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Using Your Staff Wisely: How to Make Do with Less In the authors' experience, sharing testing and development tasks is a viable option when the test staff can architect the tests. However, it requires the full support of everyone involved–testers, developers, and managers. All staff members must be committed to delivering a high-quality product and have a common vision of how to achieve this goal. Suzan Noden and Jennifer Mingee describe their experience sharing testing tasks with development.
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Ghost Bug Busters The nasty bugs, some of the juiciest, aren't easy to replicate. The author calls these "ghost" bugs–things we've seen but cannot conjure up again. They leave us haunted with doubts about a system. In this Bug Report, Karen Johnson gives tips on how to replicate these apparitions.
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Ellen Gottesdiener on Requirements Exploration and Modeling Translating customer requests into software requires exploration, learning, and discovery. As such, this Reference Point lists resources you can use to learn more about requirements exploration and modeling. Ellen Gottesdiener—a recognized authority on software requirements—provides her top recommendations for books, journals, and online resources on the subject.
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Should a Manager Know a Language? Knowing C++ or Java can make a manager's job easier. But what about being an expert in spoken language? It's essential to be competent in the use of daily language when you are making the transition to management. Technical Editor Esther Derby gives advice on improving your language, including a warning about the dangers of using absolutes and of leaving out details in conversation.
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Go Configure! Configuration management problems can derail the best of software projects. Walk through the basics of how to make CM work for—not against—you.
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Agile Meetings Does the thought of going to yet another meeting make your head spin? Read about how to increase your team's productivity by making your meetings short, frequent, and focused.
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Targeted Fault Insertion Some programs must handle network errors, file system errors, and the like. Testing their error handling manually can be tedious and time consuming. Relying on accidental errors is unreliable and uncontrollable. Learn about a method for simulating errors that makes the process automated and flexible.
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Forecasting Software Defects The six weeks of testing you've been preparing for are suddenly reduced to one, but you still want to provide some assessment of overall quality. Read about this statistical approach to predicting the number of failed test cases in an application.
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Bug Tracking Basics Effective bug tracking assures that bugs are logged, fixed, and verified by the appropriate personnel. Here's a beginner's guide to this process.
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What a Tangled Web Web applications provide platforms so wide open that they defy the very structure and predictability that make test automation feasible. Object names are optional, can be duplicated, and may change at a moment's notice. Page layouts can change between and within builds. This wicked combination makes test automation even more difficult, if not downright impossible. Linda Hayes explains the importance of unique, consistent object names in Web development.
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