Here are a few skill development ideas that can help build better testers. These will range from free to ‘you need manager approval’ and from low time requirement to needing to set aside some time every day. For each idea, I’ll talk explicitly about who it is for, and what skills you might see improved.
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On my latest project, I’ve been working with our developers to test defect fixes as we prepare for our initial release. Normally, I’m the only one on the team who tests defect fixes, but as the result of a recent push, our developers are actively working with me on testing. Testing with our developers has helped us discover some huge benefits. Let’s look at some of them.
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Software developers love talking about tools. As a test specialist in a team that does near-constant pairing, the tools I use daily help drive code design, refactoring, collaboration, and help create new environments as quickly as possible.
Here are five tools I use daily to help me perform better testing, why I use them, and examples of the problems they help me with.
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Did you ask questions during the BDD Testing Skills Webinar? Find the answers here…
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As part of our increasingly regular series of webinars, we had the pleasure of welcoming Jeff Langr yesterday who shared a wealth of insights into how teams can achieve the benefits BDD is intended to deliver.
If you didn’t manage to get along to the webinar, you can find the video here.
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This is how I brought forward the importance of risk based testing, using a case study of our agile team. Using some simple tips, we inculcated risk based testing in practice without any formal change or adoption. I will also share an example of an agile sprint, and how to perform a simple risk analysis of an application and use the same in test strategy and planning, test execution and test matrices.
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Cross environment testing is viewed as a tedious and repetitive task and is generally a challenge to accommodate within an agile life cycle. I would like to showcase my own experience in an agile release, wherein we created a strategy for coverage of a number of test environments to support. Using simple steps, discussions, baselining and agreement within the scrum team, we created a scalable interoperability test strategy which was later supplemented with automation and other tools.
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Unit testing is important. Performance testing is important. You’ll get little argument from the people with boots on the ground, actually doing software development, that these tests matter a lot.
Let’s explore techniques for planning and implementing performance testing at the code level, as developers are creating software. Items covered include performance testing iteration, synchronous and asynchronous functions, as well as measuring the performance burden of complex algorithms.
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You don’t have to visit many Pen Testing “”how to”” resources before you read about Kali Linux. It is one of the most common and accessible suites of Pen Testing tools available today. We’ll cover why it is so valuable to your Pen Testing toolbox and how you can get the most utility value from the collection.
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Last year, I spent a lot of time working on projects that expanded my skills outside of testing. This year, I’m hoping to focus my time on developing testing skills. I came to this decision after reflecting on some problems that I ran into during my annual review. I described the first annual goal to come from this meeting in my last diary entry, Reprioritizing Testing. Now, I’d like to add two more goals: revamping our test plans and developing a strategy for security testing.
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