ALM & SCM Tools
Articles
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Why You Need Continuous Testing in DevOps DevOps is more than adopting the right set of tools; it's a cultural shift that incorporates testing at each stage of the agile project lifecycle. Continuous testing is key to unlocking this culture change because it weaves testing activities into every part of the software design, development, and deployment processes, which helps everyone involved communicate more, collaborate better, and innovate faster. |
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Solving Production Issues Using Testing Tools Standard web-monitoring tools can ping webpages and verify that they’re responding, but they don’t alert you to an issue. But you can use the technology in load testing to monitor your sites by running an interactive script that can detect issues and generate emails as needed. It runs constantly like a silent sentry, never sleeping or taking a vacation, improving your sites' reliability. |
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Rowing in the Same Direction: Use Value Streams to Align Work Ambiguity abounds about value streams, so it’s good to clarify what they are, why they matter, and how to exploit them. It's important to help employees understand the organization's definition of value, to provide visibility on how business value is created, and to focus on the fast flow of value through the value streams. If everyone understands which direction to row the boat, they can steer toward it together. |
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DevSecOps: Incorporate Security into DevOps to Reduce Software Risk DevSecOps is a growing movement to incorporate security into DevOps practices in order to ensure flaws and weaknesses are exposed early on through monitoring, assessment, and analysis, so remediation can be implemented far earlier than traditional efforts. By failing fast with security testing, organizations reduce risk of a security incident and decrease the cost of rework. |
Interviews
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Embedding Performance Engineering into CI/CD: An Interview with Anj Dubey
Video
In this interview, Anj Dubey, director of performance engineering for McGraw-Hill Education, discusses the need to shift left and embed your performance engineering into your CI/CD pipeline in order to ensure that every line of code is going to meet your performance requirements. |
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Continuous Testing and Open Source Integration: An Interview with Alex Martins
Video
In this interview, Alex Martins, the CTO of continuous quality at CA Technologies, explains how continuous testing, continuous integration, and open source testing tools can help modern software teams keep up with the speed and demands of agile. |
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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. |
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Getting Started with Security Testing: An Interview with Jeff Payne
Video
In this interview, Jeff Payne, the CEO and founder of Coveros, talks about software security. He discusses the Internet of Things and how it relates to safety-critical devices, some useful tools, how testers can test for security, and how DevOps pushes that process earlier in your lifecycle. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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The Amazing Benefits of Integrated ALM Tools For years, developers have struggled with using individual lifecycle management tools, but no longer! Joe Farah walks you through a history and benefits of an integration of ALM tools that every team should seriously consider. |
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Why NoSQL Matters and What Configuration Management Experts Need to Know About It NoSQL is a new approach to data storage that addresses many problems associated with relational databases. Many highly popular websites—including Facebook, Netflix, and Digg—are using NoSQL to crunch large volumes of data. Eugene Dvorkin gives us insight into why NoSQL is important and what CM experts need to know about it. |
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Practical Security Testing for Web Applications It seems like every week the press has yet another story about security breaches or stolen data at some of the world’s largest companies or government agencies. Sometimes the responsibility for ensuring thorough security resides with an IT security group, and other times it gets outsourced altogether. The responsibility seldom falls to testing teams. However, this is changing. Having trained and experienced testers hunt for security bugs will make web applications safer from hackers and will further protect consumers, corporate assets, and brands.. Scott Aziz offers some practical techniques that will help you get started. |
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Traditional Test Engineering, Your Days Are Numbered In the first installment of this article, Dr. James Whittaker discussed turning testing on its head—to revitalize and improve the value of late-stage testing. James also discussed ideas behind empowering your dogfooders, testers, and the crowd to significantly and efficiently improve software quality. In part two, Jason Arbon discusses the research and engineering experimentation behind realizing these ideas into new tools and processes. |
Conference Presentations
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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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Influencing Stakeholders Using Fact-based Information
Slideshow
With all the open source tools available on the market it can be overwhelming as to which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best in your environment to create a high performing team and metrics dashboard. Join Jennifer as she explains the relationship of data, your environment, and how a hub and spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. She identifies opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites. She will review ways to collaborate and show results in a way that clearly demonstrates progress and how to present a visual metrics dashboard to your leadership and stakeholders in the organization. |
Jennifer Bonine
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Engineering Productivity and Enterprise Quality at Scale
Slideshow
Over the past two years, PayPal has been on a journey to modernize its internal development and test systems, from test environments, implementing enterprise continuous integration and code propagation into the development pipeline, to release processes and production code validation. Jose Buraschi and Nir Szilagyi will talk about transforming the code of 5,000 developers across 350 teams and how it required social “magic” to influence behaviors and motivate engagement. This modernization of PayPal's development practices has involved creating reliable integrated test environments, continuous integration, automated code propagation, and automated validation before each deployment. Instead of asking for a list of things developers need to do differently, Jose and Nir asked for simple changes that, through side effects, led to the desired results. |
Nir Szilagyi
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Faster Food and a Better Place to Sleep: Applying Agile Outside Software
Slideshow
Agile methods aren’t just for software anymore—actually, they haven’t been for quite a while. Agile's collaborative, iterative, incremental approaches to work have caused it to go mainstream. But can we apply team-based agile straight out of the box in a nonsoftware context? Although most of the principles and patterns apply, sometimes the practices and frameworks need modification for a particular context. Mike Cottmeyer will explore two case studies of agile journeys: an international hotel chain going through a major rebranding initiative, and a well-known fast food restaurant looking to optimize its kitchen production capacity. These are two totally different companies in two totally different industries, both trying to use agile to solve their problems. We’ll look at the challenges each faced, what they had in common, and the patterns, tools, and techniques they are using. |
Mike Cottmeyer
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