tools

Articles

Question Mark Cucumber for BDD—How Effective Is It?

Whether to use Cucumber and BDD (Behavior Driven Development) is an old topic and a lot has been shared regarding this already. However I believe many times it’s just the high level technical reasons that make it to the forefront of the argument on how effective it is, and I want to address the topic from a holistic point of view and not just technical.

Akash Bhatia's picture Akash Bhatia
Pyramid in Egypt Inverting the Test Automation Pyramid

A growing company was tasked to develop a test automation program from scratch, change its coding practices, and build a continuous testing toolchain. Martin Ivison details how they did it, including realizing that implementing the traditional test pyramid wasn't going to work—it would have to be turned upside down. They found out that small is beautiful, cheap is good, and cultural change matters.

Martin Ivison's picture Martin Ivison
Circle made of arrows Why You Need Continuous Testing in DevOps

DevOps is more than adopting the right set of tools; it's a cultural shift that incorporates testing at each stage of the agile project lifecycle. Continuous testing is key to unlocking this culture change because it weaves testing activities into every part of the software design, development, and deployment processes, which helps everyone involved communicate more, collaborate better, and innovate faster.

Tom Alexander's picture Tom Alexander
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

Better Software Magazine Articles

The Amazing Benefits of Integrated ALM Tools

For years, developers have struggled with using individual lifecycle management tools, but no longer! Joe Farah walks you through a history and benefits of an integration of ALM tools that every team should seriously consider.

Joe Farah's picture Joe Farah
Why NoSQL Matters and What Configuration Management Experts Need to Know About It

NoSQL is a new approach to data storage that addresses many problems associated with relational databases. Many highly popular websites—including Facebook, Netflix, and Digg—are using NoSQL to crunch large volumes of data. Eugene Dvorkin gives us insight into why NoSQL is important and what CM experts need to know about it.

Eugene Dvorkin's picture Eugene Dvorkin
Practical Security Testing for Web Applications

It seems like every week the press has yet another story about security breaches or stolen data at some of the world’s largest companies or government agencies. Sometimes the responsibility for ensuring thorough security resides with an IT security group, and other times it gets outsourced altogether. The responsibility seldom falls to testing teams. However, this is changing. Having trained and experienced testers hunt for security bugs will make web applications safer from hackers and will further protect consumers, corporate assets, and brands.. Scott Aziz offers some practical techniques that will help you get started.

Scott Aziz's picture Scott Aziz
Traditional Test Engineering, Your Days Are Numbered

In the first installment of this article, Dr. James Whittaker discussed turning testing on its head—to revitalize and improve the value of late-stage testing. James also discussed ideas behind empowering your dogfooders, testers, and the crowd to significantly and efficiently improve software quality. In part two, Jason Arbon discusses the research and engineering experimentation behind realizing these ideas into new tools and processes.

Jason Arbon's picture Jason Arbon

Interviews

Greg Paskal Data Visualization in Test Automation: A Conversation with Greg Paskal
Video

Greg Paskal, test automation lead at Ramsey Solutions, talks about data lakes and how to effectively use data visualization. Done well, data visualization should help practitioners, managers, and stakeholders easily consume, understand, and act on the information the visual displays.

Owen Gotimer's picture Owen Gotimer
Mining a Data Lake to Improve Analysis of Your Test Automation Data: An Interview with Greg Paskal
Video

In this interview, Greg Paskal, a technology innovator in quality assurance, discusses a new open source tool from Elastic Stack that creates a “data lake” that can be mined to analyze the data coming from test automation on a more effective level than pass/fail. 

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Anj Dubey Embedding Performance Engineering into CI/CD: An Interview with Anj Dubey
Video

In this interview, Anj Dubey, director of performance engineering for McGraw-Hill Education, discusses the need to shift left and embed your performance engineering into your CI/CD pipeline in order to ensure that every line of code is going to meet your performance requirements.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Alex Martins Continuous Testing and Open Source Integration: An Interview with Alex Martins
Video

In this interview, Alex Martins, the CTO of continuous quality at CA Technologies, explains how continuous testing, continuous integration, and open source testing tools can help modern software teams keep up with the speed and demands of agile.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine

Conference Presentations

Agile DevOps West Building Quality into Your Release Pipeline
Slideshow

Decreasing the time to market has become critical for many organizations.

Troy Walsh
Agile DevOps West Building Healthy Agile and DevOps Teams
Slideshow

The tools and technologies our teams rely on to build solutions are changing faster every day. New frameworks, new tools, transformations to DevOps, and migrations to public cloud are all putting strain on our teams.

Lee Eason
STAREAST Dig In: Get Familiar with the Code to Be a Better Tester
Slideshow

Maybe you’ve been testing the same application for a while and your rate of finding new bugs has slowed. Or you’re trying to find more ways to figure out what your devs are doing day to day.

Hilary Weaver-Robb
STAREAST The Dell EMC Journey in the Age of Smart Assistants
Slideshow

Dell EMC is driving to optimize and reimagine their testing practices with the application of data-driven smart assistants, powered by analytics and machine learning.

Geoff Meyer

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