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The most common request I get as a consultant these days is to help testers and teams transition to an Agile development process or to help testers be more effective in “agile-ish” environments. Interestingly, the core answer to these questions starts with “forget the process for a moment and focus on yourself and what you’re […]

Breaking news! Automation development is software development. Yeah, it’s true. Even if we are using a drag-and-drop or record-and-playback interface to create that automation, somewhere, in the stack, under the hood or behind the curtain, there is code sequenced by our actions. We must start treating our automation initiatives as software development initiatives, lest we […]

We are all leaders. At minimum we must lead ourselves every single day. In addition, many of us have teams that we lead and serve. Have you ever stopped to analyze yourself to determine if you are the BEST leader you can be? Many of the great leaders outside the testing arena that Amy Jo […]

It’s our responsibility as quality ambassadors to get developers to think holistically – from a user perspective, as well as positive and negative scenarios in which quality does not impact overall customer experience. It’s straightforward. In the agile world, we need to tear down “them vs. us” silos, so every member of the team – […]

“When will the tests be green?” Have you heard that question? I submit that, until we fix all the bugs, they never will be! Project leaders look to the test results to know if we can release. They want to see “Green” on the status board. Green means all tests are passing. Will they ever? […]

It has been said “Everything rises and falls on leadership”. The world has experienced many changes over the last few decades, and organizations must respond to this constant change at much greater speed than ever before. Many companies are eliminating the role of the test manager in agile teams and creating flat organizations which combine […]

When it comes to a successful QA organization, great QA teams STILL start with great people. But building great teams (and keeping them together) is tough, given how hot the market is for the best QA talent! Turnover in IT is rampant, and with dozens of QA roles available to a strong professional, competition for […]

“No ducking way!” This was the reaction from the team when I asked if we could accelerate the system test schedule and release early. Thank goodness for auto-correct. We eventually did reduce the test schedule; we reduced it in half. And, we did it in a way that led to better quality delivered to our […]

In this session, we will discuss a more modern approach to testing. Focusing on the Quality Engineer role, Melissa will define the role, show areas within the SDLC where the modern QA/QE can be influential, and present practical (and actionable!) ways to implement them. In addition, we’ll see what a modern testing approach looks like, […]

While working on our daily tasks in agile teams, we quite often have this feeling where we are working on multiple tasks all day long and at the end of day when we review our work, we realize we haven’t accomplished anything concrete. The main reason for this is, our work environments are filled with […]