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How to Make Testing Progress Visible

Testing efforts can easily go under the radar or be hard to grasp. It’s important to remember that software testing is not only about running tests: it involves multiple crucial facets that contribute to creating better and better software. In this article, we share with you all what we do in order to help the team and the different stakeholders to be informed of the testing progress. 

Testing is aimed to provide information about the quality of our system and the risks that might affect the user experience and our business so that better decisions can be taken. All this in order to mitigate those risks and improve the quality and the experience of our users.

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Can There Be Testers in Scrum?

There is no doubt that Scrum is one of the most important tools in the search for business agility for teams in any context, and in tackling challenges of varying complexity.

As explained by Forbes, business agility enables organizations to thrive in a world of rapid and unpredictable change, helping them to adapt their business management models and internal processes to make them more efficient. All of this without compromising quality, and being truly able to maintain their competitive advantage.

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TSQA 2022: Test Automation Code and Strategy

In March, Abstracta's Senior Leader, Matías Fornara, and I had the opportunity to speak at the Triangle Software Quality Association(TSQA) 2022 Conference.

TSQA is a non-profit, volunteer-led organization dedicated to promoting software quality practices through networking, training, and professional development opportunities. The TSQA conference takes place once a year, and leaders from all over the world get together to share cutting-edge knowledge, emerging technologies, and trends in the test and quality assurance industry.

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3 Keys to a Successful Continuous Testing Implementation

Unless you’ve been hibernating for the past decade or two, I’m sure you have already become well aware of the benefits of continuous testing: reduced cost of development, less waste, improved system reliability, reduced risk upon release, and so on. Of course, you believe putting it into practice in the real world is not as simple as some vendors may have. It’s become clear that having a continuous integration tool configured will not mean that a team successfully achieves continuous testing.

Fortunately, we now have more resources than ever to overcome this organizational challenge, such as the ACT Framework. Not long ago, my team and I also released our Ultimate Guide to Continuous Testing, which is very much in line with the philosophy of the ACT framework. In this post, I will share some key considerations and tips from the guide to successfully implement continuous testing. 

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A COO’s Guide to Test Strategy Creation

A test strategy is a set of high-level definitions that determine how software testing processes are going to be performed, driving our decisions on how to invest our testing efforts. Creating a well-thought test strategy is crucial to understanding the overall scope of your project, and what testing approaches, tools and skills are required in order to develop a successful product that provides a great user experience.

However, creating a test strategy is a complex task. Every piece of software is unique, and as such, objectives, user expectations, budgets and timelines differ greatly between projects. In this webinar recording and in this article, I'll share the foundational bases for creating and revising successful test strategies that you can adapt to your software projects regardless of their specific requirements.

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How to Keep Software Testers Motivated

Recently, I gave a talk at Agile Testing Days called “How to Keep Testers Motivated.” This topic is one that’s close to my heart because as COO, I manage all of Abstracta’s operations that rely on the effort of more than 100 software testers. Therefore, the motivation of the people working with us is a key factor to success: the company’s success, the different teams’ success, and their personal success.

I remember last year during the TestingUY conference in Uruguay, Melissa Eaden was answering a question from the audience and she said that everyone can do testing, but only a tester does good testing. I fully agree with her, but I like to add a little detail to this affirmation, which is that only a motivated tester does good testing.

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Improve Your Software Testing Strategy: A Testing Maturity Model

Does your development team feel stuck when it comes to knowing what specific things to focus on to improve your software testing and quality management? Need to figure out how to fill in the gaps and improve efficiency and results?

In this post, I’ll share the process behind this software testing maturity assessment my team and I devised at Abstracta so that you can bring some of these ideas to your test strategy, working towards continuous improvement.

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Migrating to Open Source Tools (Especially Now)

Key Considerations and Strategies for Going the Open Source Route

If you’re paying for expensive software testing tool licenses, perhaps something to consider is migrating to open source alternatives to optimize costs, especially if your team needs to find ways to go lean during the pandemic. 

Of course, like most things worthwhile, migrating implies some up-front investment, with the realization of cost savings happening in the mid to long-term. 

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How Can You Optimize the Cost of Software Testing?

Ways to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing Without Sacrificing Quality

Due to the novel coronavirus and the impact, it’s having on the global economy, my colleagues and I have been thinking a lot these days about how we could help our clients and others find ways to reduce the cost of testing without letting their products’ quality suffer. And dare we say it, maybe even lessen the need of having to let go of valuable team members. In certain cases and many industries, the latter is unavoidable but it’s important to first try to control or optimize costs as much as possible. 

In this post, we’ll share some ways to reduce software testing costs that we have tried and tested firsthand at Abstracta with great results.

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3 Performance Testing Metrics Every Tester Should Know

Making sense of the average, standard deviation and percentiles in performance testing reports.

There are certain performance testing metrics that are essential to understand properly in order to draw the right conclusions from your tests. These metrics require some basic understanding of math and statistics, but nothing too complicated. The issue is that if you don’t understand well what each one means or what they represent, you’ll come to some very wrong conclusions. 

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Do Software Testers Actually Improve Software Quality?

What is the relationship between software testers and software quality?


You may also like: Software Testing Tutorial: How to Perform Testing

Do Testers Improve Quality, Help Improve Quality, or Only Pass Info to Others Who Do So?

Lately, I’ve been closely following a super interesting Twitter discussion about whether or not testers improve software quality. Yes, we find the bugs, but are we just the messengers? Or are we active participants in the construction of great digital products?

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Why Software Testing is Necessary for Delivering Superior Customer Experiences

Isn't this how you want your customers to view your software?

Since attending Forrester's CX SF conference, I’ve been reflecting lately upon the relationship between software quality and the customer experience for brands that are seeking to innovate and stand out in a sea of growing competition.

One recent experience of mine really highlighted this for me; I recently moved to Berkeley, so I’m still buying some furniture and other items for my home. I was about to complete an online order from a very famous store that included more than 20 items in my cart. All went well until I hit the “place order” button. After I had already finished the transaction, I was notified that some things were out of stock, others were discontinued, etc. This seems like an operational problem, but from my perspective, it’s also a software problem; the site didn’t alert me about these different issues, which caused this part of the process to ruin my experience. Then, I had to call customer service, spend an hour on the phone, follow a lengthy process to get my refund, and so on. In the end, I had undergone stress, frustration, and disappointment.

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A Guide to Cucumber Best Practices

In this post, we’ll share some good Cucumber practices, especially when writing scenarios using the Gherkin language, clarifying some BDD concepts and from these practices, how to build better scenarios.

BDD is a development strategy, and even if you do not follow this practice, we find it beneficial to use Cucumber (or a similar tool) since it "forces you" to document your automated tests before implementing them. It’s fundamental that these tests be made clear to a user who does not know the behavior of the described functionality and that they be maintainable to reduce the costs of making changes in the test steps.
This image by Cucumber reflects the idea of combining automated tests, having a living documentation, and at the same time, still having specifications that are executable. All of this is thanks to the approach of using a tool like Cucumber.

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Are Agile Testers Still a Thing?

We need our testers in agile. See, they have a post it.

With the implementation of Agile methodologies and the coupling of roles in software development, the tester has been lost, especially since integrated roles like the full stack developer started to emerge. Companies are looking for people capable of performing analysis, design, architecture, development, and testing, grouping these skills into one single specialist.

But don’t all these roles have to be taken into account for software development? Although there are those developers with extensive knowledge who are capable of performing functions in each of these areas, there is always a role that loses some importance.

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What is BDD and What Does it Mean for Testers?

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), as its name indicates, is not a testing technique, but rather a development strategy (as well as TDD, which is Test-Driven Development). What it proposes is to define a common language for the business and the technical team members, using it at the outset of development and testing, which is why it's important for testers to understand BDD.

BDD and TDD

I used to think about BDD as an evolution of TDD, but then I realized that it is much more than a simple evolution. It's a different approach that solves a different problem. In TDD, the focus is on the unit test, while in BDD, the focus is testing on a higher level, functional and acceptance testing, as its aim is to comply with the business and not just with the code.