The Canary in the Coal Mine: Create an Early Warning Tool to Help Your Testing
Many organizations are using virtualization technology to increase the number of available test machines. However, this increase creates a new dilemma for testers. How can you confirm that all test systems are running properly and not showing signs of serious defects? Since many companies are reluctant to add additional staff members to simply “babysit” test environments, teams are forced to do more with less. Stephen Burlingame shares a solution to this problem that takes a proactive, rather than reactive, approach—in the form of a daily status report—to gather data, perform analysis, and generate results. This analysis of each test machine helps expose defects that, if ignored, could pose serious issues once the software is deployed to production. Take away an understanding of how such analysis is completed and a meaningful report compiled. See how critical data points are collected and presented efficiently. Leave with an understanding of how to create a similar early warning tool for your own organization and change the conversations testers are having.
Stephen Burlingame’s introduction to software quality assurance occurred during his university senior project where he discovered critical defects in software designed to diagnosis breast cancer in digitized mammograms. Since graduation, Stephen has worked exclusively in the quality assurance field. In 2006, he joined the medical claims clearinghouse Navicure, Inc., where he is director of quality assurance, responsible for overseeing the testing for an application that processes more than one million transactions daily. Living in the Atlanta metro area with his wife, Julia, Stephen has served as president of Atlanta SPIN (Software and Systems Process Improvement Network).