Have you been thrust into the role of test team leader or are you in this role now and want to hone your leadership skills? Test team leadership has many unique challenges, and many test team leaders—especially new ones—find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the problems they face. The test team leader must motivate and support the team while keeping testing on track within time and budget constraints. Randy Rice focuses on how you can grow as a leader, influence your team and those around you, and positively impact those outside your team. Learn how to become a person of influence, deal with interpersonal issues, and help your team build their skills and value to the team and the organization. Discover how to communicate your team’s value to management, how to stand firm when asked to compromise principles, and how to learn from your successes and failures. Develop your own action plan to become an influential test team leader.

The STEP™ process, introduced to more than 10,000 individuals and implemented in hundreds of organizations, is a flexible, risk-based testing approach that can be integrated into any lifecycle model. Deciding how to focus your testing effort, what elements and areas to test, and how to design and document effective tests are all critical success factors. Dale Perry explains the STEP™ process that provides a framework to make these critical decisions earlier and with more confidence.  You’ll learn about test analysis and how to develop an inventory of test objectives that helps you prioritize all of your testing efforts. Then, you’ll find out how to translate objectives into a concrete strategy for designing and developing tests. Finally, with a prioritized inventory and focused test design, you will be able to create detailed test cases, execute the resulting tests, and report accurately on the effectiveness of the testing and testing process. Take back a proven approach to organize your testing efforts and new ways to add more value to your organization.

Testers and developers who come from traditional software development backgrounds often lack the collaborative skills necessary to work with each other in today’s cross-functional teams. Janet Gregory shares a model—the Agile Testing Quadrants— that describes the different reasons why we test. This model can be used as a trigger to start discussions and encourage collaboration within the project team as well as with external teams or customers. Janet Gregory explores different ways to interact with each other to get and give the best information possible. Using examples of desired system behavior, Janet describes how testers can help define business-facing tests to support programming. Janet uses interactive group exercises, role playing, discussion, and personal experiences to help you learn the interaction techniques to help your team deliver more value to your business. A common vocabulary is a powerful tool for great collaboration efforts, and you’ll increase yours in this tutorial.

Testing generates a huge amount of raw data, which must be analyzed, processed, summarized, and presented to management so effective decisions can be made quickly. As a test manager or tester, how can you present information about your test results so that decision-makers receive the correct message? Using his experiences as a test manager and consultant, Lloyd Roden shares ways to communicate with and disseminate information to management. Develop your skills so you become a “trusted advisor” to senior management rather than the classic “bearer of bad news.” Discover innovative ways to keep the information flowing to and from management and avoid losing control of the test process, particularly near the delivery date. Learn how to deal effectively with various controversies that often prevent senior managers from taking us seriously.

Classification trees are a structured, visual approach used to identify and categorize variables within test objects, enabling testers to build effective and efficient test cases quickly. Julie Gardiner describes the fundamentals of classification trees and how they can be applied in both traditional and agile test environments. Using real-world examples, Julie shows you how to employ the classification tree technique, identifies the benefits and rewards of this technique, explains how it complements other testing approaches, and reveals its value at every stage of testing. She demonstrates a classification tree editor available to aid in building, maintaining, and graphically displaying classification trees. Take back a powerful new approach for overcoming the constant struggle we have when maintaining and assessing the impact of changing requirements on our test suites.