Category: Development & Testing

Quality Engineering Role in Root Cause Analysis

The worst defects are the ones that become incidents in production. You might hear about the cost of defects in various stages of the SDLC, but I’ve seen incidents that cost over $1M an hour in production downtime. Some QE teams might avoid looking at these because the fire is too hot. If you are… Continue reading Quality Engineering Role in Root Cause Analysis

Testing as a Service: a Modern Approach for a Critical Need

The increasing dominance of web and mobile applications is increasing complexity for organizations—and the software teams charged with ensuring application functionality and quality. The number of critical business functions processed via a browser or mobile device is escalating, the pace of updates is accelerating, and inaccurate results, aberrant behaviors, and security flaws can all be… Continue reading Testing as a Service: a Modern Approach for a Critical Need

It’s Late 2016, What’s the New Rule for Performance Test Environments?

This question was passed around internally last week: “Does anyone on this distribution list have a list of good reasons why a test environment should approximate that of production to provide accurate test results in lieu of using a cheaper, smaller test environment and math to estimate production-like results?” In my former career, we had… Continue reading It’s Late 2016, What’s the New Rule for Performance Test Environments?

Solving the Challenge of Data Security in Development and Testing

Data breaches are becoming impossible to escape. They occur in every business sector and in companies of all sizes. Juniper Research estimates that the average cost of a single data breach will exceed $150 million by 2020, with the global exposure exceeding $2 trillion by 2019. Yet, many organizations still struggle to secure their production… Continue reading Solving the Challenge of Data Security in Development and Testing

Performance Assessment – Collaboration

Learn to Collaborate Communication breakdown is not unique to IT. Somehow, most IT organizations create towers. Maybe this happens to reduce the number of status meeting or to allow for a tree-shaped management chain. When leadership creates these separate teams, the intention is not to prevent the individual contributors from collaborating and working efficiently, but… Continue reading Performance Assessment – Collaboration

Mobile Applications: Challenges from Development to Production

Many companies are struggling to balance time-to-market demands for mobile applications while still providing the performance and functionality end users desire. The mobile application lifecycle adds more complexities and unknowns than traditional applications, which only adds to the challenge. In order to be successful, processes need to be streamlined and/or enhanced from development through production.… Continue reading Mobile Applications: Challenges from Development to Production

Open Source Versus Commercial Software Tools: The Time and Place for Both

As a software professional, are you a fan of open source or commercial development and testing tools? Or, do you rely on both? Little more than a decade ago, many organizational decision makers frowned on open source tools, and software developers and testers often had to sneak them in the back door. Open source tools… Continue reading Open Source Versus Commercial Software Tools: The Time and Place for Both

Using Modern Automated Testing Tools to Verify Mainframe and Midrange Batch Functions

Automated software quality (the process of having software test other software in an unattended fashion) has become a key player in the continued rollout of agile development processes whose target is “better software, faster.” Technical articles, open-source utilities, and licensed software solutions abound for desktop and server operating systems. But, what about classic System i… Continue reading Using Modern Automated Testing Tools to Verify Mainframe and Midrange Batch Functions

Finding the Root Cause of a .Net Application Memory Leak

Overview High memory use in a .Net application is usually the result of Common Language Runtime (CLR) objects growing in size continuously. When the application memory use grows to over 1.4GB in size, the next time the application tries to “New” an object it will hit a CLR exception of type System.OutOfMemoryException causing the application to crash. The CLR memory is… Continue reading Finding the Root Cause of a .Net Application Memory Leak