Resources

Suppose you went to a restaurant for dinner, sat down, and told the waiter, "Bring me dinner and a drink." You didn't provide any further details, though you had something specific in mind. What are the chances that you'll get the dinner and drink you expected? While no one would ever do this in a restaurant, it happens sometimes on projects that involve third parties.

If we have certain expectations and requirements for an engagement with a third party, those should be defined and clearly communicated between the parties. The best practice is to have that definition and communication before the project starts and to put the agreed-upon terms into the contract. If the third party is delivering software, then these requirements should include quality targets, including measurements of those targets. The measurements should be objective and not subject to distortions.

In addition to defining the requirements, the point at which those requirements must be met should be defined. This can be done by defining entry and exit criteria that establish quality gates for deliverables. Because these quality gates will control the start and end of project phases, they should be synchronized with the phases of the project and aligned with project schedule milestones. 

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This is an excerpt from my book, Expert Test Manager, written with James Rommens and Leo van der Aalst. I hope it helps you think more clearly about the test strategies you use.

A test policy contains the mission and objectives of testing along with metrics and goals associated with the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which we achieve those objectives. In short, the policy defines why we test. While it might also include some high-level description of the fundamental test process, in general the test policy does not talk about how we test.

The document that describes how we test is the test strategy. In the test strategy, the test group explains how the test policy will be implemented. This document should be a general description that spans multiple projects. While the test strategy can describe how testing is done for all projects, organizations might choose to have separate documents for various types of projects. For example, an organization might have a sequential lifecycle test strategy, an Agile test strategy, and a maintenance test strategy.

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[The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Mobile Testing: An ASTQB-BCS Foundation Guide, coming out in summer 2018.  This section talks about the important issue of mobile test environments.]

Earlier in this book, I gave the example of my client that gave iPhones to all the sales associates in their stores.  Because of that, they have a fairly homogeneous environment. This is true not only of the client-side, but also the connectivity in the stores (through the in-store Wi-Fi installed by them) and the back-end servers in the stores and in their data centers.

In terms of mobile testing, this homogeneity makes them the exception that proves the rule, as the saying goes.  They don’t have to deal with widespread and unpredictable environmental diversity.  What diversity they do have is due to deliberate decisions. For example, they have to depreciate the iPhones, so over time there came to be multiple generations of iPhones in stores.
 

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The following is a transcript of an interview with Rex Black. Rex is President of RBCS, a worldwide test consulting, training, and expert services company. He is also former President of ISTQB, and most recently served the ISTQB as Project Manager and Technical Editor for the ISTQB® Foundation 2018 syllabus release. The interview was conducted by Agustina Gay. She is a Key Account Manager at iSQI.
Agustina: Rex, thank you for being here. Would you please introduce yourself?
Rex: Yes, I am Rex Black. I am the president of a company called RBCS and we are a training, consulting, and expert services company based in Texas with clients around the world. I’ve been in software engineering since 1983 and RBCS has been around about almost 25 years, since 1994. I’m also the past president of the ISTQB, from 2005 to 2009, and most recently I was involved on the Foundation project. So I have many years involvement with the ISTQB program.
 

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Article from SQ Magazine, www.sq-mag.com
Automated testing continues to be a major transformational factor in software development and there is no doubt that there is an urgent, and rising, requirement for QA and test professionals with automation skills.  In particular, Selenium is globally rated as a top priority in the test automation field.
iSQI has introduced the Selenium Tester Foundation certificate into its portfolio in response to significant market demand for Selenium WebDriver skills. The certification is based on a highly practical hands-on training course that will give an immediate return on investment back in the workplace.
Rex Black, President of RBCS and past President of the ISTQB®, supported the development. The SQ mag asked him about the new course and the certification: 

1. Rex, a new star is born: the A4Q Selenium Tester Foundation. Tell us more!
The A4Q Selenium Tester Foundation is an entry-level training and certification program for people who want to learn and use the very popular test automation tool Selenium. The Selenium Tester Foundation syllabus addresses the key fundamental concepts of application GUI test automation using Selenium WebDriver, which in itself is a really valuable resource for the Selenium community. The three-day training course is exceptionally hands-on, which is critical for test automation, since you can really only learn how to do test automation by doing test automation. The exam for the certification allows people to demonstrate mastery of the concepts in the syllabus, thus providing a way for people to prove their mastery of the fundamentals of Selenium test automation. We think this new star is quite a nice star indeed!
 

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Let’s suppose you bought a car. Six days later, someone from the dealership let himself into your garage, removed the tires on the car, installed some “updated” tires that actually had holes in them, and then left. In the morning, your car was there in the garage, all sad and undriveable on its flat, flabby tires. That’s clearly unacceptable, in fact even criminal, but we allow the same thing to happen all the time with software. Why? In this webinar, Rex will catalog infamous automated software updates, released without sufficient testing to wreak havoc, or at least inconvenience. He’ll then give a detailed roadmap for reducing your chances of being part of the problem.

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If you’ve been testing for any length of time, you know that the number of possible test cases is enormous if you try to test all possible combinations of inputs, configuration values, types of data, and so forth. It’s like the mythical monster, the many-headed Hydra, which would sprout two or more new heads for each head that was cut off. Two simple approaches to dealing with combinatorial explosions such as this are equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis, but those techniques don’t check for interactions between factors. A reasonable, manageable way to test combinations is called pairwise testing, but to do it you’ll need a tool.  In this inaugural One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of a free tool, ACTS, built by the US NIST and available for download worldwide. We can’t promise to turn you into Hercules, but you will definitely walk away able to slay the combinatorial Hydra.

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If you are testing a simple mobile app, you may find it relatively easy to find representative test data. However, what if you are testing enterprise scale applications? In the enterprise data center, one hundred or more applications of various sizes, complexity, and criticality co-exist, operating on various data repositories, in some cases shared data repositories. In some cases, disparate data repositories hold related data, and the ability to test integration across applications that access these data sets is critical.  In this keynote speech, Rex Black will talk about the challenges facing his clients as they deal with these testing problems. You’ll go away with a better understanding of the nature of the challenges, as well as ideas on how to handle them, grounded in lessons Rex has learned in over 30 years of software engineering and testing.

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In our inaugural One Key Idea session, we looked at how use pairwise testing to examine combinations of inputs, configuration values, types of data, and the like. This is a great technique when the interaction between these factors is unpredictable. However, in some cases, specific business rules govern these interactions. How can we model these business rules and use that model to develop a reasonable set of tests? Simple: decision tables. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will explain the basics of this fundamental technique.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn how to create and use these straightforward, table-based representations of business logic in your daily work.

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Agile methods have become widespread over the last 20 years, but it’s taken a while for testing to catch up.  However, Agile testing best practices have emerged, and the ISTQB Agile Working Group has taken on the task of capturing those for you.  In this brief webinar, Rex Black, Chair of the ISTQB Agile Working Group, will explain where the program has been, where it is now, and how it is evolving to support Agile testers in their careers. In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn how the ISTQB Agile syllabi can help you advance your career as an Agile tester.

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If you have been in software engineering for a while—or in fact just in the working world in general for a while—you’ve probably seen someone do something stupid with metrics. Such mistakes raise a whole bunch of interesting questions. What are the most common metrics mistakes? Why are they mistakes? Why do people make these mistakes? Are you making these mistakes? Why use metrics at all, when there are so many mistakes? In this talk, Rex will give real-world examples of these mistakes, explain the management and economic theories behind metrics, and help you find ways to implement metrics that aren’t stupid.

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In just a few years, mobile devices and the applications on them have upended the way people use computers. People spend more time than ever on their PCs, but people spend even more time on their mobile devices. Obviously, mobile devices and apps have important differences from their PC counterparts. It’s not just a smaller screen! However, does that mean that all proven best practices for testing and quality go out the window when dealing with mobile apps? In this webinar, Rex will explain what changes, and what doesn’t change, when you move into the mobile world.

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Shift left. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Continuous deployment. DevOps. What is all this stuff and what does it mean for you as the tester? In this keynote, Rex Black will explain these concepts and their test implications.  He’ll then describe the emerging role of the SDET (Software Development Engineering in Test, also called SET) and what SDETs do.  Yes, being an SDET is about test automation, but it’s about a lot more than that, and Rex will give you some examples of things you can expect to do as an SDET in a shift left world over the coming decade.  Don’t worry. Life as a tester in the SDET reality is gonna be fun and exciting, and Rex will give you some ideas how.

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Test automation is all the rage.  Spinning away in Agile lifecycles or playing key roles in DevOps pipelines, automation is supposed to be everywhere, right? However, such widespread automation is a big investment. If you want to obtain management approval for the kind of automation investments all the webinar and conference talking heads are saying you simply must do right now, you better be able to talk automation ROI. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will explain the measurable business benefits of test automation and how to calculate automation ROI.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn how to bridge the gap between automation techno-speak and the managerial bottom-line focus.

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For nearly ten years, RBCS has run a highly successful free webinar series.  In 2018, we’re adding the Two Points of View at Two series to our monthly webinar rotation. In each of these sessions, Rex Black will talk with another software luminary about topics of mutual interest, where the two have some different views, and then Rex opens the floor to questions. 

In this inaugural session, Rex is happy to welcome Maaret Pyhäjärvi .  Maaret’s bio describes her as feedback fairy with a day job at F-Secure, where they call her a Lead Quality Engineer. She identifies as empirical technologist, tester and programmer, catalyst for improvement, author and speaker, and community facilitator and conference organizer. You can catch her latest thoughts on her blog at http://visible-quality.blogspot.fi

In this session, Rex and Maaret will discuss tester-developer collaboration and the relationships between testers and developers.  How to approach developers for collaboration? How do testers-developers ratios affect relationships? What about people who move between tester and developer roles? Join Rex and Maaret to hear their thoughts and ask your questions.

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Technical debt is bad.  It’s smart to carefully manage technical debt. Defects are a form of technical debt.  Do you know how to measure how well you are managing defect-related technical debt? In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate two simple defect metrics, easily extractable from any defect management tool, which can give you useful insights into what’s happening with defect-related technical debt.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn what these metrics can tell you and how you can use them to manage your technical debt better.

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Hiring and managing distributed, international test teams

Phil Lew, President of XBOSoft, an international software testing firm, joins Rex Black to discuss the critical topics of hiring and managing teams of testers who work around the world.  How do distance, culture, and language create challenges, and how have Phil and Rex dealt with those challenges in the past?  You won’t want to miss Phil and Rex’s points of view on these important topics.

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The Agile Testing Pyramid is a great metaphor, and it can be very useful when applied properly. However, it can also lead to some serious dysfunctions in organizations that misunderstand, misapply, or misinterpret it.  Are you using the Agile Testing Pyramid properly? Rex will help you answer that question, and help you resolve problems if they exist.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn the rights and wrongs of the Agile Testing Pyramid.

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As a bonus to our June complimentary webinar, this month we shared with you an interview with Rex about the newly released ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level  2018 Syllabus. Listen to the session and you will learn why the changes were made, what was the process for making the changes and, finally, what are the changes!

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What should testing accomplish and how do we recognize success?  How should we approach testing? What specific activities need to be planned for each release, each project, each iteration?  What risks can affect testing, and how can we manage those risks?  How does lifecycle affect these documents? These are critical questions for testers and test managers, yet often they go unanswered or have answers that aren’t fully thought through.  In this webinar, based on years of experience helping testers and test teams optimize their testing processes, Rex will discuss test policies, strategies and plans.  Join this webinar, illustrated with examples throughout, to learn concepts and ideas that you can apply to your testing processes right away.

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All too often, people believe that they have to run all their system tests through the GUI, and that includes automated tests.  However, it is possible to run automated system tests through a variety of interfaces, such as command lines, APIs, data layers, network services, and more. In this webinar, Rex will give two such examples of sophisticated automated system test platforms capable of quickly running thousands of tests with very low false positive rates, flaky test rates, and test maintenance rates. One tested a data layer interface, the other a network services interface.  Each used a flexible and maintainable keyword driven architecture.  Come ready to open your mind to new ways of automating system testing, and leave with ideas you can apply to automating your tests away from the GUI.

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If you are a hiring manager, you might already know that a bad hiring decision is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. One easy mistake to make is hiring someone who tells a convincing story about their abilities, but can’t actually do the work.  How can you separate the glib talker from the accomplished doer?  Well, in this One Key Idea session, Rex will explain how to use audition interviews, illustrating the concept with case studies.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll gain a powerful tool for making smarter hiring decisions.

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If you are testing a simple mobile app, you may find it relatively easy to find representative test data. However, what if you are testing enterprise scale applications? In the enterprise data center, one hundred or more applications of various sizes, complexity, and criticality co-exist, operating on various data repositories, in some cases shared data repositories. In some cases, disparate data repositories hold related data, and the ability to test integration across applications that access these data sets is critical.  In this webinar, Rex Black will talk about the challenges facing his clients as they deal with these testing problems. You’ll go away with a better understanding of the nature of the challenges, as well as ideas on how to handle them, grounded in lessons Rex has learned in over 30 years of software engineering and testing.

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Selenium has become a very important test automation tool.  Now, the Alliance for Quality (A4Q) has brought out a highly practical, extensively hands-on training and certification, the Selenium Tester Foundation.  In this One Key Idea session, Rex Black, Project Manager for the A4Q Selenium Tester Foundation development project, is here to help you understand this certification and how it can launch you—or boost you along the way—on your career path to becoming a Selenium test automation expert.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll understand how the A4Q Selenium Test Foundation training and certification can help you progress towards your professional test automation goals.

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Defects and errors prevent applications and systems from delivering the value their designers and customers intended.  Moreover, defects and errors present opportunities for malicious actors to undermine the integrity, availability and confidentiality of essential business data and computational assets.  Many large cyber incidents (ex. Target, Yahoo! and Equifax) have reduced the tolerance of regulators, shareholders, customers and the public for poor cyber security practices.  The greatest threat is directed towards the greatest value, albeit the path of attack may be roundabout.  Security testing is an essential phase in the application and systems development and operations lifecycle.  Join us to learn about this valuable professional development step that will bolster your career, and assist your employer’s efforts to take substantive steps to ensure their business goals are reached and risks managed.

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Is your organization looking for growth opportunities?  Do feel the status quo within your firm or your industry is ripe for disruption?  Are you concerned your company will be swamped by the backwash of some else’s innovation?  Your organization needs to innovate.  Innovation requires a way of thinking, a reliable process and a toolset to identify the problem or challenge that you are best equipped to solve while solving it in a manner stakeholders will value.  Innovation is risky, so is not adequately anticipating ever persistent change.  This course discusses several approaches and tools developed to enable teams to apply designerly ways that center design on your users, and enables your users to help you help them.  To learn design thinking well is to apply it.  This Design Thinking course puts the evolution of a product design in your hands in collaboration with a participant design team.  Join us to learn about the Design Thinking approach to solving problems, which will serve you well as an individual contributor, manager or leader.

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Performance testing is easy, right?  Grab a tool, record a transaction with the server, ramp up a thousand virtual users...  What do you often get?  A hot mess!  Performance testing is likely the kind of testing most likely to be done poorly.  It does not have to be that way.  Join us to learn what performance testing is not: not easy, not guaranteed, but not impossible to do well.  Much of a good performance testing program is not about using the tool at all; instead it includes all of the ISTQB buzzwords: static testing, early testing, planning and preparation.  Learn the basics of successful performance testing and improve your performance test project.

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Exploratory testing is a name given for a technique of using knowledge, experience, and skills to test software in a non-linear, investigatory fashion. Is it a powerful and important part of each professional tester’s repertoire, or actually magic quality pixie dust? Is this the only real way of testing, or is there room for other forms of validation as well as verification? What are the origins of exploratory testing, and who actually invented the technique (as opposed to coining the current name)? Does it always degrade into an unmanageable, unaccountable, random bug hunt, or are there ways to instill order, measure coverage, and build confidence with it? In this webinar, Rex will explore and burst some of the myths of exploratory testing.

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Just like creating code for user stories, creating and maintaining automated tests for user stories have characteristic velocities.  Are you measuring them?  Do you know what good looks like for these metrics, and can you recognize the warning signs of a serious test automation death spiral when it emerges? In this One Key Idea webinar, Rex will explain how to use two simple, easy-to-gather metrics to calculate automated test creation velocity and automated test maintenance velocity.

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Is software testing a waste of time and money?  Many people outside of the testing profession seem to think so, and, based on the relative paucity of money devoted to testing compared to other activities in the lifecycle, it’s certainly not a high priority for many organizations.  Is that smart?  Why do we test software?  What benefits, goals, and objectives does testing serve?  Attend this presentation to learn solid, hard-headed, convincing reasons why testing is one of the smartest investments you can make, and why organizations that invest in testing receive long-lasting benefits from doing so.  Rex will lay out the case for software testing and answer your questions.

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In the 2010s, the software testing profession made a lot of big strides. Testing skills expanded significantly across the set of practitioners, and the number of professional testers grew.  However, there remains one place where testing remains challenged, and was unable to surmount that challenge in the 2010s. Tune in to learn what that challenge is, and to get Rex’s thoughts on how to succeed in the 2020s decade, which starts just two days later!

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In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome Yalonda Haywood. Yalonda Haywood is a person of intention. As a professional speaker, trainer, and rebound coach, Yalonda helps companies and individuals recover in value, amount, and strength after any decrease or decline. The passion to see other’s reach their next level has been the driving force behind Yalonda’s career. Over the past 20 years, her journey has and continues to include speaking, training, coaching, people leadership and building high performing teams in the quality assurance space within information technology. 

In this session, Yalonda and Rex will discuss the key to building stronger IT departments including  possible tension between quality assurance and development and operations teams, keys to creating a different culture that is not dependent on industry, practical steps organizations can take to make the culture shift and more.
 

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Join Rex and Gary for a joint  presentation on how TMMi can improve your testing and accelerate your business performance since testing is a key contributor to higher profits, customer satisfaction, personnel motivation and a bigger market share.

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If you’ve been testing for any length of time, you know that the number of possible test cases is enormous if you try to test all possible combinations of inputs, configuration values, types of data, and so forth. It’s like the mythical monster, the many-headed Hydra, which would sprout two or more new heads for each head that was cut off. Two simple approaches to dealing with combinatorial explosions such as this are equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis, but those techniques don’t check for interactions between factors. A reasonable, manageable way to test combinations is called pairwise testing, but to do it you’ll need a tool.  In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of a free tool, ACTS, built by the US NIST and available for download worldwide. We can’t promise to turn you into Hercules, but you will definitely walk away able to slay the combinatorial Hydra.

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In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome José Mata. José has worked over 20 years as a Software Quality Assurance consultant and manager, working in Austin, San Francisco, New York, and Paris.  As a member of the American Software Testing Qualification Board (ASTQB) Technical Advisory Group, José wrote questions for the Foundation Level qualification exams. He is currently a Senior Software Test Engineer with NarrativeDx, an Internet startup in Austin Texas, providing AI-driven analyses of healthcare data. 

In this session, José and Rex will discuss moving Selenium automated testing from concept to implementation and overcoming basic “gotchas” in bootstrapping Selenium testing.

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Automobiles can have millions of lines of code in them, and some of that code can have safety-critical implications. Various standards apply to safety-critical automotive code, dictating the level of code coverage required: statement, decision (or branch), or modified condition/decision coverage. To celebrate the launch of our new Automotive Software Testing course, we’re offering this free webinar. If you build or test automotive software, attend to get a taste of what you could learn in this course.

In this free RBCS webinar, join Rex Black, President of RBCS, as he describes in detail what each of these levels of coverage means, how you can achieve it, and how to understand what code coverage tools are telling you.

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Isn’t it amazing? Stakeholders drop software on our desk and expect us to test it with no requirements, no design and no product knowledge whatsoever. About the only clear thing is the absurd and unrealistic deadline. We are expected to bend over backward, spread magic pixie dust and heroically test quality into a product we never heard of before.

But testing in the dark is not impossible – and as Rob Sabourin shows it can even be a very valuable and fun experience.

Learn strategies to emerge from a murky fog into clear meaningful quality insights. Leverage unlikely sources about what stakeholder’s care about and what users really need the software to do.

Join Rob’s quest to find important bugs fast, let “testing in the dark” illuminate you!

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In this month’s webinar, we are happy to welcome guest speaker, Adam Leon Smith. Adam is CTO of Dragonfly and is focused on testing, quality and AI. With two decades experience in environments, development, testing, quality and project delivery in addition to commercial experience, he is the chair of the British Computer Society's Special Interest Group in software testing, and works with international standardization committees developing AI and quality-related standards.

AI is a complex topic and is the biggest technical renaissance to impact testing for at least two decades.  Adam will talk about intrinsic quality issues with AI, challenges in testing AI-based systems, and new techniques and methods.  In addition, he will cover emerging AI-enhanced testing tools that are yet to get much coverage.

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You know that testing and quality is important, right? Okay, prove it. Exactly how much money do you think testing saves? Yes, that’s right saves. Testing is often thought of as a regrettable cost center, something that must be funded to avoid some dimly-understood “bad stuff that could happen.” In fact, software testing and other quality assurance activities save money. Typically, every dollar spent on testing saves eight dollars in the long run. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of cost of quality, a technique known for over 50 years, using a real world case study and a spreadsheet you can download and use that same day. Testers, know your value!

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You may have heard the saying “The only constant on any project is change.” Yet the prospect of change is rarely welcomed—either personally or professionally. How is it that we still believe that these changes apply to others but not to us? Julie Gardiner says that now is the time to re-evaluate and transform how we test in order to deliver more value to organizations—from a people, processes, and tools perspective. She examines, how we’ve gotten to this stage in terms of our role and what skills are vital for us to be prepared for the next stage.

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Test case metrics. Defect metrics. Requirements coverage metrics. Code coverage metrics. Metrics, metrics, metrics: yep, we got metrics in software testing, but do we use them properly? 

Following up on his popular keynote and webinar, “Stupid Metrics Tricks and How to Avoid Them,” testing metrics advocate Rex Black decided to have a discussion about how we use and, all too often, misuse metrics in software with fellow testing professional Dawn Haynes, a testing metrics skeptic. There are sure to be some interesting disagreements as well as some unexpected agreements. 

Join Dawn and Rex for a lively back-and-forth on the topic of metrics, followed by a Q&A opportunity.

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Join Rex Black and Rob Sabourin for a lively back-and-forth on the topic followed by a Q&A opportunity. Rob observes that, today, many software testers are challenged to quickly identify product quality concerns amidst turbulent project contexts. Business, technology, and organizational factors change frequently. Testers are forced to continuously adapt, to think on their feet, and to provide stakeholders, team members and even system users with meaningful feedback about quality concerns, and operational readiness.
There are many different test automation technologies which can facilitate the control and observation of software.  Rob notes that, among his customers, test automation technologies are mainly limited to implementing automated verification checks, as part of regression suites, in continuous integration and deployment processes.
This webinar will address the problem of how test automation tools, methods, and techniques can be effectively used to facilitate, and improve the efficiency of, exploratory testing.
Robert Sabourin has more than thirty-eight years of management experience, leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Robert has managed, trained, mentored, and coached thousands of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. The author of I am a Bug! the popular software testing children’s book, Robert is an adjunct professor of Software Engineering at McGill University.  Robert is the principal consultant (&president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc.

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TMMi has become the leading model for test process improvement, but how are organizations adopting TMMi and what issues are they addressing? Join us as we welcome guest presenter, Martin Adcock, Managing Director of Experimentus who have been helping organizations to deliver TMMi based solutions for over 14 years, as he explores how organizations have adopted TMMi and are using it to improve their test process and give them a competitive edge.

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Shift left. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Continuous deployment. DevOps. What is all this stuff and what does it mean for you as the tester? In this keynote, Rex Black will explain these concepts and their test implications.  He’ll then describe the emerging role of the SDET (Software Development Engineering in Test, also called SET) and what SDETs do.  Yes, being an SDET is about test automation, but it’s about a lot more than that, and Rex will give you some examples of things you can expect to do as an SDET in a shift left world over the coming decade.  Don’t worry. Life as a tester in the SDET reality is gonna be fun and exciting, and Rex will give you some ideas how.

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“What Gets Measured Gets Managed.” Jamie Mitchell explains, “I have heard this since the first day I got into software. Management wants metrics. The managers would tell us that it allowed them to maximize our effort and the organizational profits.  The more cynical of us always said that it was to make sure we were not sitting around drinking coffee instead of working.” 

Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that we can measure matters. And this applies to software test automation more than in most software endeavors.

As an automator of almost 30 years, Jamie has struggled with the demand for metrics from management for most of his career. Most of the metrics that he has been forced to collect were—in his humble opinion—not only worthless, but also misleading and subject to manipulation by those who wanted to prove their point (no matter what that point was.)

Join the discussion, between Rex and Jamie, as they cover various kinds of metrics that have been suggested for automation.

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In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex welcomes Gio Lodi to discuss how to adopt a Test-Driven Development mindset followed by a Q&A opportunity. We changed the start time of this month’s webinar to 5:00 PM Central in order to allow for this multi-continent session. After all, it’s 2 o’clock somewhere!

Test-Driven Development (TDD), is a software development technique that flips the testing process on its head: rather than testing after the product is done, developers build tests first and use the failure as a guide to write the necessary code. TDD's immediate benefit is that it gives better test coverage, but there are more beneficial second order effects that come when applying it consistently. Moving in this step-by-step, feedback driven process improves the team productivity and results in a malleable software design. In this presentation, we'll look at how to bring this mindset that focuses on iteration and feedback in all the areas of software and product development.

Gio Lodi is the author of Test-Driven Development in Swift. He's been exploring testing and automation since 2011, when he encountered TDD while working on a startup with his University housemates. Gio publishes his findings in his blog and with presentations such as this one. He lives in an Australian beach town with his wife and two little children, and works remotely as mobile infrastructure engineer at Automattic, where he helps teams working on apps such as WordPress ship quality code on a schedule.

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We are inundated by scads of mixed messages about software development, testing, quality, and delivery today. There are the Agile Manifesto and principles, SCRUM, Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework, the book - How Google Tests Software, the tech talk - Test is Dead, murmurs about achieving 100% automation, goals of delivering faster and more frequently to customers, the idea that we can solve every problem with DevOps, and so on. Some of these messages leave organizations confused about the value of testing, and testers wondering if they have a career path at all. We indeed are at a critical juncture in the quality and testing space, and if we aren't careful, we could be joining the dodo and the dinosaurs. 

How will we survive all this? Dawn believes the heart of the issue is in becoming truly agile in our beliefs, approaches, and attitudes about testing. Without the flexibility to serve the needs of our teams and organizations TODAY (and tomorrow!), we should be concerned. So, what is the true meaning of agility for testers? Does it mean doing "Agile" things? Following SCRUM? Doing DevOps? Etc.? Dawn doesn't think so. Please join Dawn to take a deep dive into what true agility could look like for testers and teams moving forward!

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How many times have you heard statements like, “How did we miss this in test”, “This defect doesn’t happen on my machine”, “We do not need automation”, or “We are waiting on testing to give us the green light”? Far too often, teams are spending a lot of time diving into discussions that they no longer need to have. This builds frustration, affects team alignment, and can potentially impact the quality and milestones of the project. Through the years, we have seen a need for processes, tools, and old-school approaches to change. Discussions we needed to have years ago are no longer the same now.  There is a need for strategic changes in how we operate within a project and how we communicate across teams.

With over 25 years of experience in IT, Mike Lyles has held various roles: from developer, project management office, development management, and ultimately testing. He has witnessed the paradigm shift required to measure success on teams and the speed at which we must reach goals as compared to the past. And most importantly, he has taken part in discussions which are losing their relevancy and need a major overhaul in our workforce today.

Join the discussion, between Rex and Mike, as they discuss many of the well-known phrases, philosophies, and theories around testing of years past, and how that we must overcome the obstacles to be successful today.

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In this month’s webinar, we are happy to welcome guest speaker, Adam Leon Smith. Adam is CTO of Dragonfly and is focused on testing, quality and AI. With two decades experience in environments, development, testing, quality and project delivery in addition to commercial experience, he is the chair of the British Computer Society's Special Interest Group in software testing, and works with international standardization committees developing AI and quality-related standards.

AI is a complex topic and is the biggest technical renaissance to impact testing for at least two decades.  Adam will talk about intrinsic quality issues with AI, challenges in testing AI-based systems, and new techniques and methods.  In addition, he will cover emerging AI-enhanced testing tools that are yet to get much coverage.

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Did you ever wonder why your colleagues sometimes look at you funny when you’re explaining your test results, or ask you strange questions like, “Why don’t you find all the bugs in testing?” Maybe they don’t understand what you do or even why you do what you do. In this podcast, Rex will reveal ten common misunderstandings that your fellow software professionals have about testing, and discuss ways to resolve those misunderstandings to promote better communication.

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If you have been in software engineering for a while—or in fact just in the working world in general for a while—you’ve probably seen someone do something stupid with metrics. Such mistakes raise a whole bunch of interesting questions. What are the most common metrics mistakes? Why are they mistakes? Why do people make these mistakes? Are you making these mistakes? Why use metrics at all, when there are so many mistakes? In this talk, Rex will give real-world examples of these mistakes, explain the management and economic theories behind metrics, and help you find ways to implement metrics that aren’t stupid.

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