Articles
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5 Key Elements for Designing a Successful Dashboard When you’re designing a dashboard to track and display metrics, it is important to consider the needs and expectations of the users of the dashboard and the information that is available. There are several aspects to consider when creating a new dashboard in order to make it a useful tool. For a mnemonic device to help you easily remember the qualities that make a good dashboard, just remember the acronym “VITAL.” |
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Applying Data Analytics to Test Automation Testers gather lots of metrics about defect count, test case execution classification, and test velocity—but this information doesn't necessarily answer questions around product quality or how much money test efforts have saved. Testers can better deliver business value by combining test automation with regression analysis, and using visual analytics tools to process the data and see what patterns emerge. |
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Agile: Don’t Worry, It’s Natural Although the idea of repeatedly exercising the full development lifecycle on smaller chunks of the requirements is newer to the software industry, it isn’t at all new to many other aspects of life and nature. We have been agile practitioners for quite some time, and the software development industry is just catching up. John Ryskowski addresses a few examples. |
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Mitigating Team Hazards without a Typical Scrum Product Owner A good product owner should be collaborative, responsible, authorized, committed, and knowledgeable. But what do you do if yours doesn’t exemplify these characteristics? This article aims to showcase mitigation plans that can be effective for overcoming Scrum violations due to the fact that you’re not working with a typical product owner. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Avoiding the Prioritization Trap With incoming priorities being requested by just about everybody, how in the world can you and your team prioritize? Brandon shows you some innovative techniques that you can use to turn chaos into order. One surprising approach is simply handling priorities on a first-in, first-out basis. |
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Taking the Risk: Exploration over Documentation The loudest voice in the room might push for a stable, predictable, repeatable test process that defines itself up front, but each build is different. An adaptive, flexible approach could provide better testing in less time with less cost, more coverage, and less waste. |
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Once Upon A Retrospective Children can teach us some extremely profound things--often when we least expect it. Jennitta Andrea shares sage advice about project retrospectives that she learned while perusing the well-known children's stories on her daughter's bookshelf. These insights will help improve the way you plan, facilitate, and participate in project retrospectives. |
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Simplify Your Combinatorial Testing Combinatorial testing is effective for testing multiple, non-sequential inputs that affect a common output in complex software. But, it's easy to misapply it or become a slave to the output. Learn to overcome limitations and benefit fully from this technique. |
Interviews
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How Agile Helped a Business Analyst Discover Her True Value: An Interview with Diane Zajac-Woodie
Video
Diane Zajac-Woodie sat down to discuss her upcoming presentation at Agile Development and Better Software Conference West 2014, why the business analyst role doesn't get the attention it deserves, how the BA role can make a difference on agile teams, and her alter ego as the Agile Squirrel. |
Conference Presentations
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Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need
Slideshow
Successful agile testers collaborate with programmers as code is written, isolating problems, troubleshooting defects, and debugging code all along the way to getting the product to done. But modern systems are scaling beyond what traditional teams are able to understand using familiar tools. New appreciation for systems and complexity theory, as well as disciplines and tools around emerging areas such as observability and resilience engineering, are offering solutions that allow teams to actively debug their systems and explore properties and patterns they have not defined in advance. Chris will share the basics of the theory of these new ideas, as well as some tools that support this type of work. He'll show how dynamic analysis can be used to isolate and understand puzzling system behavior. |
Chris Blain
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Leverage Big Data and Analytics for Testing
Slideshow
Sabermetrics turned the baseball world upside down by challenging decades-old measures of individual performance and their perceived linkage to team success. After cementing their legacy as the Lovable Losers for 108 years, the Chicago Cubs were able to leverage a data-driven... |
Geoff Meyer
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Analyze, Diagnose, and Prevent Test Flakiness
Slideshow
Test code development is generally approached with more lenient standards and less scrutiny than production code. As a result, rather than providing valuable feedback on software quality, this can lead to tests that produce inconsistent results and false outcomes. Team productivity is... |
Dionny Santiago
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The Business Analyst Role on Agile Projects
Slideshow
Agile—a single word that sparked unprecedented confusion in the technology world. When it went agile, did your organization throw out your business analyst team? Have they banned all requirements documentation? Are teams struggling to see the big picture? Brian Watson has encountered... |
Brian Watson, VersionOne
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