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How Much Is Enough?—Exploring Exploratory Software Testing Exploratory testers design and execute tests in the moment, starting with an open mission and investigating new ideas as they arise. But how do we know when to stop? The first step is to recognize that we can't know when we're done, because any approach to answering the stopping question is necessarily heuristic.
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What's In a Word? Evolution of a word's meaning through common misuse is a reality of human communication. In the software industry, by using the phrase quality assurance to refer to what is more properly called quality control (i.e., testing), we may have lost our ability to answer the question "does our process work?"
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Mind the Gap The requirements composition table is an effective technique comprising six steps that will help you assess an application's test coverage and identify gaps in your test suite even if you don't have any software requirements specifications.
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Software Development Worst Practices While some debate which, if any, industry practices deserve the designation "best practices," this tongue-in-cheek look at the horrors of some of software's "worst practices" drives home the value of the good ones and may help us improve the quality of our software.
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Breaking Ground on SOA: How to Build and Test Your First Web Service Web services are the foundation of today's service-oriented architecture. This article will teach you how to build a Web service from the ground up as well as how to test it using the three pillars of Web services testing—functional, performance, and interoperability tests.
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The Other Side of Complexity Software development has always been an exercise in managing complexity because there appears to be no end to the problems to which we can apply automatic computation. It has progressed as a discipline as good minds have created abstractions that transform that complexity into simplicity.
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Make Your Mission Possible Defining the work that belongs in your group and the work that doesn't belong can be challenging. A strong mission statement can help you defend your stance on what work you will and will not do, while ensuring you still provide the work your organization values.
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Designing Reusable Software For software to be reusable, it must be usable in a variety of contexts, and an important attribute of reusability at the code level is genericity. Learn more about defining for reuse and using generics.
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A Needle in a (Very Large) Haystack Putting together a successful team is always a challenge, but assembling a global team can be almost overwhelming. These tips can help you overcome the obstacles to hiring the best offsite developers for your project.
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Is There a Problem Here? Suppose you were testing an application that you had never seen before with no time to prepare, no specification, no documentation, no reference programs, no prepared test cases, no test plan, and no other person to talk to. How do you know that what you are seeing is a bug?
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