge for IT organizations for several years now. How do you find a steady source of qualified candidates for entry-level QA and QE positions, especially considering colleges and universities don't include a software quality assurance curriculum?... |
Brenda Hall
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The Art of Software Investigation
Slideshow
Although processes and tools play an important role in software testing, the most important testing tool is the mind. Like scientists, testers search for new knowledge and share discoveries—hopefully for the betterment of people’s lives. More than sixty years ago, William I.B. Beveridge reframed discussion of scientific research in his classic book The Art of Scientific Investigation. Rather than add to the many texts on the scientific method, he focused on the mind of the scientist. Join Ben Simo as he applies Beveridge’s principles and techniques for scientific investigation to software testing today. Learn to discover and communicate new knowledge that matters; to think—and test—like scientists; and to continually prepare, experiment, exploit chance, imagine productively, apply intuition and reason, tune observation, and overcome resistance. |
Ben Simo
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