1. Gauging the Performance of Your QA Teams
One of the most frustrating things in the world is being evaluated against arbitrary benchmarks. Unfortunately, for many quality assurance professionals, this is their reality. QA teams are quite often evaluated by how many bugs they’ve found, but these numbers may not show the full story.
To better gauge QA performance, author Francis Adanza recommends focusing on the rate of incidents over time and testing progress itself (e.g. the number of complete tests, planned tests, test cases run and test cases passed). Read on here for insight into how you can establish more concrete ways to gauge the performance of your quality assurance teams.
2. Tools Need Testers: Why Automation Isn’t Automatic
As organizations sprint headfirst into test automation, the men and women behind the automated testing tools may feel a bit overshadowed. In this TechWell article from Josiah Renaudin, he notes that test automation isn’t quite as automatic as its name suggests. You can’t simply buy a bunch of tools, set them up and then walk away under the assumption that everything will go off without a hitch.
Automation is a skill, and while test automation tools play a critical role in facilitating the process, ultimately a thinking, decision-making tester will need to do the testing. Renaudin quotes software testing consultant, Dorothy Graham, who points out that the tool itself doesn’t have a brain, so the need for skilled, experienced testers is just as strong as ever—and testers need to know that.
Read on here for more information on the steps you can take to both pick and properly incorporate different tools into your team.
3. How Agile Changes Testing, Part 1
It’s safe to say that Agile methodology has changed the game in terms of software development. It has also drastically changed the way testing takes place within the project lifecycle. Traditional development methods required planning the entire project, including system test plans, at the beginning. When it finally came time to test, testers discovered that what they planned at the beginning wasn’t what they truly needed.
In contrast, Agile testing doesn’t require much upfront planning. Author Johanna Rothman states that she likes to plan for no more than a couple days as more planning may result in waste. Take a look at her full article here for a deeper dive into the testing processes an Agile project system demands.
4. Ego, Apathy, and Test Cases
After reading and becoming inspired by A is for Apathy, a blog post by Colin Cherry that describes how apathy and ego inhibit companies engaging in testing despite measurable incentive to do so, Brendan Connolly drafted this article to highlight the relationships between test cases, egos and apathy.
Throughout the post, Connolly poses some tough questions like, “do test scripts encourage active evaluation the software through interacting with it or do they lead the tester to focus just on completing the checklist? How do you think that effects your feelings of self-esteem and self-importance?”
He dives into the philosophy of conflicting test cases and ego and explains how this can lead to apathetic test execution. Check out the full article here, it’s worth the read!