In today’s age of tight deadlines and accelerating delivery cycles of software, test automation is surely favorable for the world of functional testing and critical to the success of big software development companies. But its various benefits have led to unrealistic expectations from managers and organizations. This article highlights the role and use of automation in an agile context and the irreplaceable importance of manual testing.

Pini Reznik explains how containers can help shorten the software development feedback loop by drastically reducing the overhead involved in deploying new software environments. This leads to faster build and test executions and simplifies the standardization of the development and production environments, allowing for an easier transition to continuous deployment.

Terry Wiegmann writes about how Microsoft Word's features, like its spelling and grammar checkers, can help one identify agile smells—those signs that something might be wrong. While we may want to minimize documentation and the use of Word, we can mentally use some of Word’s features to sniff out some whiffs of smells.

Every time we look at the data, we perform an analysis that helps us make decisions—hopefully the right ones. In this article, Gil Zilberfeld describes a few traps where bug data misled him to make bad decisions. These traps are in the data itself, not the tools, and can lead us in the wrong direction.