test management | TechWell

test management

man carrying bag of debt How Are You Managing Your Test Debt?

Just as debt can be good and bad in everyday life (such as a home mortgage), debt in the engineering world can also be good and bad. This applies to quality engineering as well—with good and bad test debt. As testers, how do we create a balance and stay at the right test-debt quotient?

Rajini  Padmanaban's picture
Rajini Padmanaban
Bug in a circle with a line through it Stop Hoarding Bugs and Clean Up Your Backlog

Many testing organizations have bugs sitting in their bug-tracking tool gathering dust. The issues aren't high-priority enough to fix immediately, but no one wants to close them because they might get around to fixing them eventually. This is a hoarder mentality! You need to organize and declutter your bug backlog.

Jerry Penner's picture
Jerry Penner
Two grain silos Testing Centers of Excellence and the Return of Silos

Testing centers of excellence aim to be R&D labs for software testing, experimenting, and innovating new testing techniques and then piloting them on projects and analyzing the results. But that's not always the reality. Some CoEs merely isolate testers, taking a step back to the days of silos. What's your experience?

John Tyson's picture
John Tyson
Computer dashboard showing metrics, photo by Carlos Muza The Testing Practices and Metrics That Really Matter in Agile and DevOps

Scaled agile and DevOps change the game for software testing. It’s not just a matter of accelerating testing; it’s also about fundamentally altering the way we measure quality. The test outcomes required to drive a fully automated release pipeline are dramatically different from the ones most teams measure today.

Wayne Ariola's picture
Wayne Ariola
A cockpit's dashboards as a pilot flies a plane, photo by Kristopher Allison Testing at 43,000 Feet: Reporting Risk That Matters

Many teams' daily testing gets broken down into numbers. If you're used to dashboards, it can be easy to forget the prime objective: to raise up quality issues—or, in the case of safety-critical devices, potential hazards. Graphs are comfortable, but do they really provide the information we should be looking for?

Alexandre Bauduin's picture
Alexandre Bauduin
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
Four checkboxes with two of them checked Questions to Ask during Test Selection for Automated Tests

We use test design techniques to answer the questions “What do I need to test?” and “What tests should I perform?” We try to ensure test coverage during test automation too, except that choosing poorly creates slower builds and unreliable information about product quality. Here are some guidelines for test selection.

Justin Rohrman's picture
Justin Rohrman
Outdoor staircase leading up, photo by Håkon Sataøen The Role of the Test Manager in Agile

In traditional software processes, test managers are responsible for all management aspects of their team. Agile, however, is self-directed, so teams handle all the usual duties. Still, there is a role for test managers in agile, and it’s much more strategic than it was before. Here are the opportunities for the role.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne