Articles

Exploratory Testing: Why Is It Not Ideal for Agile Projects? Exploratory Testing: Why Is It Not Ideal for Agile Projects?

As the Agile environment has efficient principles that allow quick responses to changes and the ability to deal with uncertainty, exploratory testing may seem like a perfect match for such projects. However, this is only partially true. In reality, diverse reasons impede its usage in Agile projects, and companies should take them into account before designing QA strategies.

Vitaly  Prus's picture Vitaly Prus
Signs Build or Buy? 5 Reasons Why Your Application Needs an Error Monitoring System Versus Building Your Own

The best way to ensure users have a positive customer experience is to use error monitoring to catch errors in real time so you can respond immediately. Error monitoring provides hope for avoiding poor app store ratings and for keeping customers satisfied.

James Smith's picture James Smith
Computer showing fire on the screen Strengthening System Resilience with Chaos Engineering

Testing continuous technological change can seem like chaos. There are many challenges that need to be managed, such as unavailability of power, excessive temperature, incorrect configuration, unexpected behavior of services, network downtime, and processing slowdown in production. By deliberately engineering chaos, we’ll be able to discover many of our systems’ weaknesses before our users do.

QA professionals performing continuous testing How Continuous Testing Is Done in DevOps

DevOps does speed up your processes and make them more efficient, but companies must focus on quality as well as speed. QA should not live outside the DevOps environment; it should be a fundamental part. If your DevOps ambitions have started with only the development and operations teams, it’s not too late to loop in testing. You must integrate QA into the lifecycle in order to truly achieve DevOps benefits.

Junaid Ahmed's picture Junaid Ahmed

Better Software Magazine Articles

QA Is More Than Being a Tester QA Is More Than Being a Tester

QA testers often take on more of a role than just testing software code. When the team needs help, QA should lend a hand in assisting with business analysis, customer communication, user experience, and user advocacy.

Amanda Perkins's picture Amanda Perkins
Achieving Continuous Improvement and Innovation in Software

There is tremendous pressure on software development teams to deliver software faster, better, and cheaper. Quality engineering with a focus on innovation is the answer

Michael Sowers's picture Michael Sowers
veggies and gems Alternate Testing Models: A Tale of Veggies and Precious Gems

As if working at Lego isn’t fun enough, Sherri Sobanski delights in finding new ways to test. Faced with a situation requiring a complete product redesign, she shares the route her team took to overhaul testing.

Sherri Sobanski's picture Sherri Sobanski
Quality Assurance Is a Process, Not a Department

QA is often considered that lonely department of testers whose job is to find defects before the customer does. It's not always glamorous, but QA deserves to be recognized as a key cog in the testing  machine. To achieve business goals, it is Susan Bradley's view that the QA process needs to be embraced throughout the entire software development lifecycle.

Susan Bradley's picture Susan Bradley

Interviews

Melissa Benua Whole Team Quality: A Conversation with Melissa Benua
Video

Melissa Benua, director of engineering at mParticle, chats with TechWell community manager Owen Gotimer about the importance of whole team quality, how to get started using the test pyramid, and how developers can start writing testable code.

Owen Gotimer's picture Owen Gotimer
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
Gene Gotimer Understanding the Role of QA in DevOps: An Interview with Gene Gotimer
Video

Gene Gotimer, senior architect at Coveros Inc., discusses understanding the role of QA in DevOps, DevOps educational tools, trusting your team, and paid and open source security tools.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Sam Kaufman Why Bug Reporting Is More Important than Ever Before: An Interview with Sam Kaufman

In this interview, Sam Kaufman, the founder and CTO of BugReplay, explains why most teams don’t put enough emphasis on bug reporting—even though agile and DevOps have made it even more important than before. He also details where DevOps can improve and where he sees it in five years.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin

Conference Presentations

STARCANADA 2019 Taming Your Dragon: From No QA to Fully Integrated QA
Slideshow

Many companies struggle with their QA processes and think of them as bottlenecks to their releases. Join Priyanka on her journey of transforming QA and improving its reputation and reliability.

Priyanka Halder
STARCANADA 2019 3 Steps to QA Success from a VP of Quality Assurance
Slideshow

Are you a leader with a quality problem? Every organization struggles with quality at some point in their product lifecycle. Knowing what to measure and how to build a culture of quality with specific and actionable methods is key.

Karen Holliday
STARCANADA 2019 Enabling Enterprise Quality
Slideshow

Too often quality is identified as solely owned by the quality assurance team. By taking a broader approach to roles, tools, and ideology, you can restructure your vision of how to provide rapid, frequent releases that empower all delivery team members.

Mike Cullen
Scaling Quality through Community Leadership
Slideshow

Modern software development organizations often build teams around features. Unfortunately, these teams tend to become siloed, building tools and processes without being aware of how other teams have solved the same problems.

Philip Daye

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