Better Software Magazine Articles

Improve Your Test Environments with Service Virtualization

Want to save money and time, expand your testing environment’s capabilities, and still get high-quality releases? Service virtualization provides virtual replicas of physical environments and databases. Its earlier-lifecycle defect detection just might change your company’s reality.

Scott Aziz's picture Scott Aziz
Simplicity and Precision: Test Planning in Agile Projects

Test planning is often thought unnecessary in an agile project. However, if our mindset is on "planning" rather than "plans," we see that test-planning activities happen throughout the project, taking advantage of levels of precision, i.e., what is absolutely necessary at each level.

Janet Gregory's picture Janet Gregory
How Do You Write Good User Stories?

Expert answers to frequently asked questions. In this issue, David Hussman explains how to write good user stories.

David Hussman's picture David Hussman
Increase Quality with Table-Driven Acceptance Tests

Vague or ambiguous requirements can cause loops in development processes. Creating requirements that include acceptance tests cuts down on the looping and increases the flow of working software to the customer.

Ken Pugh's picture Ken Pugh Al Shalloway
Simplify Your Combinatorial Testing

Combinatorial testing is effective for testing multiple, non-sequential inputs that affect a common output in complex software. But, it's easy to misapply it or become a slave to the output. Learn to overcome limitations and benefit fully from this technique.

Bj Rollison's picture Bj Rollison
The Weekend Testers

This is the true story of freedom from the monotonous work of checking. It is the story of what happened when a few passionate testers took responsibility for their own education and fun in testing. Explore how they test, learn, and contribute to the open source.

Three Kinds of Measurement and Two Ways to Use Them

Are software development and testing sciences subject to the same kind of numerical measurement that we use in physics? If not, what kinds of measurements should we use? How could we think more usefully about measurement?

Michael Bolton's picture Michael Bolton
Software Longevity Testing: Planning for the Long Haul

How long do you let your software run during testing? An increasing number of software applications are intended to run indefinitely, in an always-on operating environment. And yet, few test plans include more than a brief memory leak test case. Learn how to test for problems due to the passing of time and problems due to cumulative usage.

Steven Woody's picture Steven Woody
Food for Thought

Ideas about testing can come from many different and unexpected sources, including reductionism, agronomy, cognitive psychology, mycology, and general systems. Michael feasts on Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and finds much to whet the tester's appetite for learning about how things work.

Michael Bolton's picture Michael Bolton
Testing the Contract Metaphor

A contract represents a service agreement between two parties, the bounded provision of service by one party to the other. This metaphor also applies to how we can think about the relationship between unit tests and code. A contractual mindset encourages test names and partitioning based on clear propositions, backed up with executable examples.

Kevlin Henney's picture Kevlin Henney

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