Software Testing

You want to integrate skilled testing and development work. But how do you accomplish this without developers accidentally subverting the testing process or testers becoming an obstruction? Efficient, deep testing requires “critical distance” from the development process, commitment and planning to build a testable product, dedication to uncovering the truth, responsiveness among team members, and often a skill set that developers alone—or testers alone—do not ordinarily possess.

Many projects implicitly use some kind of risk-based approach for prioritizing testing activities. However, critical testing decisions should be based on a product risk assessment process using key business drivers as its foundation. For agile projects, this assessment should be both thorough and lightweight. Erik van Veenendaal discusses PRISMA (PRoduct RISk MAnagement), a highly practical method for performing systematic product risk assessments. Learn how to employ PRISMA techniques in agile projects using Risk Poker.

Ever feel like your manager, development manager, product manager, product owner, or ____ (you fill in the blank) is not listening to you or your team? Are you struggling to make an impact with your messages? Are you “pushing a wet rope uphill” in championing product quality? Are you talking, but no one is listening? Mike Sowers shares practical examples of how to more effectively speak like a test manager and offers concrete advice based on his experiences in the technology, financial, transportation, and professional services sectors.

Testers frequently feel that they and their contributions to delivering software are undervalued. These feelings may stem from patterns of important defects being de-prioritized, receiving lower salaries than their peers who code, being assigned seemingly pointless tasks, or being expected to “test comprehensively” with insufficient time and resources (that tend to shrink as the target release date approaches). If you’ve experienced these feelings, you’ve probably wondered “What does senior management value if not the information testers provide?!?” If so, here are some answers.

Test process improvement can be done in many ways. In a top-down approach a central organization does all the planning, and then implementation is done when everything is ready. In a bottom-up approach the improvements, developed and implemented in individual projects, are then spread throughout the organization.

Quality assurance professionals have an arsenal of tried-and-true techniques for assessing and improving quality. Many of these revolve around the concept of risk. When quality professionals focus on risk, they generally focus on areas where defects would be the most damaging, rather than areas in which defects are most likely to be found. In recent years, the maturation of big data mining and predictive analysis tools have made it practical to predict where defects in an application are likely to reside.

Thousands of times each day, network perimeter security defenses fail to recognize new and obfuscated attacks. Rather than attempting to build security firewalls, Declan O’Riordan asserts that project teams must design, code, and test security into applications―and that requires skills that are in short supply. As testers, we need to recognize which security tests we can perform and which require delegation to experts. Let’s stop our passive acceptance of designs that are weak on security and instead conduct analysis of the security features before we plan the system testing.

Have you ever stood in line at midnight to buy the latest release of a product? Have you worked on a product that created such delight in customers that they camped out overnight to be the first to buy it? Though this level of customer devotion is rare, it is possible to create everyday products that your customers will love. In the past, the designers and developers have received the lion’s share of the credit, but the role of quality teams is just as important in creating this level of success.