Podcast Episodes

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.

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.

Archimedes once wrote, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” In Agile, the place to stand is testing, and the lever is test automation. Are you using all the leverage that lever gives you? Most organizations are missing some tricks, and not getting the full value of test automation. In this webinar, Rex will survey all the different ways you can—and should—take advantage of test automation as an Agile tester. The best news: Many of these forms of automation involve tools that won’t cost you a dime! Spend some time learning about some high-ROI, proven best practices to reduce failure costs and increase quality.

Shifting defect discovery to earlier activities (Shift Left) reduces rework and improves quality deliveries to customers. A lot of attention is paid to this part of “Shift Left and Down”, but how do we do the Shift Down? Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is the answer. A variety of techniques can be used with varying formalities, cost, and results; ranging from informal, 5-why, Ishikawa/fishbone to Cause-Effect.  Which technique is the right one to use, and when should it be applied? Is your organization ready for RCA? What do you do with the results? These questions and others will be discussed by Ed Weller, who will draw on 20 years of experience using RCA and onsite training across a wide range of businesses.

Give a listen to Rex's talk with Mark Tomlinson on STP Radio. They cover the history of RBCS, the future of software testing and how AI/ML figures into it, and how to stay relevant and up-to-date as a consultant. (Hint: It's not by leaving the field for eight years.)

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.

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.

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.