quality management

quality Are You Testing The Quality Into Your Software?

The test team shouldn’t have the onus to improve the software quality, rather the quality should already be built into the software.   A few subtle indicators can reveal if the quality isn’t being built into the software.

Richard Estra's picture
Richard Estra
Review A Culture of Criticism in Software Companies

Author Qaiser Munir outlines his experience with the culture of blame in software development toward those considered to be responsible for "quality".

Qaiser Munir's picture
Qaiser Munir
Quality engineers working on product quality Quality Engineering in Agile and DevOps

Ensuring that quality is advocated for at every step along the lifecycle can be tough. One easy response is, “Quality is everyone’s job”—after all, whole-team accountability is a key tenet of agile. But what does this really mean in practice? What approaches and roles help us embrace a culture of quality engineering?

Michael Sowers's picture
Michael Sowers
Ascending staircase with a web of connections on the ceiling Testers Must Use Team Connections to Enable Quality

The quality team has the greatest reach in its visibility and ability to connect with all other engineering and non-engineering teams. For a tester to realize their fullest potential, they need to acknowledge and leverage this reach by communicating and collaborating with all other teams to create the best product.

Mukesh Sharma's picture
Mukesh Sharma
Tester outlining the quality attributes for a test automation framework 7 Essential Quality Attributes for Your Test Automation Framework

A common problem in software is that developers and designers tend to concentrate on pure functionality and neglect quality attributes. These are the famous “-abilities”: usability, reliability, portability, etc. If your testing framework is suffering, you might want to check if it has these seven quality attributes.

Iryna Suprun's picture
Iryna Suprun
Third rail of a train track The ‘Third Rail’ of Project Management: Cutting Quality

Scope, schedule, and resources: Whether you’re using agile or more traditional project management approaches, this triple constraint is the law of the project universe. The unmentionable “third rail” of project management trade-offs is compromising quality to deal with the other two aspects. Don't make that an option.

Payson Hall's picture
Payson Hall
Tree on a green landscape How DevOps Has Changed the Landscape of Testing

The focus on automation and “continuous everything,” from integration, deployment, and now all the buzz about continuous testing, makes the daily activities of a tester in DevOps challenging. Testers may be used to controlling quality—or thinking they do—but they need to pivot to assuring their teams focus on quality.

Brendan Connolly's picture
Brendan Connolly
Tester teaching developers about quality practices Testers as Disciplinarians

As testers, are we disciplinarians? We shouldn't fall into the trap of controlling quality or becoming quality police. Instead, we should be true facilitators of quality, enabling the product team to own it in their own right at every stage. Isn’t this what teachers do, too, in the learning process? What is our role?

Rajini  Padmanaban's picture
Rajini Padmanaban