Your issue-tracking and version-management systems are powerful tools that you can use to help you manage change and improve team and individual productivity. This article provides some simple advice on how to use your tracking system to be more productive without introducing excessive overhead.

In this installment of FAQ, SQE Trainer Rob Sabourin answers one of the questions students ask him most often.

For many organizations, automation is a burden--even with good tools. Keywords are popular but don't suffice on their own. Action based testing places a high emphasis on modularized test design, not only making tests lean and mean but also allowing for very stable and maintainable automation.

We can apply agile development practices to test automation like any other software development project. The good news is … using agile practices for test automation projects addresses some of the classic problems of test automation: when and what to build, increasing automation execution to achieve extended return-on-investment, and test automation teams “going dark” for long periods of time. Sharing a case study, Monica Luke demonstrates how adopting agile principles increases the test automation team’s visibility and productivity while providing higher value automation. She addresses the special challenges of building automation in real-time while the product is also under development and explores GUI test automation issues. Learn how to incorporate stakeholder feedback, time-boxed iterations, demos, and other agile concepts into your test automation initiatives.