The Latest

Technologist and evangelist Peter Varhol and Gerie Owens, a test architect and certified ScrumMaster, discuss their STARWEST presentation, “What Aircrews Can Teach Testers about Testing.” They talk about how testers can apply airline safety practices to their teams’ delivery of high-quality applications through complementary expertise, collaboration, and decision-making. They also explain how blind deference to authority and automation can be detrimental to a testing team, and how to use everyone’s skills to achieve success.

People are actively engaging in civic tech, social robots are tweeting, and veteran storytellers are capturing stories in new ways using virtual and augmented reality. This explosion of tools, sources, voices, and data is indicative of a new, more collaborative era for storytelling.

A decade ago Microsoft had over twelve thousand full-time testers, and when you added up all the contract and outsourced testers too, there were more software test engineers than developers.

Pretty much everything you hear about DevOps mentions “the pipeline.” Continuous delivery is not really about the pipeline, however. Continuous delivery is about two things: testing strategy and branching strategy. The pipeline is important; it is an integral part of DevOps. However, the central element is the practice of testing continually using automated tests.

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.

Greg Paskal, test automation lead at Ramsey Solutions, talks about data lakes and how to effectively use data visualization. Done well, data visualization should help practitioners, managers, and stakeholders easily consume, understand, and act on the information the visual displays.

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.