What's in the Winter 2018 Issue of Better Software Magazine

Today we published the first issue of Better Software magazine in 2018! As the magazine continues to find articles that propel our industry forward with great tips and techniques, TechWell sees the future focused on continuous processes. In fact, three of the four feature articles will help you improve how enterprise software is planned, developed, validated, and released.

For those of you not up to speed with this industry trend, here is a brief overview of this new terminology:

• Continuous integration: The practice of merging all developer working copies to a shared mainline several times a day
• Continuous delivery: The evolution of continuous integration by always being able to put a product into production
• Continuous deployment: Taking continuous integration and continuous delivery for automatic deployment to production
• Continuous development: The umbrella term of continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment
• Continuous testing: The process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline in order to gain feedback on business risks with a software release candidate as rapidly as possible
• Test automation: Designed to produce a set of pass/fail data points correlated to user stories and application requirements
• DevOps: The software engineering practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops)

Better Software magazine will still include articles about all the other subjects that are important to further your careers (agility, process improvement, testing methods, and so on) but with enterprise apps becoming the norm, customers expect frequent, quality product updates. That’s not too easy to accomplish, and TechWell wants to help you learn how to deliver products faster, cheaper, and better.

Our featured article by Wayne Ariola, “What Testers Need to Know about Continuous Testing,” presents a wonderful introduction to how modern testing is changing. By using test automation and frequent evaluation of business risk, you can determine the best time to deliver.

As a practicing business analyst, Ron Healy shows how agile is perceived in “Agile outside the Development Team.” If you are struggling to get nondevelopers to accept your agile practices, this is just the “secret sauce” you need to know.

Has the rise in test automation resulted in poor quality? John Tyson seems to think so in his provocative “Automation’s Role in the Fall of Software Testing.” John gives good advice on how to right the ship.

In Miiro Juuso’s “Building Autonomous DevOps Capability in Delivery Teams” article, you’ll learn the best way to structure your DevOps organization for success.

If you haven’t had success providing quality in your software products, consider following Jeffery Payne’s advice in “5 Ways to Pair Developers with Testers.” And in “Adopt an Innovative Quality Approach to Testing,” Rajini Padmanaban offers a new perspective on testing in production.

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