The Latest

Several years ago, Peter Clark's company opened an offshore software development team when offshoring was booming. Everyone was doing it, and so would Peter's company, but the results were not so great. In the first installment of a three-part series, Peter explains what happened.

Rather than being an afterthought for SCM, an appropriate testing strategy is what enables an SCM in an agile environment. To be more agile, you need to avoid the silo-based perspective of development, SCM, and testing being three different disciplines. Instead, think about how the processes in one part of your development ecosystem affects what you can do in the others.

The code review checklist is the bane of developers.  Thirty-odd check-boxes await, each requiring thoughtful consideration before the liberating tick mark can be applied.  Twenty source files, freshly altered, are awaiting verification.  The math is simple: 20 x 30 = 600 decisions, no matter how you tackle the problem.  This is going to suck.

Can software test automation ever replace manual software testing? Dion Johnson says no, but he does think it’s time that test automation is recognized as a mature discipline with its own body of knowledge. This ABOK allows test-automation professionals to hone their skills and provides organizations wishing to automate a pool of able resources from which to hire.

If a tester is "somebody who knows that things can be different," then Marshall McLuhan was a tester par excellence. According to McLuhan, the English professor who proposed the Laws of Media, the message of a medium is not its content but rather its effects. Find out how this translates to software testing and how we evaluate requirements.

From an experience with a testing buddy in a large organization, Julie Gardiner had a career-shaping epiphany. She discovered that understanding and applying formal testing techniques can help you grow as a testing professional, and she has incorporated that knowledge into her management repertoire ever since. Learn four ways you can get started using formal testing techniques with your team.

Just because a metric is easy to capture doesn't mean it is useful. The metrics that are really needed are the ones that can help you make good decisions. Find out how to establish a project dashboard with meaningful metrics that will guide your project safely to its destination without getting bogged down in an endless pursuit of unnecessary information.