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People attending a talk at the Agile Dev, Better Software & DevOps West conference Lessons Learned at the Agile Dev, Better Software & DevOps West Conference

The Agile Dev, Better Software & DevOps West conference was held in Las Vegas in early June. Coveros technical manager Gene Gotimer was a speaker at the event, but he also attended as a delegate, getting to experience the keynotes, sessions, Expo, and other parts of the software conference. Here are his takeaways.

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Gene Gotimer
A high-performing QA team holding up a trophy Testing the Tester: Building a High-Impact QA Team

Teams don’t always understand the impact their roles have on the business outcome, so their lack of focus can affect software quality and lead to an array of disasters. You can help your existing testers become a high-performing QA team focused on goals. Here’s what you can do to transform how your QA team functions.

Amol Adsule's picture
Amol Adsule
blurry photo The Blurred Lines between the Open Source and Closed Source Worlds

The open source and closed sourced worlds need each other—not only for healthy competition, but more importantly, for healthy collaboration, too. Mukesh Sharma looks at recent collaborative efforts between the open source and closed source communities and what is driving these changes.

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Mukesh Sharma
A person's legs dangling off the edge of a building, photo by Alex Wong The Risk of Overemphasizing Risks

We are trained to identify and evaluate risks. This prevents teams from making decisions that are unlikely to work, saving time and money and helping the team move forward. However, a risk-avoidance mindset can also stop progress. Successful agile teams see risks as ways of starting a conversation, not stopping it.

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Steve Berczuk
Question mark drawn on a blackboard The Power of a Single Question in Understanding Customer Needs

People tend to see their circumstances as more unusual, difficult, or troublesome than anyone else’s. As a result, by asking about their problem, priorities, or responsibilities, you can gain important information about their situation and how they perceive it. Here's one question to learn a lot about your customers.

Naomi Karten's picture
Naomi Karten
Person standing on a scale 3 Ways to Keep Your Test Suite Lean

Test automation is useful, but as your tests grow, they require maintenance. Without curation, your test suite can turn messy and uncontrollable. Keeping a lean test suite will ensure your tests remain useful. You can whip your test suite into shape by focusing on always making your tests valuable, reliable, and fast.

Meaghan Lewis's picture
Meaghan Lewis
A group of people participating in a mob programming session Mob Programming: Working Well Together

Mob programming is a whole-team approach to creating software where everyone works together on the same thing at the same computer. It's not a bunch of people watching one person write code, but rather everyone thinking, discussing, designing, and collaborating. Sound crazy? Here's how it improves the quality of code.

Woody Zuill's picture
Woody Zuill
Several people fist bumping over a busy workspace with computers Automation for the People

We tend to contrast automated and manual testing, but really, they should support each other. The key is to define what our testing objectives are, then build the solution needed to achieve them—probably a combination of manual and automated testing. We should not let the method become more important than the results.

Christin Wiedemann's picture
Christin Wiedemann