Programming often is considered an individual pursuit, but there are other options gaining popularity: pairing, where you work with another developer or tester, and mobbing, where the entire team works on one thing at a time. Each is effective for certain kinds of challenges. How much collaboration is right for you?

With a week full of sessions, tutorials, training classes, and events, the STARWEST software testing conference had plenty of takeaways useful for your professional and personal life. Here are four lessons distilled from the conference’s keynote presentations on testing, communication, and directing your career.

The MVP brings tremendous value to a team’s ability to effectively implement agile practices. It also allows us to better understand what “value” actually means to our users and how context changes the meaning. Your MVP must move through your validation and release cycles while still being valuable to your users.