Articles

QA professionals performing continuous testing How Continuous Testing Is Done in DevOps

DevOps does speed up your processes and make them more efficient, but companies must focus on quality as well as speed. QA should not live outside the DevOps environment; it should be a fundamental part. If your DevOps ambitions have started with only the development and operations teams, it’s not too late to loop in testing. You must integrate QA into the lifecycle in order to truly achieve DevOps benefits.

Junaid Ahmed's picture Junaid Ahmed
Power button Simplify Continuous Operation Tests with a Periodic Reboot

Continuous operation tests find important bugs, partly as a result of their long operation and partly by increasing the probability of finding statistical bugs. However, CO tests have their own downsides. Mandating a periodic reset or reboot can work around these issues, as well as save time and cost for testing, reproduction, debugging, and fix verification.

Michael Stahl's picture Michael Stahl
Graph showing how testing earlier costs less and means fewer overall defects The Shift-Left Approach to Software Testing

The earlier you find out about problems in your code, the less impact they have and the less it costs to remediate them. Therefore, it's helpful to move testing activities earlier in the software development lifecycle—shifting it left in the process timeline. This article explores the shift-left methodology and how you can approach shifting left in your organization.

Arthur Hicken's picture Arthur Hicken
Row of cupcakes decorated with blue frosting and rainbow sprinkles, photo by Brooke Lark Shifting Testing Left Bakes In Quality from the Start

“Shift left” is one of the latest buzz terms in software testing. Movements like agile and DevOps recommend that testers shift left, but what does that mean, exactly? Here's how one tester became a believer in the shift-left movement; how he got his team's developers, analysts, designers, and managers on board; and how his entire organization has benefited from the shift.

James Espie's picture James Espie

Better Software Magazine Articles

The Unspoken Truth about IoT Test Automation The Unspoken Truth about IoT Test Automation

The internet of things (IoT) continues to proliferate as connected smart devices become critical for individuals and businesses. Even with test automation, performing comprehensive testing can be quite a challenge.

Rama Anem's picture Rama Anem
testing Adopt an Innovative Quality Approach to Testing

How much testing is really enough? Given resources, budget, and time, the goal of comprehensive testing seems impossible to achieve. It’s time to rethink your test strategy and start innovating.

Rajini  Padmanaban's picture Rajini Padmanaban
Developers and testers 5 Ways to Pair Developers with Testers

Some agile practices stress the importance of pairing team members together to achieve better team performance. Try these five suggestions for pairing key resources.

Jeffery Payne's picture Jeffery Payne
Testing as a Development Catalyst Testing as a Development Catalyst: Accelerate Project Delivery

Putting technical people together and hoping for success isn’t enough, according to Justin Rohrman. The testing team’s involvement can never be an afterthought.

Justin Rohrman's picture Justin Rohrman

Interviews

Michael Nauman Shifting Left and Going beyond Agile: An Interview with Michael Nauman

In this interview, Michael Nauman, a testing lead for AutoCAD Web, explains how we can go beyond basic agile principles. He digs into the current state of shift-left testing, the importance of aligning your DevOps with your automation, and using agile as a starting point on your quality journey.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Melissa Benua How to Adapt to the New Age of Testing and Development: An Interview with Melissa Benua
Podcast

In this interview, Melissa Benua, a senior technical lead at mParticle and senior backend software engineer at PlayFab, explains how the speed of development and testing has changed, as well as how to adapt to the new era of software.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Adam Auerbach Testing as the Driving Force of DevOps: An Interview with Adam Auerbach
Podcast

In this interview, Adam Auerbach, vice president of quality and DevOps engineering at Lincoln Financial Group, explains how the role of testing has changed thanks to DevOps. He also talks about how testers can lead the DevOps movement through the power of automation.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Andreas Grabner Performance Testing for the Sake of Your Users: An Interview with Andreas Grabner
Video

In this interview, Andreas Grabner of Dynatrace explains why you need to pay attention to your users' needs when you're doing your performance testing. He shares his performance testing approaches and explores the top problem patterns that you can learn to spot in your apps.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine

Conference Presentations

STAREAST Testing in Production
Slideshow

How do you know your feature is working perfectly in production? And if something breaks in production, how will you know?

Talia Nassi
STARWEST 2018 Risk Based Testing – Are You Talking the Talk, Or Walking the Walk?
Slideshow

Risk-based testing is essential to focus our testing, but it is not always easy to apply to our projects. Risk management tends to focus more on project and process risks (i.e., Will we make the deadline? Do we follow our processes?) and less on the product risks that can act as a foundation for a risk-based approach to test. Including this aspect of risk in your test coverage will give you a solid foundation for defining a test strategy that implements and executes the right tests with the right intensity to mitigate the most critical product risks. In this presentation, Gitte Ottosen walks you through approaches to lightweight product risk analysis that can be applied whether you are working in a traditional or agile context. The approaches focus on the conversation around identifying and classifying product risks as a team effort, as well as how to use product risk analysis to support test specification and execution.

Gitte Ottosen
STAREAST 2018 Automated Testing for New-Gen Digital Interactions: Chatbots, Alexa, and Siri
Slideshow

Today’s IT systems communicate with customers through multiple points of engagement and various interfaces, ranging from web, mobile, and voice to BOTs and apps like Alexa and Siri. Sanil Pillai says these systems need to provide seamless handoffs between different points of interaction—while at the same time providing relevant and contextual information quickly. To accomplish this, a team must be able to successfully pair device hardware capabilities and intelligent software technologies such as location intelligence, biometric sensing, and Bluetooth. Testing these systems and interfaces is becoming an increasingly more complex task, and traditional testing and automation processes simply don’t apply to new-generation digital interaction services. Join Sanil as he discusses the testing and automation challenges in new-generation digital interactions using hyperconnected BOTs.

Sanil Pillai
BSE Testing Machine Data Is EVERYWHERE: Use It for Testing
Slideshow

As more applications are hosted on servers, they produce immense quantities of logging data. Quality engineers should verify that apps are producing log data that is existent, correct, consumable, and complete. Otherwise, apps in production are not easily monitored, have issues that are...

Tom Chavez

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