Even if it’s the testers who are asked to make some of the biggest changes when it comes to the concept of shifting left, they’re rarely the ones who are calling the shots. When it comes to testing earlier and more often during a project, it’s management making the big decisions.

The last thing managers want to hear is that the money they’re investing in automation tools isn’t going to make everything instantly easier. But it takes time, patience, and a general understanding of the different processes involved to make test automation work for everyone involved.

How do testers contribute in agile? DevOps? Should testing tools and automation replace most things that manual testers do? At this point, testers are almost required to hold their breath whenever people start talking about new trends, and artificial intelligence is no different.

Quality can be improved over time, and while it’s difficult to change perception, it’s still possible. But poor security can sink your ship before it even leaves the dock. Invest in the security of your application and be sure to spread that responsibility to multiple levels of your software team.

Manual testing might not be as all-important as it once was, but it’s still needed if you have any hope of delivering software at a quality you can be proud of. How we create software is going to continue to change, but the burden of that change needs to be handled by more than one group within the industry.

You can’t solve the problem unless you know what that problem is, and you can’t rekindle your creativity if you just don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Pinpoint your team’s purpose, let everyone on your team contribute, and rekindle the innovative nature at the core of agile.

Better automation tools, the evolution of AI, AVM, visual testing—what’s going to make automation continue to spread through teams is the improvement of all the different solutions out there. And what should be encouraging to testers is the fact that just about every option requires smart, educated testers.

A customer-centric mindset might be most important when it comes to the user experience and user interface. With so many different available options on mobile devices, if users don’t like the way your app runs, looks, or functions, they’ll drop it before you get a chance to update anything.

Once you move into banking applications or anything related to healthcare, it becomes more and more important for developers and testers to guarantee that all the data they’re gathering from their users is locked behind the biggest, most bulletproof safe you’ve ever seen.

The industry keeps growing in complexity, and there are more things than ever that need to be tested. By studying the data you have and making use of modern analytics, you can allow your team to run more smoothly, complete certain tasks with fewer resources, and give yourself a clearer lane to better software.

When you’re testing software, yoga is probably the last thing on your mind. You don’t need to be a yoga master to test better, but if you add a few poses to your routine and understand how your mindset needs to adapt to different situations, you’ll set yourself up for smarter, more complete testing.

We continue to hear from successful organizations that the transition from something like waterfall to agile is not just beneficial—it’s essential. There will be growing pains, but if you keep your eye on the prize and work to lessen the hiccups, you’ll find your organization in a much more competitive place.

There are so many strong reasons why digital transformation has become big, but many organizations are missing a major opportunity by simply running digital projects instead of fully transforming the organization itself—similar to doing some agile things without actually committing to being agile.

Simply having data stowed away and ready to use when needed is great and all, but if you don’t have a smart strategy for how to not only analyze and interpret it, but also put it to proper use, then you may end up creating a connected ecosystem without a real purpose.

When it comes to quality, agile very often leads to better applications and just stronger testing overall. However, the rapidity of agile can make it even more difficult to keep up with bugs since you’re iterating at speeds teams often just aren’t used to.

Of the things that are being sacrificed for speed, proper bug reporting is high on the list. Because it’s so easy to quickly update applications on the fly and push out fixes within days or even hours rather than weeks or months, plenty of teams assume it’s OK to ship something with a high volume of bugs.

Change doesn’t need to be a decree from the top that forces everything else to follow suit. Change can and should start from the bottom, and that happens after you empower your developers and testers and clearly show why things like agile are critical to overall success.

The hope with any new concept is that it produces better results while removing certain tedious steps that might cause frustration along the way. While DevOps does change the way you test, you cannot forget that testing is still a major layer to your success.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the promise of ten-times greater production, shorter development times, smarter testing, and everything surrounding the fresh idea of the day, but when it comes to DevOps, there’s no longer a need for trepidation. DevOps is here to stay.

Even if the industry is booming, it’s not easy filling the full-time DevOps roles. Every software team is vying to find the perfect person to come in and establish a culture to promote improved software release cycles, software quality, security, and rapid feedback on product development. But it's not easy.

You can’t expect to achieve successful testing without the proper strategy, but you also can’t create a strategy that doesn’t allow you to adapt along the way. Think about why you’re testing, and be confident enough to change course if you feel it can benefit your team and project.

If you want to create software in the modern era and maximize the skills of your entire team, you can’t do things the way they’ve always been done. And going back to the late-stage testing example, you just can’t do things the traditional way anymore.

Teams that leverage continuous delivery and continuous integration are playing an entirely different game than software teams of the past—instead of mapping out this major, ridged timeline, data is being both gathered and used more frequently (and effectively) than before.

In software testing, automation can be viewed as an editor, of sorts. Previously, manual testers had to be extremely thorough to guarantee quality since they were the final check before products got into the hands of users. Now, testers can lean on automation tools to catch any bugs that might have been missed.

Similar to the discussion of “How much test automation do I need?” the answer often depends on your team’s makeup and what sort of product you’re making. There isn’t a perfect equation, but there are still general, proven qualities that lead to better software and happier software testers.

Communication is more important than ever, with developers and testers working together more closely. You can no longer think of the “development” and “testing” stages as diametrically opposed sides of the process—in order to succeed, developers and testers need to communicate and work as a unit.

You really can’t find the same types of roles that so many testers have occupied for decades, but according to Janet Gregory, an agile testing coach and process consultant with DragonFire, there’s more testing to be done than ever—even if the additional workload they’re being asked to do can be unfair at times.

If you look at artificial intelligence (AI) as the next big tool that can take your testing over the top rather than an inevitable replacement, the future of the profession becomes much brighter. Testing is changing, but for the foreseeable future, real testers still need to be closely involved.

It’s not easy, but to find success with agile, you need to become comfortable not only taking risks, but watching those risks lead to real failure. Not every idea is going to be a winner, but more often than not, those failures lead to an even greater success.

When you take a quick, general look at what shifting left means, you might wonder how it makes things faster. Testers are testing earlier and more often, so that means more work throughout the entire project lifecycle. Shouldn’t that slow things down?

The people behind your automation tools need to understand how the testing is done. You want your automation people to be able to write their own test cases, understand the domain so that they know what they’re automating should be automated, and have an overall solid testing foundation.

Take the time to evaluate your team and your goals before committing to automation, and be sure to try out different tools instead of following what might be popular at the time. Automation is critical, but bad automation will only slow down your processes and sink your projects.

Some organizations are seeing all the buzz surrounding DevOps, not quite reaping the benefits from agile that they had hoped, and putting all their eggs in this new basket. However, if you ask Jeff Payne, the CEO and founder of Coveros, you don’t often have DevOps without incorporating some aspects of agile.

It’s important to note the more collaborative nature that agile encourages for every single member of the team—not just the testers. Sure, testers might have to adopt the most new skills if they hope to make things work at this new pace, but product owners and developers can’t just rest on their laurels.

Taking a step back, being honest about your strengths and weaknesses, and then using agile concepts to make yourself better is smarter than simply copying another team's structure. Agile can be your base, but don’t let trends that work for your competitor dictate the core of your software development.

Every single tester should keep an eye on what security vulnerabilities might be plaguing their testing, but speaking in an interview at STARWEST 2016, Jeff Payne, the CEO and founder of Coveros, explained why you need to put a focus on security very early in the process.

There have always been distinct lines that separate developers and testers—and they didn’t often work all that close together. However, shifting everything to the left and being more concerned with testing at every single stage of development has blurred the line between their responsibilities.

Throughout the years, manual testing was just how things were done within standard software teams. Now, with advances in technology, the introduction and spread of agile, and the greater demand for speed, automation tools are almost required to keep up in this fast-paced industry.

Testers need to take on new responsibilities and learn new skills in order to stay relevant. And while everyone on a software team has to adapt in some way in order to keep up, it always seems like testers are under the brightest lights. It’s either evolve or get fully left behind.

One aspect that gets a lot of play in software is the size of your testing team. But whether you’re working at a major corporation with a massive testing team or a start-up that’s just looking to release a small financial app, the size of your company shouldn’t radically alter your testing strategy.

With new methodologies, technologies, and innovations constantly being introduced, testers need to continue to push forward with an open mind and an understanding of different disciplines to make sure they have a rock-solid standing in the process. 

With DevOps, modern software teams of all shapes and sizes are aiming to deliver a high-quality software production early and often. Shifting testing earlier into your development lifecycle and smartly using test automation to reduce bottlenecks can create a more seamless, collaborative business.

One person might be the spark that starts the fire, but it takes multiple people to help keep the flame burning. Developers and testers rely on each other more and more these days, and you need to be able to pass something along to someone with different talents in order to successfully reach the finish line.

Security is continuing to skyrocket in importance as we tie more and more aspects of our personal life to the phones we carry. And with the Internet of Things burrowing deeper and deeper into our daily lives, we need to understand who has access to our info and how we can best protect ourselves.

Testing earlier assures better quality. But maybe most important, things like agile and DevOps—which encourage that you shift your testing left and allow for more collaboration between different parts of your team—have broken down the walls that previously separated testers for the rest of the organization.

Testing has often been seen as the final stage of creating an application. Since we weren’t shifting testing left as much as we do today, a great deal of work was thrown on the testing team at the very end of an exhausting project cycle. But testers shouldn’t be seen as the last line of defense.

Agile and DevOps, which now dominate software development, lean on continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment. Because of that, anything that might break this iterative and continuous cycle could throw everything out of whack and stunt your team’s growth.

For the longest time, software architecture was something you built, adapted to your team or situation, and left in place—the old “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Now, more rapid changes aren’t just expected, they’re necessary.

Becoming a good storyteller in the world of testing is important. By adding emotional weight and the full user experience to user stories, we can better our understanding of potential faults, more effectively share our experiences, and craft a better message that team members and users alike can get behind.

You achieve much greater things if you trust your testing team and focus on the entire software lifecycle rather than your own personal goals. Over the years, agile has made it difficult to be both selfish and successful as a tester.

It’s a pipe dream if you think you can just flip a switch and automate entire swaths of testing without lifting a finger. Automation is integral to today’s agile and DevOps world, but it’s easy to fall in love with it and lose track of what should and shouldn’t be automated.

Even with test automation, service virtualization, artificial intelligence, and the medley of other software innovations we’ve seen in the last few years, is it possible to accurately simulate real-life situations for your application within the myriad testing phases prelaunch?

With new concepts, platforms, methodologies, and devices being introduced at a rapid rate, it’s critical to both initiate and establish a culture of experimentation within your testing team. You need to experiment and take risks in order to keep pace and hopefully surpass the competition.

Software companies around the world are putting a significant portion of their resources into mobile application development. And even though we’ve made great strides in terms of speed and security, can mobile app quality hold a candle to more traditional applications?

Before you pick the right mobile testing tool, you need to research your options thoroughly in order to find something that streamlines your processes and allows the development lifecycle to run smoother. However, it’s even more essential to look at your own team before deciding on a tool.

Since software development is highly subjective in nature, different thought processes and assumptions between development and testing teams can positively impact applications and lead to a more successful, well-rounded product. It might not seem like it at the time, but there’s value to dissonance.

If you’re looking to remove constraints, service virtualization should be high up on your list of things to take advantage of in 2017. The idea is to give both developers and testers the ability to create simulated services of production environments to develop and test.

Quality can’t be just another box you need to check off at the very bottom of your to-do list. If you don’t properly test your application—whether that’s through traditional manual work or strategic automation—there’s a significant chance the final product won’t find a real audience.

If you don’t have the proper automation framework, the actual tools you use don’t pack near as powerful a punch. This framework allows you to better organize your reports and develop metrics through your test automation.

Agile, by its very nature, is about collaboration. The developers work alongside the testers, the testers see eye-to-eye (at least in most cases) with the developers, and there’s just a more flexible nature to the team itself. It is meant to bridge the major gaps within teams.

The concept of failing has changed from something people dread to a necessary part of creating secure, functioning applications. That means that you don’t want to have one major failure at the very end of the development lifecycle—you need to continue to fail before release to find real success.

If you’re hoping to become agile, you have to get uncomfortable before you break through and find your stride. Agile is all about growth, and in order to grow, you have to adopt new concepts, practices, and techniques that will force you to change what you’re doing in a way that might not come easy.

With the ever-increasing quality standards engrained in the common application user, we’re now at the point where transitioning from the waterfall methodology to the agile methodology isn’t just beneficial—it’s an essential step toward staying afloat in one of the most competitive industries.

Why does software development demand so much speed? We throw around terms like “agile” or “DevOps” and consider that a good enough answer for the demand for speed, but there are three major factors outlined by Mark Levy, the director of strategy at Micro Focus, that call for greater development speed.

"Shift left" is the latest philosophy teams are adopting to account for the fact that releases are happening on a daily basis, rather than a weekly or monthly basis. If you're working on mobile applications and don’t adhere to a shift-left mindset, your team will be left behind.

We’ve become so advanced in our technology—especially when it comes to IoT and embedded devices—that we can benefit some people’s quality of life, but one of the big concerns (especially when it comes to a heart) is security and preventing people from misusing access to pacemakers.

DevOps can be a loaded term. Sometimes, you’re just referring to the agile relationship between development and operations. Other people, when discussing it at a conference or in meetings, point toward more frequent releases, to the rate of hundreds of times per day or even per hour.

When something about your job changes, it’s easy to panic. However, you shouldn’t discount all your current skills or fear you’ll have to be retrained just to continue testing and developing software. The best part about IoT and AI is that what you’re doing now will transfer over.

Instead of building each individual part of a piece of software, putting it all together, and testing it to see the results, maybe we should look to how planes are assembled. By testing each aspect of the product in isolation first, problems are discovered earlier and software can be delivered faster.

Enthusiasm can’t be forced on you. If you’re not passionate about software, it’s difficult for someone to get you to the point where you wake up in the morning excited to develop a mobile application. However, the conditions of your software team can change your level of enthusiasm drastically.

One aspect of the interviewing process you can’t forget is chemistry. We so often look at someone’s skills and competence in certain areas of the job and completely forget that if that person can’t work well with your current team, development won’t go smoothly.

With Niantic Software’s Pokémon Go, the variables you’re dealing with are eons beyond what a normal testing team can manage. Millions upon millions of players are experiencing the application all over the world and putting it through paces that the development team might have never dreamed of.

Metrics are all about feedback. Similar to how a fitness tracker keeps data that allows you to optimize your workout and improve physical activity, metrics and measurement provide you with a suite of data used to advance your testing and development efforts—especially within an agile environment.

For CA Technologies, the premier sponsor at this year’s STARWEST, the goal of the show was to promote continuous delivery and drive continuous testing. But the testing information, discussions of industry trends, and personal connections gathered were what made CA’s presence invaluable.

You’ll often hear people worry that frequent deployment forces a dip in overall quality, but now that people are learning how to better leverage DevOps and are adjusting to the current speed of development, you don’t have to sacrifice quality just so that you can have quicker releases.

The Netflix team has to be dynamic in order to move as quickly as the demand of its audience. Because of that, the company only hires senior engineers, avoids actually sticking to process whenever possible, encourages a great deal of employee freedom, and even pushes budgets to the side.

In the case of Netflix, how the company is structured and how they hire engineers makes the prospect of agile less appealing than you might imagine. The streaming service makes use of over a third of the bits on the Internet at peak, but shockingly, Netflix is against the idea of having process.

We can no longer be myopic when it comes to testing, as there’s a wide group of needs to be addressed on any given project. For a project to succeed, testers must build out robust test data management capabilities in response to growing application demand.

Even if automation, artificial intelligence, and everything else that’s been introduced within the software industry has changed how we test (and the tester’s role), that doesn’t mean testing’s not worth your time. In fact, with current customer expectations, it might be more important than ever.

Agile has fundamentally changed the way we talk about testing. However, something that isn’t discussed as often, yet might be just as critical to the future direction of the industry, is artificial intelligence. In the world of testing, it’s easy to see how AI can be exceptionally useful.

There are endless reasons why your test team might need to make use of automation. However, even if we’re at a point where most people agree you need some sort of test automation to compete in today’s agile landscape, using automation indiscriminately leads to more headaches than benefits.

If you’re new to a team but have an important point to make during a meeting, it makes sense to just voice your opinion and get your message across, right? That’s easier said than done. It takes time to build credibility amongst your peers, so you need to back everything up with data.

The secret to making yourself invaluable as a tester isn’t learning how to see the future and forecast what will change the industry and what will fade away. In order to future-proof yourself, spend the time to add the skills you’re missing, and understand what might be coming on the horizon.

Simply saying, “Hey, make sure we have automated testing because that will fix everything” isn’t enough. If you don’t fully understand what needs to be automated, why it needs to be automated, and what tests should remain manual, you’re simply following fresh trends for the sake of looking relevant.

With automation, continuous integration, agile, and a slew of other testing innovations, the field has evolved into something new. However, one of the major issues that many testers are running into is that while the occupation itself is expanding, their own personal growth isn’t keeping pace.

IoT is the latest trend that’s producing new connected devices that change how we interact with our environment. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what IoT can achieve, but before we can really hit our stride in this industry, all the different players needs to agree on a standard.

If you’re a professional within the industry and fail to take advantage of a sea change like mobile, you’re wasting a valuable opportunity. Its growth curve continues to spike, and there are still countless ways you can leverage mobile to inspire fresh career opportunities.

Acting as an early adopter isn’t inherently bad—if you look at this from a business context, it’d be like investing in a promising startup and hoping to double or even triple your money over time. But what’s critical here is avoiding pushing all your chips into the middle of the table early on.

The speed at which software evolves, adapts, and moves to the next best thing can be dizzying at times. As soon as you adopt the latest and greatest methodology and see better results, a new solution is created that somehow requires teams to better test and develop at a greater rate.

Are we reducing the quality of our code by pushing teams to produce at a speed that might be too fast? Will the final product require multiple updates in order to fix bugs missed along the way? Like just about every question posed about agile, it can depend on the specific team makeup.

Just because DevOps has proven to be successful in establishing better communication between development and operations teams, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, there are quite a few obstacles that teams of varying sizes will face when undergoing a DevOps transformation that are impossible to ignore.

It’s never easy instituing a new methodology or practice into your team. If you want DevOps to be a major focus in order to improve communication and collaboration between development and operations, you can’t just make that happen with the wave of a wand and a couple of key buzzwords.

Adopting automation tools can be a big decision. When it comes to test automation, it’s critical to incorporate an integrated test automation plan instead of piling together a mishmash of unrelated tools with the hope to create some taped together mess of a plan.

TechWell pours hundreds of hours into STAREAST each year, and for the most recent conference, we saw a medley of interesting articles appear afterward written by happy attendees and vendors who represented their companies at the Orlando-based event.

Continuous integration is all about the feedback loops between your developers, testers, product owners, customers, and everyone involved in your organization. That’s great to write as if it’s gospel, but what can continuous integration and continuous testing do for you right now to improve efficiency?

Test automation is much more than just the specific tools, frameworks, or programming languages that allow it to improve the overall quality of your software. You need to go a level above the technical terminology to understand the value of test automation.

Respect is a major player when it comes to creating and maintaining a cohesive team, and plenty of testers today feel they’re lacking the respect of their peers. With test automation sometimes being seen as some magical solution to fixing bugs, the usefulness of manual testers has come into question.

Unlike waterfall, where people had to do their best to explain the value of automation, agile more naturally promotes that need for these tools through its rapidity and integration of testing throughout the development process. Agile assumes automation is the key ingredient of your mission strategy.

If you accept that it’s OK to make the same mistakes over and over, you’ll never give yourself the opportunity to grow. If you don’t grow, you won’t improve your software. A writer should always ask why an editor did what he did, and a developer should understand how he can fix the code he broke.

Mobile or PC apps that crash, have poor user experience, don’t run smoothly, or lack features give your customer the idea that whatever they bought didn’t get the tender, loving care it deserved—even if they know the issues can be fixed in a later release.

Is software harder to make? The inclusion of additional team members throughout the process has made the flow of development a bit more difficult than it has been in the past. Sure, software quality might be at an all-time high, but the journey there has a few more twists and turns.

In order to satisfy the people you hope will purchase or download your software, a proper customer and user experience process has to be built into the software development lifecycle. Whether you follow an agile, waterfall, or completely different methodology, this is a step that can’t be skipped.

How do you promote effective communication among a group of individuals, especially in agile? That’s the big question. In a world where some people might even have differing definitions of the actual word “communication,” it can seem impossible to get everyone on the same page.

Bringing in an agile coach to explain how everything is done and why certain people on your team need to do certain things is absolutely beneficial, but it’s that mindset of adaptation and learning that gives agile such a potent punch.

The emergence and eventual explosion of the Internet of Things doesn’t mean we’ll be moving on from our latest and greatest technological fling. The future of IoT devices isn’t going to replace that big mobile spot in our hearts with a door knob that can connect to the Internet.

Adopting open source tools isn’t a seamless, pain-free process. The benefits can be invaluable, but it’s important to note that most companies moving from packaged tools into the open source world often go through a technology shock. It takes the right people, processes, and planning to succeed.

A skilled tester isn’t a perfect tester. But a tester with the requisite skills, attitude, and drive to help improve quality throughout the development lifecycle can and will lead to a stronger product. And it’s these qualities that Judy McKay, the president of ASTQB, assigns to a skilled tester.

It’s critical to observe how the future is helping us better test and develop on what’s come before it. How have we taken the lessons learned from mobile development and retrofitted them to other facets of the industry, such as the web? There are three main lessons we’ve learned that apply.

As we continue to become more technologically evolved, one of the most important things testers can do is take a step back, breathe, and discover the value of testing—as well as better ways to test beyond using what’s worked for other platforms in the past.

Test automation isn’t quite as automatic as its name suggests. There’s a misconception out there that you can buy a bunch of test automation tools, set them up properly, and walk away without a second thought or worry. However, it’s important to understand that automation is a skill in itself.

When discussing agile and its impact on the industry, the concept of the “traditional testing role” is often a topic of conversation. However, we shouldn’t just assume that this “traditional” tester is as common as we seem to make it sound, as testers have always had to do more than just test.

In a perfect world, developers and testers are constantly asking themselves, “How can I make this more secure?” Security has become both a hot topic and a major priority in most businesses, but actually creating a mobile or web application that’s not porous might be more difficult than ever.

Change isn’t always necessary—or even good, for that matter—but when is it actually the right time to incorporate a new tool, language, or piece of technology that might be taking the market by storm into your business? How do you identify the risks?

That little rectangular device sitting in your pocket can already do so much, so it’s not as if there’s some terrible drought of innovation in the mobile space. But according to AppDiff.com’s CEO, Jason Arbon, the white hot excitement stemming from mobile phones has cooled.

Better collaboration, adaptive planning, early delivery, and constant improvement—do any of these agile pillars sound like something a non-software team would want to avoid? Agile has its place in different companies and teams across a multitude of industries.

Just because something is new, shiny, and more fully featured doesn’t mean that everyone is going to want to use it. Even if your IoT-enabled smart grill is voice-activated, it still has to be both consistently functional and as easy to use as a regular grill.

Some form of automation should be used to streamline testing, but leveraging automation as a crutch won’t help you or your team spot every bug and produce high-quality software. In automation, the tools don’t do all the testing—they simply do what they are told to do by the actual tester.

There’s no single solution that can guarantee success in the mobile testing space. However, by incorporating virtualization and making use of the cloud, you can test the functionality, performance, and security of an application across a bevy of networks.

If you bring in an agile coach and methodically take all the right steps toward transforming your team into a faster, more iterative group, it’s very likely that agile will work for you. However, if you find that your projects are struggling and turn to agile as a Band-Aid, don't expect results.

When it comes to effective and efficient mobile app development and testing, transitioning to agile has almost become a requirement. Agile allows you to make amendments at any stage of the process, both welcoming change and using it as an advantage.

The more devices connected to the Internet, the more challenges the average tester will face. With so many standard items expanding their technological reach through the Internet of Things, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to properly test devices manually.

A number of teams are making the agile transition, and while plenty of agile coaches give strong advice for how to go from zero to agile in a measured, streamlined manner, it’s also important to focus on how to transition from an existing waterfall mentality to an agile one.

If you find yourself rushing through development or accelerating your testing process to a speed that’s not conducive to the nature of your software or project, it might be time to take a step back, examine your methods, and find a new solution.

The Internet of Things provides new, exciting possibilities for everyone involved, but with these new possibilities come just as many challenges. We have to shift our thinking before we can adapt to the upcoming connected world.

The adoption of agile—which has taken place within both small teams and massive organizations—has changed the tester’s role. However, that doesn’t mean it’s time for testers to pack up their things and sulk out the door. The “testing is dead” narrative doesn’t tell the whole story.

If your goal is to do everything agile, bottlenecks will begin to rear their ugly heads. Not every aspect of the business lends itself to an agile structure, so it’s important to evaluate each situation in order to determine the method that suits it best.

Quality has increasingly become a responsibility for not just one single segment of the team, but the team as a whole. It’s important for each member of a team to have some hand in making sure that what’s being developed works as intended as it goes through each individual progression.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the Internet of Things. More and more objects you use on a daily basis will soon become a part of the Internet of Things ecosystem, giving companies new ways to communicate with consumers, and the consumers themselves more personalized experiences.

Agile produces software that is more thoroughly tested and secure, at a speed that the current marketplace almost demands. But beyond making better mobile apps or more appealing software, how important is agile when it comes to not only cultivating a strong team, but also communicating with clients?

The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, just laid off 450 workers at its headquarters in order to become a more agile business. It joins major names like Amazon as corporations trim the fat to compete in a fast-moving marketplace. This proves agile is now moving well beyond small teams.

Should you expand your agile team to include an even greater number of members? And should you consider spreading your new agile knowledge to other members of the company to make the entire organization agile? Determining scale can be tricky.

More and more, users are expecting increasingly responsive apps on day one, and if certain actions take just a single second longer than what they feel is justifiable, the app could be uninstalled before it’s ever really given a chance. But more complex apps might just be slower. Which is the priority?

TechWell is highlighting the strides women have made in the growing testing profession by featuring the Women Who Test summit at STARWEST. This full-day event, which will be October 2, is aimed toward women in the industry looking to network with other women passionate about software testing.

Like agile, people are quickly adopting and making great use of DevOps, which stresses communication, automation, and a strong sense of cooperation within a team. Yet, while it can be argued that agile spawned DevOps, some software veterans argue that it’s DevOps that’s actually pushing agile.

A recent IBM/Ponemon study shows that mobile application development for a high percentage of large companies—which includes some Fortune 500 members—has significant weaknesses, leaving enterprise data susceptible to theft. These apps just aren’t being properly security tested before release.

As soon as your mobile application hits the store, you want your target audience to eat it up. But is it possible to have too many tapping the download button? When does success start to weigh on the developer? Read on to find out how much success is too much.

Just about every native app developed today includes some HTML, even if its creators are labeling it otherwise. It’s a pervasive language that’s made it hard to crown native apps as the clear winner. In reality, pure native apps are a dying breed.

If you take a quick look at the data, it becomes clear that the tech industry has a diversity problem that’s yet to be fully addressed. About 70 percent of employees at Google are men, with 91 percent being either white or Asian. These numbers are consistent among the other major industry players.

In an attempt to compete with Google and Apple, Pebble, which Kickstarted one of the first smartwatches two years ago, is dropping its prices and adding new functionality. The company will have to continue to push, though, if it hopes to remain relevant in this now competitive industry.

Augmented reality continues to grow, and its place in the world of commerce has never been so pronounced. AR paid app downloads, subscriptions, and advertising will lead to global revenues of $1.5 billion by 2015, along with 2.5 billion downloads.

You can have the most talented, experienced team of tech professionals all under one roof, but if they don’t have high morale, success will be hard to reach. That’s why a group like Plasticity Labs—which uses data analytics to gauge workplace morale—can even exist.

Competitors have continued to show initiative to innovate, but a fresh update for Internet Explorer 11 has patched twenty-five of the browser’s key vulnerabilities and even added new tools to entice additional developers. Microsoft is making big moves in the browser game.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is the Department of Homeland Security agency meant to oversee lawful immigration, is aiming to automate the integration and delivery of its software projects with a new, paperless immigration system that makes use of agile practices.

Major tech companies can expect continued resistance and suspicion from users if the National Security Agency’s power to spy on customers is not reduced or further regulated in the near future. United States technology companies could lose $35 billion in just three years over data concerns.

A new crowd-funded project wants to go beyond listing your burned calories and accelerated heart rate. The Sense device is looking to not only monitor your unique sleep patterns but also help you wake up exactly when your body is telling you to.

As of now, the prospect of upgrading to a smart home appears both too expensive and too complex for the average consumer to manage. However, central hubs coming from companies like Wink are looking to bring all of the unique software together in one easy-to-find place.