Watch Paul Grizzaffi’s expert webinar, as he makes the point that automation development is software development, and takes us through the ins and out of why, and how, to perform code review on automation code.

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Many years ago, I heard a senior executive at one of my companies make a statement that changed the way I would think about things for a long time.  The statement was so common sense that I wish I had thought about it on my own. He said that regardless of the benefits of being an executive, regardless of the financial freedom he had experienced, the most important thing that becoming an executive gave him was TIME.

He stated that years earlier he would put a lot of hours into his work, only to find that when he left work, he had so many things to take care of: yard work, maintenance around the house, vehicle maintenance, remodeling and repairs, cleaning, and keeping things up to date.

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Watch this on-demand webinar, presented by automation expert Marcus Merrell, and learn how to provide real-time insights that matter to decision makers – with automated analytics testing.

Full recording and slide-deck are below. Read more…

One of the most challenging things about DevOps for existing development organizations, is how hard it is to get started. New development teams can grow organically with DevOps principles from day one. For these organizations DevOps is easy. But existing development shops not only do not have the option to stop everything and start over, they are slipstreaming new processes and technologies into an existing team, and an already-established delivery pipeline. However there is an exciting opportunity where QA/QE teams can become the genesis for an organization’s move to DevOps. Read more…

The development world is Big Data hungry, but it often feels like a race to nowhere, because the number of options is huge, and the use case is not always clear. Log analysis is one Big Data tool that makes the lives of development teams better, or it should. And log analysis can be used beyond developers and IT operations – to benefit Quality Assurance (QA) teams in the process.

We tend to focus on pretty graphs or robust query engines, but the key is to identify a tool that expedites insights into performance: good, bad and where there is room for improvement.

Specifically, these are developer logging tools for: Read more…

When you are a small and lean software development shop it seems you can’t always do things the ideal way. The processes and tooling you adopt are associated with an immediate challenge, and can seldom look past an immediate release. Quality Assurance is one of those processes that many small dev teams consider something that they will do when they are large.  And what a huge mistake that is. Read more…

Code does not live in a silo. Applications are dependent on a multi-tier stack, backends, operating systems, server configurations, and many components and frameworks. In order to do end-to-end testing there needs to be a location to test the entire stack. And test in a way it behaves as it would in production. The only way to do this is to delivery upcoming versions of the applications to a lab environment. Read more…

Your development team is stretched-thin as demands increase, but Quality Assurance takes a lot of effort—not just in running the actual tests, but in maintaining the tests, communicating with developers and creating new test cases. With this as your reality, how can you be expected to do more with less?

Fast forward to the future: you’re in QA, but you’re not chasing software releases, you’re not thinking about how to design the next test case, and you’re not worried about what test cases are outdated. You’re just focused on strategy. Read more…

You have a choice. You can be a puppet master and test applications by making them do cool things from within. Crossing your fingers you cover all use cases. Or you can be a Deity who comes to earth and sees the world from the user’s eyes, but maintains a million foot view of the application as well. Both a puppet master and a Deity are fun roles, so which approach should you choose? Read more…

I don’t know about you, but when I’m trying to keep up with my daily tasks, I might think about all the cool technologies and tools out there, but it is impossible to keep up. And the amount of new information can sometimes be more distracting then helpful.

Not only that there is more than just tools, the DevOps movement and testing best practices are changing fast as well. The tooling might be familiar but the culture, processes and philosophy is often new.

Here are the top RSS feeds to put into your favorite feed tool to quickly keep current on the QA and Development world. Read more…