As another year begins and we look forward, many teams use this time to reflect on all that they’ve accomplished—reviewing things that are working well and things they’d like to improve. A key challenge continues to be automating our testing. Most of us are running to catch up in the test automation space and aggressively […]
Another week, another preventable, high-profile tech disaster. The Iowa Democratic Party used a mobile app to pull results from statewide precincts for the Iowa caucus. While there were many reasons why this application failed, the Democratic Party left it to “coding issues.” Anyone with any degree of experience can tell you this excuse really means they […]
Early in the software engineering journey, there were primarily developers. Developers had a wide array of accountabilities: designing, coding, testing, deploying, maintaining, and more. Quality was inherently built in and championed by the triad of the customer, the business, and the developers. As we scaled, we segmented these responsibilities across roles, which came with both […]
I’m often asked about the future of the testing role. Should I change my career direction? What’s in store for testing roles? Will there be a need for quality and testing expertise in the future? As a quality engineer, or tester, or testing leader, where do I go from here? No one has a crystal […]
Load and performance issues can be difficult to resolve when found late in the software development lifecycle, yet teams still often wait until the last minute to performance test their applications. This can be costly, especially if the problem ends up being an issue with the overall architecture of the application. Load and performance testing […]
Many people misunderstand the purpose of Cucumber. Because it seems to yield clearer, plain-language test scripts, testers want to use Cucumber as a general-purpose testing tool, including for API tests. But its true purpose is as a BDD framework. You may be thinking, what’s the harm? Here’s why it makes a difference—and why you should choose another tool for API testing.
Gene Gotimer, senior architect at Coveros Inc., discusses understanding the role of QA in DevOps, DevOps educational tools, trusting your team, and paid and open source security tools.
Although in recent years there has been an exponential increase in companies and development teams applying Agile methodologies, testing still seems to be lagging behind with most companies thinking they are doing Agile testing but in fact still using the waterfall method. Some of the biggest issues in Agile Testing were brought to light in […]
The test pyramid is a valuable visual in agile. In particular, it argues that unit tests should make up the majority of tests, and while agile teams recite this principle, it is often not clear why it is so important. Here are five reasons unit tests should make up the majority of tests written for an application.
A little while ago (ok, maybe in the distant past), I started writing about Cucumber. My very first post detailed how to set up Cucumber-JVM, and we’ve come a long way from then. I thought it was worth revisiting, as there are simpler ways to get setup, and better tools out there to use. So […]
