The Agile Manifesto has twelve principles, that include “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.” For its time, the Manifesto was revolutionary. Today, that speed seems quaint. Agile Machismo has taken over, with one-week sprints better than two, and continuous deployment,

If you have a secret hobby of arguing over words, or perhaps worse, injecting meaning that is incorrect into a technical term, well … software might be the place for you. Consider Quality Assurance, or QA, which is something often used by people who do not have change permissions on the version control system, nor

A few years ago, it was popular for companies to create “suites” that were really just a bunch of small tools, purchased, and bundled together. Often the technology did not interoperate. Many of those companies are no longer in business, or else they have been purchased by a MegaCorp. None of that is what I

Three computer systems, working on the same problem separately, all try to solve a problem. If at least two come to the same conclusion, then everything can proceed. If, however, there are three different answers, then humans need to intervene to figure out what is really going on. Is this fact or fiction? If you

Imagine this scenario: The company has programmers, analysts, and testers. The programmers complain the analysts do a poor job; they have to figure out what the software should really do. The testers come along and find problems with that, unconsidered scenarios, and we have to do everything over again. When DevOps comes along, the company

Executive Summary While the world of marketing is full of “best practices” and universal truisms, engineers tend to think in terms of trade offs. That is, this approach creates these problems and that approach creates those problems, and I value this over that, so I have made my choice. The Agile Manifesto may be one of the

Executive Summary It shows up like this. The programmers make a change. At some point, the tests run, and there are a series of failures. The testers review the failures, and as it turns out, some large number of them were caused by the change. Others are “flakiness,” something wrong with the environment, or browser,

Executive Summary Record and Play tools are a popular way to get into test automation as quick to start and with little training. Their long-term success rate, and real impact on delivery cost and quality, are more debatable. We find the tools work best with small, stable user interfaces and software, and when used by

Automated Testing has become an essential activity within any modern software development practice. In agile methodology, software is released on a regular basis to stay ahead of competitors. To release software frequently and reliably, one must rely on an automated build system, which minimizes human error and speeds up the deployment process. One step within

There is a misconception in the software industry that open source software is free. While it is true that many test automation tools (Selenium, Cucumber, Katalan, etc.) are freely available, these tools are not without cost to the end user. These tools merely provide mechanisms to drive browsers, organize test suites, and enable parallel execution