If you’re going to Agile2011, be sure to check out the Testing and Quality Assurance stage. Cutter’s Ken Collier is co-producer, with Lisa Shoop from Sabre, of this stage. They’ve pulled together a powerhouse lineup of thought leaders in the Agile testing and QA space. The sessions on this stage will be highly interactive; they’re designed for sharing and learning from others. A few of the questions that will be addressed on Ken and Lisa’s Testing and QA stage include:

How do quality metrics improve testing practices? How do you effectively manage technical debt in test suites? (This one will be answered by our own Israel Gat!) How do you ensure that testing “keeps up” with the fast pace of agile development? What skills should agile teams have to ensure high quality? What is the role of a QA Read more …

In 2011 we will see successful mechanical refactoring across service and organizational boundaries. Regretfully it will take nine more years for this to become a common agile practice.

In a decade we will see terms of service expressed as automated tests. Service providers will occasionally revise these terms and their tests as they upgrade their services. They will NOT, however, be obligated to support an old interface indefinitely. Rather, they will be obligated to provide automated refactoring scripts that have been shown to mechanically upgrade a well-known public suite of sample applications in such a way that the new tests pass.

Careful readers will notice that I’m equating testing a service interface and testing a program that uses that interface. This unification will require a fresh approach to interface specification and test. My hope is that this comes as a Read more …

Whenever the topic of quality assurance (QA) over a project is brought to a conversation, testing is the first thing to come to most people’s minds. QA actually goes far beyond just testing code. In any case, being test centric can become more effective from the standpoint of QA at the project level if we expand our view of testing by taking the following five considerations:

Test the software development process. A fundamental part of continuous improvement is to mature the software development process, whether or not you are using an agile or lean methodology. If you plan a development strategy and stick to it instead of adjusting it to become more effective over time and to follow the actual project needs, then the quality of the product or service and the performance of the stakeholders will suffer. Does the Read more …

As the old joke goes, alpha tests and beta tests are named that way because “alpha” is a Greek word that means “doesn’t work,” and “beta” is another Greek word that means “still doesn’t work.” But seriously, we know that the classical software product lifecycle includes tests performed by the development team (alpha tests) and tests performed by a limited number of selected users (beta tests). Beta testers have to accept that the software may have bugs (otherwise, what would be the point of testing?) and they commit to taking the time to provide detailed feedback on the issues they encounter. In exchange, they get to use the software early, usually for free, and may even get a price break on the final license price.

With Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, especially those delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the model is changing a Read more …

I was having coffee this morning with colleague Ken Collier and we were talking about Test-driven development (TDD) and the trials and tribulations of trying to implement TDD in a development environment. I left Ken and went out for a leisurely bike ride down from the Ponderosa pines in Flagstaff to the Scrub Oak and Juniper 1,500 feet lower and 15 miles out of town (then back up-ugh).

As I was pedaling down hill thinking back on our discussion, it occurred to me that a developer doing TDD was like a triathlete–attempting to master three different, but integrated sports (running, cycling, swimming) (testing, coding, refactoring). There are several great analogies here. Many developers who are great coders, are like excellent cyclists who can’t swim–they have great trouble competing in the TDD triathlon. If you are an expert cyclists, you have Read more …