Better Software Magazine Articles

The Danger of Testing "Only" Stories

Finding defects late is a common issue when teams don't consider levels of precision or detail. You must take into account how stories and features fit into the system. In this FAQ column, Janet Gregory tells you how you should remember the big picture—even while testing the small stuff.

Janet Gregory's picture Janet Gregory
Leveraging Automated Testing to Improve Product Quality

Improving product quality is often a very difficult task for even the best software development organizations. Rajini says the additional benefits of automation include benchmarking, code scanning analysis, end-to-end test cases, and compatibility validation.

Rajini  Padmanaban's picture Rajini Padmanaban
Attacking Quality Issues in Data Warehousing

To fully detect, isolate, and resolve quality issues in a traditional, large-scale data warehouse requires that several approaches be used together. Wayne identifies types of data quality issues and then illustrates how to best attack and resolve those pesky issues.

Wayne Yaddow's picture Wayne Yaddow
Product Owners Should Care About Quality

Product owners often view quality as an ugly duckling—necessary to ship software, but nerdy and a drag. Instead, they should be guardians of quality. Only when quality meets functionality is lasting value created.

Roman Pichler
Selling To Your Buyer

No matter how well you've built it, no users will benefit from your product unless you can convince the buyers to purchase it. Selling to buyers is different than satisfying users—and you have to do both well to succeed. Consider the needs of the buyer as stakeholder. When you have no buyers, you have no users.

Scott Sehlhorst's picture Scott Sehlhorst
QA Is Not Evil

A software tester re-examines the role of software testers in quality assurance work, helping implement software development processes. If testers are knowledgeable, helpful, and supportive, they may be in the best possible position to help the team improve its software development process.

Chris McMahon's picture Chris McMahon
The State of the Practice

While software testing focuses on detection rather than prevention, we can argue that it has become a powerful counter-offensive against bugs. We can equally argue that many of today's software practices impede quality. Ross Collard compares these two positions and invites you to join the discussion.

Ross Collard's picture Ross Collard
Issues about Metrics about Bugs

Managers often use metrics to help make decisions about the state of the product or the quality of the work done by the test group. Yet, measurements derived from bug counts can be highly misleading because a "bug" isn't a tangible, countable thing; it's a label for some aspect of some relationship between some person and some product, and it's influenced by when and how we count ... and who is doing the counting.

Michael Bolton's picture Michael Bolton
Do You Know Why You Are Doing That?

It's easy to get caught up in the inertia of a project and forget to ask exactly what we are developing, who our customers are, and what their goals with our software might be. Few software projects have the time and budget to figure out what their project is through trial and error. Getting clarity on project focus not only helps productivity, working to create software that people actually need increases our chances for success.

Jonathan Kohl's picture Jonathan Kohl
The TSA and Software Quality

As evidenced by news stories relating blatant failures on the part of the Transportation Security Administration, many organizations fail to learn much from the information testing provides. What can we do to improve the quality of our measurements so we can learn valuable lessons from the results?

Lee Copeland's picture Lee Copeland

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