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From One Expert to Another: Paul Poutanen Paul Poutanen has developed extensive mobile expertise working in management for wireless hardware and cellular location firms such as Wi-LAN and Cell-Loc before launching Mob4Hire. In this interview with Jonathan Kohl, Poutanen discusses the complex global testing process for mobile devices.
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Seven Ways to Make Testing Irrelevant on Your Team Testers and developers can be friends. In fact, on teams working at a breakneck pace to deliver software, they must be friendly enough to rely on each other. However, there are a few sure-fire ways to ruin that relationship before it begins—and potentially make testing both irrelevant and unwelcome. Marlena Compton lists seven such ways here, along with suggestions for avoiding disaster.
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Goodhart’s Law Charles Goodhart stated: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." In other words, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
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The Future Is Mobile Technology: An Interview with Jonathan Kohl Jonathan Kohl discusses where he thinks technology is headed, how mobile devices are changing what we test, and what all that time we spend socializing online is doing to workplace productivity.
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The Three Amigos: All for One and One for All Analysts determine what needs to be created. Programmers create it. Testers find the holes in the work of both. That's one way to do it, but all three can collaborate to do these things better, and more easily, too.
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Imaginary Friends: Creating Software with Personas We all want to satisfy our users, but tailoring software to customers is easier said than done. Personas—a method to synthesize your primary users into abstract entities—facilitates understanding of goals and experiences.
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Load Test Your Website Before Your Customers Do When you release a website or web application, it’s going to face a lot of very public load testing. If it performs poorly, there’s a good chance that you’re going to lose a lot of customers. Colin Mason offers some tips for load testing in order to ensure a better customer experience.
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Testing Under Pressure A cast-in-concrete delivery date looms on your project’s horizon. You have precious little time remaining, and the development team keeps delivering incomplete builds of unstable code. Is this a "death march" project, or can the testing team actually do something useful, or perhaps even save the day?
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Quality Requirements: Succeeding with Waterfall Releases While there is much excitement surrounding agile, many complex or outsourced projects do not fare well under agile. In these situations, requirements and architectural design cannot emerge with the software; they need to be defined and documented before coding starts. Filip Szymanski explores important practices in waterfall projects to help ensure requirements quality while speeding up development. First, Filip explains how to speed up waterfall releases by fully engaging QA/test teams in the requirements process. QA/testers can ensure that requirements are testable and validated throughout the release and further accelerate testing by writing requirements-based test cases in parallel with development. In addition, testers can begin test efforts sooner by automating application interfaces below the GUI.
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Filip Syzmanski, HP Software and Solutions
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Specifying Effective Non-functional Requirements Non-functional requirements present unique challenges for authors, reviewers, and testers. They often begin as vague concepts such as "The software must be easy to install" or "The software must be intuitive and respond quickly." As written, these requirements are not testable because they are subjective. Definitions of "easy", "intuitive" and "quickly" are open to interpretation and dependent on the experiences of the reader. In order to be testable, non-functional requirements must be quantifiable and measurable. John Terzakis discusses the subjectivity problems with non-functional requirements-weak words, ambiguity, and unbounded lists. To facilitate the development of quantifiable and testable non-functional requirements, he introduces a solution-Planguage-and its associated keywords.
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John Terzakis, Intel Massachusetts
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