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Are you fully leveraging all the test automation opportunities offered by Agile? Most of our clients aren't. Don't miss out. Learn how to fully leverage test automation in your Agile testing by listening to this webinarthis webinar.

Testers, test automators, SDETs, product owners, scrum masters, programmers, and other quality professionals, May is going to start with a bang. If you're involved in Agile testing or test automation, join me for one of the upcoming Agile Testing and Test Automation summits in New York City or Denver.

If you attend the Denver event, you can stick around for the Black-box Bug-a-thon. What's a bug-a-thon, you ask? Good question! Learn more in this quick video.

If you're looking around at test tools, you should consider both commercial and open-source test tools. Many of the open-source tools are quite good, in some cases better than their commercial competitors. However, it's important to remember that free test tools are like free puppies, only not as cute and they won’t lick your face.

At the risk of making the joke unfunny by explaining it, a free puppy is free to get but not free to have. Puppies eat, puppies get sick and need to go to the vet, puppies need shots, puppies chew things up, and puppies crap in the house. Sometimes puppies go away and make everyone really, really sad. Well, just like commercial tools and free puppies, free tools can cost a lot, do a lot of damage, create bad smells, and make people really sad, too.

If you need help understanding your test tool needs and coming up with a smart test tool strategy that includes the right mix of commercial and open-source tools, contact us. We have no ax to grind, as we are (and always have been) entirely tool-promiscuous, without any vendor or community partnerships to bias our advice. Oh, yeah, and we really love puppies.

If you provide training services, we can help you. Do you need to license testing, business analysis, programming, and quality-related training for testers, business analysts, programmers, SDETs, managers, product owners, and more? If so, we offer high-quality live and e-learning materials at reasonable prices to organizations like yours around the world. If you have existing live training courses and you want to transform those into high-quality e-learning, we have over a decade of helping organizations do that. Take a listen to my short video, and then contact us.

Curious about what is coming in the Expert Test Manager book? Below is the first page of the introduction. If this piques your interest, you can preorder the book on Amazon and other online booksellers now.

To test or not to test: That is not the question. What to test, how much to test, in what order to test, and how to triage tests if you are time compressed: That is the question. And that's the question risk-based testing allows you to answer. For a quick overview of how a risk-based strategy changes testing, check out this short video. Need more help? Contact us.

Seven years ago I did a video where I asked the evolving question, "Do testers need technical skills?"  You can see it here. 

I think this question is answered now for more and more testers. The question is evolving, perhaps, into the following, "How much longer does the non-technical tester have before the lack of technical knowledge becomes a serious career impediment?"

If you need help becoming a more technical testers--whether you background is technical or not--we can help with that. Contact us today.

Over the next six weeks, not only are we running a bunch of live and virtual courses you've already heard about (if not, learn more here), we're also introducing two brand new offerings, one for testers interested in security (and every tester really should be) and one for testers involved with mobile apps (and what tester isn't now or won't soon be). Give a quick listen to me explain what's coming.

We hate to bug you, but have you signed up for one of our one-day black-box bug-a-thons yet? In just one day you'll learn the most important black-box test design techniques, and you'll learn them by finding bugs in real apps. Take a listen to what it's all about in this short 40 second video. At this point, relieve the severe FOMO you must be suffering right about now. Register for the nearest black-box bug-a-thon now. I look forward to seeing you there.

A quick reminder: During the holidays in 2016, we introduced our new, flexible assessment approach for 2017. Listen to my quick description here.

No matter what your constraints, I can work with you to improve your test and quality processes. Save money. Raise team morale. Get more Agile. Improve testing of functionality, performance, security, portability, or more. Deliver more and better features. Contact us today for a quote.