General Management

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in testing will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning.

Test management doesn't exist in the world of agile, or rather test managers don't—or do they? Agile methods such as Scrum have many traditional test management activities built in. With practices like self-organizing teams, role blurring, and skill diversification, the face of test management is changing. But is that a bad thing? Tom Roden and Ben Williams explore the key tenets of test management in an agile context, the likely dispersal of traditional responsibilities, and the profound effect on teams and managers.

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.

Most traditional teams do testing at least twice—once during development as new features are created and again during release candidate testing right before release. As a system grows, regression testing takes more and more time, making tight releases impossible—or at least risky—and adding to the burden of maintaining automated tests. Matt Heusser suggests that adopting continuous integration (with its continuous testing) and continuous delivery (with its associated production monitoring) can eliminate the need for classic regression testing.

Have you found yourself forced to use outdated test tools because the cost to migrate was prohibitive? Have you abandoned or rewritten existing tests because it was easier (and cheaper) than migrating? With technology ever changing, most businesses struggle to keep up with producing high-quality products for the lowest price possible. And it is usually testers who suffer the most, as they are forced to use tools that are outdated, or no longer supported, because the company cannot afford the migration cost.

When we talk about product quality, test team efficiency, and productivity, we always talk numbers. However, very few companies implement metrics programs in a way that supports solid decision making. Many have tried and failed, leaving a negative impression of metrics. Kris Kosyk explains what metrics like Defect Removal Efficiency tell us and how it is impacted by Test Coverage and Defect Backlog Change Rate. Moving up a level, Kris explains how to use operational testing metrics to understand the development lifecycle process.