Software Test Professionals Community Articles
Articles written by the STP community of professionals.
The 3 A’s of a Successful Software Testing Job Interview
Over the past two years, the economy has taken various tumbles and turns, and companies are doing radical things with their IT departments. Outsourcing, offshoring, and layoffs are throwing good, senior testers, back into the interview process. If a tester has had...
Ask the Tester: Michael Bolton
No, not the singer. No, not the guy from Office Space; and he is not related to any UN ambassador. Instead, Michael Bolton is a consulting software tester based in Toronto, Canada. After working as a programmer, trainer, and technical support manager, Michael worked...
Six Sigma Control in Software Development
What is the purpose of adding ‘Control’ to our list of tasks? One major reason lies in the tendency of processes to lapse back into previous and undesirable behaviors. Our ‘Improve’ phase options may make for better software or better software development, but it is entirely possible that the new approach hasn’t taken root with our developers. By adding some reasonable measures to control regression to the past, we can help see to it that our new approach has a chance to become institutionalized in our organizations, be they large or small or somewhere in between.
Baselining Your Testing Team
Across the software testing market, tester’s skill levels differ tremendously. Some testers have experience with regulated environments, while others have worked exclusively on startup projects. Requirements and project management maturity levels vary across projects...
A Brief History of Software Testing
When STP announced the call for nominations for the Software Testing Luminary award, it got me thinking about how software testing came to be a role separate and distinct from software programming with unique and identifiable skills and responsibilities. It also got...
The Automated Testing Handbook
The Automated Testing Handbook Introduction The risk of software failure has never been greater. The estimated annual economic impact ranges from $60 billion for poor testing to $100 billion in lost revenues and increased costs. Unfortunately, market pressure for the...
Implementing Six Sigma: Improvement in Software Development
“We can Improve the Software Itself (And, possibly, the testing) Or We can Improve The Development Process.” We can improve software development in two primary ways: we can improve the software itself (and, possibly, the testing) or we can improve the development...
How to Spot a Tester in a Supermarket
About the Author Andy Glover Andy Glover is a software test team leader, in this role he tests windows and web applications for the pharmaceutical industry as well as manage a team of 5 software testers. He follows a number of testing blogs and when ever possible he...
Quality, Not Testing
May 24, 2010 When I am asked to review projects, one of the things that I ask to see is the quality plan. Almost always I am handed a test plan, and usually the project manager is very proud of the fact that they have a well-documented test plan. There seems to be a...
Automated Software Testing: Do Your Metrics Measure Up?
Without the Proper Metrics, All the Automation In the World Won’t Yield Useful Results “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and can express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers,...