Articles
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Agile Trends to Watch in 2018 With 2018 well underway, it seems like a good time to look ahead and think about what we hope to accomplish this year. Find out which agile trends these software experts are most looking forward to in the coming months. |
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4 Steps to Level Up Your Testing Game and Advance Your Career As more businesses are adopting DevOps and demanding continuous delivery, it's important for testers to constantly upgrade their skills. By leveraging the right resources, including developer and application performance management tools, you can play a bigger and more collaborative role in producing higher-quality output. |
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My Journey to Adopting DevOps There’s good reason DevOps is an emerging trend in the IT industry—it alleviates prevalent problems, such as operational waste, and emphasizes collaboration, communication, and visibility. Uday Kumar details how he became a believer in DevOps by recalling the rocky road he took on his way to adoption. |
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BSC West 2015 Keynote: Better Thinking for Better Software: Thinking Critically about Software Development Software developer Laurent Bossavit delivered the second keynote presentation, about why we need to think more critically about software development. He began his presentation by saying his intention was to make you question what you know—or what you think you know. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Be Indispensable: Cross-Train like a Testing Athlete Stretching your skills and preparing for organizational and work-related change is vital for any QA tester. Your best approach is to work on complementing your skills and competencies. |
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How Technology Is Changing the Way We Learn Modern technologies like virtual reality, cloud-based systems, and measurement of content have disrupted how we learn. Standards have evolved to improve how learning material can be published to any device. |
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Saying No to More Work We’ve all been placed in the situation where a boss asks you to perform more work than you can possibly handle. Johanna Rothman knows firsthand that there is a better way to respond that benefits you and your manager. |
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Recognizing #WomenInAgile As part of her involvement with #WomenInAgile, Natalie Warnert conducted a study to determine why women are less involved in the agile community and what can be done about it. Her research shows some surprising results. |
Interviews
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Why Testers Should Be Using GitHub: An Interview with Wilson Mar
Video
In this interview, Wilson Mar, principal DevOps performance evangelist at JetBloom, describes the importance of Git to testing and to securing employment in the field. Because Git is a great way for testers to display their work, many interviewers look at an applicant’s public GitHub account as a means of judging their work. Wilson discusses his STARWEST session on Git and resources he provides on his GitHub account about Git basics. |
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Getting Restarted in Test Automation: A Conversation with Chris Loder
Video
Chris Loder, automation architect at InGenius, talks about being a self-taught automation developer, why learning new skills is so important, and the synergy between manual testers, automation testers, and developers. |
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Experiences at STAREAST 2018: An Interview with Michael Sowers
Video
Michael Sowers, TechWell’s IT director and program chair for STAREAST 2018, discusses some of the activities, presentations and networking opportunities at the event. He also discusses what to expect at the all-new Agile Testing Days. |
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How Traditional Testers Can Use Old Skills in New Ways: An Interview with Melissa Benua
Video
In this interview, Melissa Benua, a senior technical lead at mParticle, explains how traditional testers can use their current skill sets to easily transition to new concepts, like DevOps. She also details how continuous testing and continuous integration continue to be major hot topics. |
Conference Presentations
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The Life of a Tester, from Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After
Slideshow
Most fairy tales start out with a scary premise and move to a happy ending. Lately, we have heard lots of scary stories about the future of testing. As machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to gain prominence, we see even more concerns about the tester’s career. With the... |
Jennifer Bonine
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Working with Anxiety: From Personal Weakness to Career Strength
Slideshow
Each of us has personal weaknesses that are often perceived to have negative impacts on performance and capability in the workplace. When this weakness is prominent to yourself or others, are you capable of benefiting IT teams and qualified to do the job? In dealing with negative impacts of her Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Julene Johnson falls into this category and has experienced personal doubt in her ability to perform her job well. Over time, however, she’s noticed that habits and techniques developed while dealing with anxiety can be applied in a manner that improves her life and her career and gives confidence to others in her capabilities. Similarly, skills and abilities gained while working as a tester have helped her build successful patterns in her life to help her manage anxiety more effectively. |
Julene Johnson
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The Life of a Tester, from Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After
Slideshow
Most fairy tales start out with a scary premise and move to a happy ending. Lately, we have heard lots of scary stories about the future of testing. As machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to gain prominence, we see even more concerns about the tester’s career. With the help of a famous animation team, Janna and Jennifer will take you through a wild animated journey from what it was like in the early days of software to where we are today. We’ll explore the evolution of the testing profession, as well as what it will become in the future. As this story moves from black and white to full color, you will get a history lesson on where some practices we may take for granted originated, review times when testers and developers were separated and more of adversaries than collaborators, and finish with the present, where quality is everyone’s responsibility. |
Jennifer Bonine
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Elegant Test Weapons for a More Civilized Age
Slideshow
Software Engineering as a discipline is always evolving. The technologies and tools that were in vogue yesterday are passé today and gone altogether tomorrow. Despite this high churn, there are a number of skills that software testers, in particular, possess that are eternally useful. They cut across time and tools and even job titles. Melissa will help software testers look past technologies and titles to explore the skills that they may already possess that are in high demand. She will explain some of the hottest job titles and technologies in the market today, and go in-depth into what skills many software testers already hold that uniquely qualify them for these positions. In the most cutting-edge software companies – from startups to megacorps – traditional software testing functions have been encompassed in roles that might not be immediately obvious. |
Melissa Benua
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