Many organizations institute testing and quality improvement initiatives focused on testers, developers, and software managers. One stakeholder often ignored in these efforts is the user-your customer. To dramatically improve overall product quality, you must purposefully include the user in your testing efforts. Lanette Creamer illustrates this anecdotally with some important bugs missed, which would not be found even with 100% test and code coverage. Find new ways to collaborate with users and learn how to adopt a customer-based focus on integration and functionality. Explore ideas that will help you consciously “zoom out” to see important gaps in your test coverage. Learn specific techniques to help you and your team find bugs that lurk outside the requirements and beneath the code.

Evidence shows than more than half of the ideas that we think will improve the user experience actually fail to do so-and some actually make it worse. Instead of guessing, why not measure what your real users like and don't like? Controlled, online experiments (A/B tests being the simplest version) are a proven way to make data-driven decisions about what works and what doesn't. Seth Eliot shares numerous examples of online experimentation within Microsoft to test new user interfaces with their customers. Seth shows how special frameworks, such as Microsoft's ExP (Experimentation Platform), can also move testing into the high-value realm of testing-in-production. In addition to new features and designs, Microsoft tests the impact of new code in production. By employing online experimentation, you can control how and when new, potentially dangerous code is exposed to users.

Inspired by the success of India’s Weekend Testing movement, Michael Larsen saw a need for a group closer to home. The Weekend Testing Americas chapter invites testers from across the Western Hemisphere to join an informal, distributed group of their tester peers to learn and perfect their craft.

My team is in the middle of one of the hardest projects—we call them "themes"—we’ve ever tackled. We’re a high-functioning agile team that has helped our company grow and succeed over several years now—we “went agile” in 2003. Here’s one thing I know for sure: No matter how many problems you solve, new challenges will pop up.