Featured Article

Rebuilding Your Agile QA Strategy and Plan

February 11, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Excerpt of this Featured Article:

In the past 4 consecutive roles I’ve had as a Lead, Manager, or Director of software QA, these three themes have greeted me as I walked in the door: We want to do Agile development but are struggling with implementing and running it We want to do good QA with Agile but nobody seems to know how to really run it The plans we have in place seem reasonable but they also seem to keep slipping Let’s fix that. You might not have thought very deeply about roles and responsibilities, and whether... [Read the full Featured Article]

Philosophy

Defects vs. Bugs; Are They Different?

January 18, 2011 · 1 Comment

What is a Defect? What is a Bug? Are they different? (Yes!) Does it matter which term we use, and why? (This article is borrowed from a section in Eric Mumford’s upcoming book, Holistic Software Quality Assurance.) In my opinion, the most basic unit of measure of the quality of a piece of software is the defect. Without measuring defects, there can be no currency of exchange in determining the value of the software itself and the underlying process that built the product. And yet, teams and managers seem to struggle with exactly how a defect is defined, how it differs from a bug,... [Read the full story]

Web Products

Growing QA Economy

July 26, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Move over, Wal-Mart and Home Depot. It looks like the spotlight is shifting back to the little guys. The economic climate of bigger is better has been shifting much media attention and fiscal policy away from smaller franchise operations and toward the monolithic pavement deserts that are filling towns and rural routes. The promise of mass employment, tax revenues, and large construction contracts is a tempting apple for any city planning board to turn down. Harvard University Economics professor Dr. Edward L. Glaeser and Harvard Business School‘s assistant professor William R. Kerr... [Read the full story]

Agile Scrum

Agile Scrum QA as a Resilient System

October 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Lines of software, like different colored spools of yarn woven to make a tapestry, are artfully blended by software engineers to make individual features and, eventually, a larger cohesive software product. Just as the mindful guidance of each hand that works a loom or skillfully manipulates knitting rods contributes to the overall creation of each piece of finished fabric, every software developer, manager, tester, and product champion contributes to the software product that emerges. This process of mindful contribution by means of careful accuracy to create an emergent property is a systems... [Read the full story]

Managing QA

Agile Delivery Management: Six Base Principles

As my career in QA management has grown to focus exclusively on working with testing in Agile delivery teams, my responsibilities have honed in on not only Quality Assurance but also Delivery Management. I found that in order to be shaping and informing what good testing looked like for the product’s content I had to be explicitly aware of the... Read more of this article

OpenTestCenter: Proposing an open source Test and Defect Management database

I propose an open source test and defect management system called OpenTestCenter. (I’m not saying it’s intended as an open source replacement for the core functionality in HP Quality Center… but I’m not saying it’s not.) The following is an excerpt from the database documentation I provide on my github site linked... Read more of this article

Defining Quality-Driven Development (QDD)

Quality-Driven Development (QDD) is an emergent property of Agile/Xtreme practices synthesized with high-energy proactive QA thought leadership and just-in-time testing. Modern proactive QA procedures to encourage defect prevention in Agile software development include singular techniques such as test-driven development (TDD) and formal templates... Read more of this article

Mentorship in QA and Software Development

Mentorship programs in software delivery teams are consistently re-invented as they react to the cries of those who complain that they are not receiving the challenge and mentoring they should be getting. Companies struggle to bridge the gap between employee morale and shipping the products that support the bottom line. Why is mentorship so difficult... Read more of this article

QA as a Change Agent in Defect Prevention in Agile Development

Q: The role of QA is less to test out the bugs than figure out how bugs are introduced into the product and reduce that opportunity. How does QA contribute to removing those obstacles? A colleague of mine once emphasized “you can’t test Quality in!” For some, it is sensible to move forward with decisions based on the notion that a longer... Read more of this article

When To Hire A QA Manager

You build software to support your business. You want it walked, stretched, and wrung before your customers use it. Sure you have people testing it, but bugs are building up and the quality of the product is in question. Worse yet, you’re becoming more nervous that you’re going to break something buried in the product that you won’t... Read more of this article

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