You work in an organization with incredibly smart and diligent software engineers. Deadlines are tight and everyone is busy. But when developers outnumber testers by ten to one and the code base is growing exponentially, how do you continue to produce a quality product on time? Google addressed these problems by creating the Testing Grouplet—a group of volunteer engineers who dedicate their spare time to testing evangelism. They tried various ideas for reaching their audience. Weekly beer bashes were fun but too inefficient. New-engineer orientation classes, Tech Talks by industry luminaries, and yearly “Fixit” days became successful and continue to this day. But no idea caught the attention of engineers like Testing on the Toilet. This weekly flyer, posted in every Google bathroom, has sparked discussions, controversy, jokes, and parodies.

Testing professionals are often viewed as the pessimists of the software world. Some people think testers will do anything to prevent an application’s release into production. In reality, testers should be pro-active protectors of the organization and a strong voice for its customers-lines of business, end-users of the applications, system designers, developers, and the operations group responsible for application support. Theresa Lanowitz believes that testers should be customer advocates, representing all constituents in each and every stage of the application development lifecycle. As such, testers help ensure delivery of quality products that meet the needs of all. To be a successful customer advocate, you must understand and balance the complex web of requirements, constraints, roles, skills, and abilities of all stakeholders.

For years, testers implored developers to do better unit testing. Our pleas fell mostly on deaf ears. Testers were constantly frustrated, finding bugs that should never have escaped the developers. Then, out of nowhere, a few developers started preaching Test Driven Development-test early and often, write unit tests for the code, then write the code. Suddenly, unit testing was cool! Why did testers fail to entice developers to test earlier, more, and better? Why is Test Driven Development a practice that was not driven by testers? Antony Marcano examines these questions and explains how the testing community can become a driving force of software improvement practices. If testers want to be more influential in our day-to-day projects and in our organizations, we must broaden our horizons. Join Antony to find out how to provide concrete ideas that make things easier for everyone-not just ourselves.

Instead of viewing software test automation as an effort to replace manual tests think of it as a means to extend the abilities of the tester. Combining the power of the human mind with automation tools helps fuel observation and discovery and provides a different perspective of the software under test.