Better Software Magazine Articles

eXtreme Rules of the Road

In the fast-paced eXtreme Programming environment, how can the tester steer the project toward success? Being in a more detached role, sometimes the tester can see a neck-breaking hairpin curve in the road before everyone else. Here are some tips for navigating the challenges of high-speed, iterative design.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
Trade Secrets from a Web Testing Expert

If you oversee a mission-critical Web site, you want to be able to predict how many users you can handle within acceptable response times. Here are three fundamental load testing concepts you can't do without.

Alberto Savoia
Outsourcing: What to Consider When Supplementing Your Test and QA Capabilities

Companies outsource for a variety of reasons, with a variety of expectations. This article describes ways outsourcing can be successful, and reasons outsourcing may fail. This is an in-depth article that sets the stage and discusses numerous scenarios.

Jim Bampos
Tracking Down a Defect Management Tool

Selecting the right defect tracking solution for your business can be a high-pressure job. Choose badly, and you're stuck with an expensive tool that's not going to meet your needs. Choose wisely, and you're a hero. Read about how to rise to the challenge.

Hung Quoc Nguyen
Usability Testing

Observing users getting lost in an awkward application is easy; identifying, categorizing, and communicating those snags to your developers is the tricky part. Here's a proven method for success.

Bob Stahl
Are You Ready for the Test Automation Game?

Automating your testing can significantly impact your business. Here are things to consider before investing in test automation.

Kerry Zallar's picture Kerry Zallar
Web Page Response Time 101: A primer

Online sites lose billions of dollars every year due to sluggish performance speed and user bailouts. Here are four laws of Web site performance that will help you understand response times and deal with your "abandonment issues."

Alberto Savoia
Orthogonally Speaking: Deriving a Suitable Set of Test Cases

Is your testing effort facing an impossibly wide choice of test parameters? Shooting in the dark can yield hit-and-miss results--and that’s just not very effective. When your testing effort faces an impossibly wide choice of test parameters, the Orthogonal Array Testing System technique can be a very useful method for deriving a suitable set of test cases.

Elfriede Dustin's picture Elfriede Dustin
Looking Under the Hood

Understanding a program's inner workings, dataflows, and bug history can enable you to build more robust tests. Here are pointers on investigating a system's internal design as a tool for effective testing.

Len DiMaggio
Juggling Concurrent Releases

Every day you are faced with juggling resources and attention between customer escalations, current development projects, and planning for the future. With development cycles measured in weeks, you have at least three releases for each product. Multiply that by the number of projects under your responsibility, and you have a dozen or more releases to manage simultaneously.

Neal Reizer

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