Conference archive

Better Software East 2016 - Agile Testing

Monday, November 14

MG

Docker Fundamentals Jumpstart

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Docker is a mechanism for low-overhead virtualization that is emerging as a key aspect of DevOps architectures. Interest in Docker—with its lightweight, portable, “build once, configure once, and run anywhere” containers—is growing. Aater Suleman presents and demonstrates best practices, pitfalls, and practical advice from real-world case studies using Docker. Aater discusses basic Docker concepts, Docker terminology, Docker commands, must-know Docker features, and real-world examples of Docker projects. He focuses on eight common use cases and explores the...

Ken Pugh
Net Objectives
MI

Acceptance Test-Driven Development

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase...

Tuesday, November 15

Bob Aiello
CM Best Practices Consulting
TA

Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices, starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations. Bob explains how to...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TC

What DevOps Means for Testers

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

DevOps is more than a buzzword or passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly delivering high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle....

Robin Goldsmith
Go Pro Management, Inc.
TE

Writing Agile User Story and Acceptance Test Requirements

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Poor requirements are often the major cause of project problems. Yet nobody does much about them—at least not effectively. Traditional approaches advocate writing voluminous requirements documents that often don’t help much and may even contribute to difficulties. Agile goes to the opposite extreme, relying on brief requirements in the form of three-line user stories that fit on the front of an index card and a few user story acceptance criteria that fit on the card’s back. In this exercise-focused interactive workshop, Robin Goldsmith reveals reasons user stories...

Rob_Sabourin
amibug.com
TH

The Tester’s (New) Role in Agile Development

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills...

Rob_Sabourin
amibug.com
TL

Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Agile teams are charged with delivering potentially shippable software at the end of each iteration. In fact, some high-performing agile teams with advanced automation can ship working software every day. They achieve regression confidence with extensive automated test suites and other advanced practices. Rob Sabourin shares automation techniques to improve story and feature testing, exploratory testing, and regression testing. Explore ways to fully integrate testing into agile delivery teams by combining test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and...

Wednesday, November 16

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AW1

The Business of Agile: Better, Faster, Cheaper

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Ryan Ripley relates that during his last agile transformation project, a key stakeholder asked, “Why are we adopting agile?” Ryan talked about increasing quality, delivering software sooner, and fostering a more collaborative relationship with business partners. After a few moments, the stakeholder raised his hand and said, “I get all that. But how is all of this agile stuff any better, faster, or cheaper than what we do today?” Ryan says that leaders must answer the better, faster, cheaper question if they want their agile transformation and associated projects...

Adam Serediuk
xMatters, Inc.
DW1

From Ops to DevOps—and Beyond

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 11:30am

Join Adam Serediuk on his journey leading change during the transition from IT Ops to DevOps and the driving forces behind making this change. In this non-tool talk, Adam describes the cultural and organizational approaches, challenges, and techniques his company used in establishing successful DevOps teams and their continuing journey toward NoOps. Adam outlines the steps his organization took to reshape its operations and development teams along with the reasons and the opportunities for making those changes—with tradeoffs and benefits. Any IT Ops team trying to...

Brandon Carlson
Lean TECHniques, Inc.
AW4

Unconventional Agility: Beyond Dogma

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

You’re agile. You talk the talk and walk the walk. Just like the twelfth principle of the Agile Manifesto says—“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”—you have regular retrospectives. So, why are your agile practices, whether based on Scrum or SAFe or even XP, the same as everyone else’s? Brandon Carlson explores another agile principle that often seems to be forgotten: “Simplicity—Maximizing the amount of work not done is essential.” Using a case study example, Brandon shows you...

David Bernstein
To Be Agile
AW5

Five XP Practices for Agile Development

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

David Bernstein says that the core of Extreme Programming (XP) is comprised of five development practices: automating the build for continuously integrating software as it is written, collaborating with team members through pair programming, practicing agile design skills that enable testability, using test-first development to drive design, and refactoring code to reduce technical debt. Together, these five technical practices are essential for sustained success with XP and for many of the best agile teams. However, quite a few agile teams haven’t been exposed...

Lee Eason
Ipreo
DW3

DevOps Is More than Dev and Ops: It’s about Tearing Down Walls

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

The word DevOps is quickly becoming the new Agile—an overused word that has lost its meaning. Cutting through the jargon, Lee Eason gets to the heart of what DevOps means, where it came from, and why it is crucial for your company to embrace it. If you want to deliver on the promise of agile—to improve quality and reduce time to market—you must understand and implement DevOps. Lee shares three mechanisms of change—enablement, mentoring, and coaching—you can use to drive the transformation, as well as key performance indicators to measure your progress along the...

Abraham Marin-Perez
Equal Experts
DW4

Make Your Continuous Deployment Pipeline as Fast as Possible

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) have been key to increasing the pace at which development teams can deliver value to the business while keeping quality high. However, many teams are finding that their build pipelines are hard to manage, with builds taking so long that they often halt the development process. Abraham Marin-Perez explores the negative effects of long builds and discusses the most common solutions that organizations apply—many of which involve unfortunate compromises that reduce the benefits of CI/CD. In order to fix this...

Satish Thatte
Independent Consultant
AW8

Develop Your Agile Planning Playbook

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Agile planning is often misinterpreted to mean minimal or improvised planning. However, planning and replanning with discipline and rigor are essential in agile, and no amount of execution effort can compensate for poor planning. Satish Thatte presents a customizable Agile Planning Playbook where each planning level guides and aligns planning at the next lower level. The planning process itself is agile with periodic adjustments based on customer feedback, plan execution, and changes in market or customer needs. Learn how to increase your agility by practicing...

James Waletzky
Crosslake
AW9

Agile Snafus: When Good Teams Go Bad

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Agile done well can lead to great successes—rapid delivery of business and user value, high product quality, fast time to market, and engineering productivity. Agile done poorly leads to skepticism of the methodologies, distrust of the principles, and failure to deliver—in essence, a snafu [sna-foo]: a badly confused or ridiculous muddled situation. James Waletzky has gathered a set of snafus (anti-patterns) that pose challenges for organizations adopting agile. Set yourself up for success by understanding where teams go wrong with agile, complete with tips on...

Ken Mugrage
ThoughtWorks
DW5

DevOps and Continuous Delivery: What’s It All About?

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

It seems like everywhere you look someone is telling you to implement continuous delivery (CD) within a DevOps framework. Although there is a lot of talk about what you should do, there’s precious little about why or how. Ken Mugrage starts with the business issues that resulted in CD being formalized and how these issues can be made better with CD practices. He moves on to discuss the DevOps culture movement and clarifies the differences between CD and DevOps. Ken shares some useful ways you can start applying these concepts and practices. Throughout the...

Al Wagner
IBM
DW6

Transform Organizational Culture for DevOps Success

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

An organization’s ability to adopt a DevOps approach for software delivery often hinges on a cultural transformation that may be more difficult than technology issues. The keys to success are change supported from the top down, combined with people on the front line who are willing to experiment, fail fast, continuously learn, and openly collaborate in a blameless and fun working environment. When done right, the result is a renewed level of trust between the people involved and the organization they work for. Join Al Wagner as he shares how teams can increase...

France Van Wirkus
Francie Van Wirkus
AW11

The Agile Dojo: Shiny Toy or Best Idea Ever?

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Remember your first two weeks on a Scrum team? It was fantastic and miserable all at the same time. And when things got difficult, your team teetered on the edge of the waterfall. What if there were a way to help teams gel more quickly and accelerate their agile learning by immersing them in it? What if there were a place where they could practice what they’ve learned in training, without interruption? Enter the Agile Dojo, a real experiment happening in a large, complex organization. Francie Van Wirkus shares her insights and learnings of creating and sustaining...

Andreas_Grabner
Dynatrace
DW7

Testing and Measurement in DevOps: Find Solutions—Not More Problems

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

The promise of DevOps is to deliver new features faster following today’s best practices. However, blindly automating the delivery pipeline by installing Jenkins, Chef, and Docker without adapting test approaches will cause a great number of deployments to fail. While the tester’s role and testing are critical for the success of DevOps, the tester’s objective changes—from finding more defects to understanding the patterns that make deployments fail. Then, the job is to automate the detection of these patterns through quality gates into the pipeline. Using...

Thursday, November 17

Sherry Chang
Intel
K3

Solve Everyday IT Problems with DevOps

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 8:30am to 9:30am

Some believe that DevOps is only applicable to Internet-based companies with a desire to disrupt existing businesses. On the contrary, DevOps practices can dramatically reduce many everyday IT problems—defects, incidents, waste, bottlenecks, downtime, and infrastructure fragility. Sherry Chang dives into these problem areas and outlines the DevOps tools, practices, culture, and other artifacts necessary to eradicate them. She shares practical tips and hard-learned lessons from Intel IT to arm you with the knowledge and tools you need for DevOps adoption. You and...

Dave West
Scrum.org
AT1

The Past, Present, and Future of Scrum

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

In the past two decades, Scrum has become the standard for agile development, used in some form today by 90 percent of agile teams. As Scrum starts its third decade, it’s not the fresh-faced process framework it once was. Yes, it has met—and dealt with—commercial, technical, philosophical, and practical challenges. Dave West discusses the past, present, and future of Scrum, using real data from more than 200,000 open assessments and 50,000 professional assessments to describe its challenges and evolution. Learn how to: (1) add the development infrastructure for...

Michael Durrant
Everquote
AT3

Developing Reliable UI Test Automation in Agile Development

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Automated UI tests typically suffer from a number of problems: They are brittle, hard to maintain, hard to read, often test only one browser, and are frequently slow. These problems are amplified in agile environments which often have less up-front planning for these tests, contributing to a number of issues affecting their reliability and maintainability. Michael Durrant says that writing reliable, automated UI tests in agile environments requires a development style that emphasizes a standards-based approach and the application of specific practices such as...

Adam Auerbach
Capital One
DT1

Demystifying DevOps: Capital One’s Journey toward Continuous Delivery

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00pm

Many companies are either talking about DevOps or already working toward adoption. Books and conferences around DevOps abound, and it seems that everyone is hiring DevOps engineers. What impact does adopting DevOps have on a company and its people? What does DevOps look like from the inside out? What does it mean to be a DevOps engineer? What do you need to do and learn to make sure you’re not left behind? Adam Auerbach answers these questions, explains the overall DevOps movement, and discusses how DevOps is driving changes to our organizational culture and...

Amit Patel
Total Performance Consulting
DT2

Optimizing Performance across the DevOps Lifecycle

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

The world of DevOps moves fast and substantially impacts application development quality, costs, and customer confidence. Giving your operations and development teams an effective performance process from an early stage means quality is a priority throughout the development lifecycle. A “test early and often” approach improves your chances of on time/on budget application release and meeting your customer’s performance and quality expectations. Successful performance across DevOps relies on the use of proper processes, performance tools and solutions, and...

Paul_Merrill
Beaufort Fairmont
AT6

Agile Test Automation Patterns: From the Inside Out

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Does your team struggle to test new functionality during your iterations? Do you end up testing code in added-on “test-only” hardening iterations? Are bugs still found in your product weeks or months after they were delivered? If so, you are missing out on a major process improvement that will save money, shorten delivery times, and reduce overall risk to the product and your brand. Paul Merrill empowers you to test quicker and earlier in your agile process with proven techniques and patterns like “use test driver,” “define interface,” “simulate functionality,”...

Alicia Cyrus
Enterprise Knowledge
AT7

The Agile Product Owner: Beyond the Books and Classrooms

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

As organizations embark on agile transformation, many traditional project managers or business and technical leads are thrown into the Product Owner role after reading a book or two and, perhaps a few days of CSPO training. In the midst of changing environments, conflicting mindsets, and other change-related issues, they are expected to start operating within a Scrum team. Alicia Cyrus compares the responsibilities of product ownership and traditional project management—similar roles, same goal of achieving working software (or services) and productive teams, but...

Heidi Araya
BrightLogic
AT8

Scrum, Kanban, or Scrumban: Which Is Right for You?

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Agile is on everyone’s minds today, as more and more organizations are eager to reap the benefits of rapid iterations using customer-centric approaches. Organizations tend to run to Scrum first because it is the most recognized agile framework. But is Scrum always the right answer for a team and a business? Heidi Araya discusses the types of scenarios and projects in which Scrum may not be a good fit. She shares other frameworks—including Kanban and Scrumban—as potential alternatives to consider to ensure teams and projects select the right fit and can deliver...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
AT9

The Three Pillars Approach to an Agile Testing Strategy

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Far too often, organizations focus solely on the development teams and their technical practices as their agile adoption strategy. And then there’s the near constant focus on acquiring development tools. Often the testing activity and the testing teams are left behind in agile adoption, or even worse, they’re simply along for the ride. This is not an effective transformation strategy. Join experienced agile coach Bob Galen as he shares the Three Pillars framework for establishing a balanced strategic plan for quality and testing. The Three Pillars focus on...

Brian Saylor
Scripps Networks Interactive
BT9

Conquer the Murky Waters of Test Automation

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

A solid test automation implementation is key to any foray into continuous delivery. Although the test automation waters may look peaceful and pristine, anyone who has jumped in to automate testing complex systems has found the waters to be troubled and murky. Tests take too long to run, they periodically break for mysterious reasons, or they fail to catch business critical problems. Over time this leads to automated tests becoming outdated and irrelevant. Brian Saylor has studied a number of test automation projects—and far too many lines of test code—to...

Chris Haddad
Karux, LLC
DT5

Integrate DevOps Release Automation with Cloud and Container Management

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Pushing code into Git and continuously building web applications with Jenkins are only the first steps toward a streamlined development workflow and agile delivery. Canary, Blue/Green, feature flag, and rolling update release strategies help teams deploy with confidence and zero downtime. Cloud Container platforms (Kubernetes, Docker Data Center, AWS ECS) provide automated workload scheduling and release capabilities. By automated environment provisioning with Terraform or AWS OpsWorks, teams can rapidly spin-up and tear-down Dev, Test, and production...

DT6

The Tester’s Role in a DevOps World

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

A DevOps approach to software development provides value to the business with incremental and frequent releases of new functionality to meet the demands of its customers and users. In this new world, the level of software quality directly impacts a company’s success or failure. If software quality is key to success, why do testers often feel ignored during the development process only to be blamed for defects escaping into production? Marianne Hollier explains how the tester’s role, now more important than ever, fits into a DevOps approach to software development...

Jamie Mades
LEAP Consulting
AT10

The Lean Agile Portfolio

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Agile practices continue to improve as organizations move forward with adoption and adaption. However, as they move forward, they often run into daunting challenges—coordinating projects with highly complex requirements and interdependencies; navigating highly political environments; and finding ways to fund, report, and integrate agile project work into existing organizational processes. Jamie Mades has found that the Lean Agile Portfolio bridges these gaps, applying lean product development flow principles to identify high-value initiatives and speed completion...

Don MacIntyre
Scrum Etc.
AT11

Agile at the Intersection of Mobile, Cloud, and the Internet of Things

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a $1.7 trillion market by 2020. Don MacIntyre explores how agile is being used well beyond traditional software development in the Internet of Things. First, Don dives into how agile is being used today in a wide range of development environments. He discusses cloud-based software-as-a-service, large complex mission critical systems, and both mobile software and hardware. Next, he reviews the IoT, describes how it is disrupting many traditional markets, and shares how traditional device manufacturers are applying agile. Don...

Kevin Berg
Sauce Labs
BT12

Build Fail-Proof Tests in Any Browser with Selenium

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

What happens when you have thousands of tests that run beautifully in Chrome but many of them fail in Internet Explorer? Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common for testers and remains a major sore point for teams tasked with getting software to work in any browser. Kevin Berg highlights how access to cloud-based Selenium Grids makes it easier than ever to run functional test suites in every imaginable operating system and browser combination. The result is less time and hassle adapting testing suites to each individual browser. Join Kevin as he shares...

Esteban Garcia
Nebbia Technology
DT7

Use the Cloud to Enable Continuous Delivery

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

As your organization embraces DevOps practices, you may run into bottlenecks trying to find the infrastructure needed to support automated unit tests, load tests, UI tests, CI builds, automated deployments, and other parts of a continuous delivery pipeline. Esteban Garcia shares ways to use the cloud to remove these obstacles and help your team focus on delivering software. Using Microsoft's Azure infrastructure as an example, Esteban shows how you can quickly create a test environment with a web application and a database, and then use those resources to support...

Arthur_Hicken
Parasoft
DT8

Evolving from Automated to Continuous Testing

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Testing issues can be a significant barrier to taking full advantage of agile approaches to software development and the emerging DevOps movement. To leverage these development and delivery strategies to their fullest, you need to evolve beyond automated testing to continuous testing. Arthur Hicken discusses the testing and development processes and technology that enable continuous testing. He shares insights on how to close the gap between business expectations and development activities by encapsulating clearly defining development policies for software...

Friday, November 18

Madhumita Das
Great-West: Financial Empower Retirement
SMT4

Six Things to Avoid in Software Testing on Agile Projects

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Friday, November 18, 2016 - 2:30pm to 3:30pm

With the emphasis on cross-functional teams, are testers still valuable on agile teams? The answer: Absolutely! Testing helps consider the full spectrum of quality attributes by bringing a unique perspective of evaluating various user interactions with the application. Insufficient testing may allow severe defects to pass into production, causing financial loss or even bankruptcy. Knowing how to leverage testing to gain the greatest rewards can be tricky as there are many things you can do that appear to be equally important—and likewise many things to avoid. For...