Should you diligently produce multiple big documents before testing begins? Consultant Fiona Charles argues that you should do that only if you believe that documentation is your product as a tester. If your product is information, you should instead minimize test documentation and engage with the software to build the product your stakeholders are paying for.

Configuration management (CM) has matured into a "must-have" discipline. But, many CM experts have failed to keep up with what's required to implement CM best practices. Find out what needs to be done to raise the bar for CM.

When you release a website or web application, it’s going to face a lot of very public load testing. If it performs poorly, there’s a good chance that you’re going to lose a lot of customers. Colin Mason offers some tips for load testing in order to ensure a better customer experience.

Automated tests are a foundation of agile software development. Many experts teach that developers should write unit tests and testers should write higher-level tests. However, many of the practices, such as test-driven development and pair programming, say little about how programmers and testers could work together. Shannon Prue (developer) and Dawn Cannan (tester) describe and demonstrate the interactions between the developer and tester pairing to implement a user story. Early in the process they agree on story scope, develop a shared vocabulary, and work together to understand the technical and logical details. The tester learns the developer’s approach to solving the problem and begins to design the associated test approach. The developer learns what will be tested, resulting in more solid production code from the beginning.