Articles

Laptop screen showing test data analytics Applying Data Analytics to Test Automation

Testers gather lots of metrics about defect count, test case execution classification, and test velocity—but this information doesn't necessarily answer questions around product quality or how much money test efforts have saved. Testers can better deliver business value by combining test automation with regression analysis, and using visual analytics tools to process the data and see what patterns emerge.

Harsh Vardhan's picture Harsh Vardhan
Blender: Blended IT analytics Smashing the Silos with Blended Analytics

While significant progress has been made in leveraging analytics for better operational insights, today’s IT operations analytics solutions still operate in silos. To really reap the benefits and promise of analytics, IT decision-makers need to break these silos and apply an approach that combines many different major sources of information: blended analytics.

Sasha Gilenson's picture Sasha Gilenson
DevOps Teams Programmable Infrastructure and DevOps Teams

A decade ago, continuous integration became a key practice to support the agile process. Now, the hot topic is continuous delivery, and Pini Reznik has noticed many similarities between the adoption of CD today and the implementation of CI. You can learn a lot from past experiences.

Pini Reznik's picture Pini Reznik
IT Operations Analytics Streamlining the Management of Hybrid Clouds with IT Operations Analytics

A hybrid cloud incorporates—not just bridges between—public and private clouds, enabling businesses and their IT organizations unprecedented flexibility. But a transition to a hybrid cloud brings its own set of challenges. Sasha Gilenson addresses some of these difficulties and offers some IT operations analytics solutions.

Sasha Gilenson's picture Sasha Gilenson

Better Software Magazine Articles

Avoiding the Prioritization Trap

With incoming priorities being requested by just about everybody, how in the world can you and your team prioritize? Brandon shows you some innovative techniques that you can use to turn chaos into order.  One surprising approach is simply handling priorities on a first-in, first-out basis.

Brandon Carlson's picture Brandon Carlson
Taking the Risk: Exploration over Documentation

The loudest voice in the room might push for a stable, predictable, repeatable test process that defines itself up front, but each build is different. An adaptive, flexible approach could provide better testing in less time with less cost, more coverage, and less waste.

Matthew Heusser's picture Matthew Heusser
Once Upon A Retrospective

Children can teach us some extremely profound things--often when we least expect it. Jennitta Andrea shares sage advice about project retrospectives that she learned while perusing the well-known children's stories on her daughter's bookshelf. These insights will help improve the way you plan, facilitate, and participate in project retrospectives.

Jennitta Andrea's picture Jennitta Andrea
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

Conference Presentations

STARWEST 2018 Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need
Slideshow

Successful agile testers collaborate with programmers as code is written, isolating problems, troubleshooting defects, and debugging code all along the way to getting the product to done. But modern systems are scaling beyond what traditional teams are able to understand using familiar tools. New appreciation for systems and complexity theory, as well as disciplines and tools around emerging areas such as observability and resilience engineering, are offering solutions that allow teams to actively debug their systems and explore properties and patterns they have not defined in advance. Chris will share the basics of the theory of these new ideas, as well as some tools that support this type of work. He'll show how dynamic analysis can be used to isolate and understand puzzling system behavior.

Chris Blain
Leverage Big Data and Analytics for Testing
Slideshow

Sabermetrics turned the baseball world upside down by challenging decades-old measures of individual performance and their perceived linkage to team success. After cementing their legacy as the Lovable Losers for 108 years, the Chicago Cubs were able to leverage a data-driven...

Geoff Meyer
STAREast Logo Analyze, Diagnose, and Prevent Test Flakiness
Slideshow

Test code development is generally approached with more lenient standards and less scrutiny than production code. As a result, rather than providing valuable feedback on software quality, this can lead to tests that produce inconsistent results and false outcomes. Team productivity is...

Dionny Santiago
The Business Analyst Role on Agile Projects
Slideshow

Agile—a single word that sparked unprecedented confusion in the technology world. When it went agile, did your organization throw out your business analyst team? Have they banned all requirements documentation? Are teams struggling to see the big picture? Brian Watson has encountered...

Brian Watson, VersionOne

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