I like to make decisions based upon data. One of the more challenging decisions a leader of a functional area will have is workload prioritization. Fact based decisions, in a spreadsheet, are a great way to communicated with executive leaders in IT. One cool method, to determine the test prioritization, I’ve used was a heat… Continue reading Functional Test Prioritization with Heat Maps
Category: Process
Software Centers of Excellence Foster Quality Assurance
Quality is an inherent goal of every software project, but reality can get in the way of achieving it. Between the desire to curtail costs and the drive to get solutions and services out the door and into the hands of customers, organizations may inadvertently―or even knowingly―allocate less time to testing than is needed for… Continue reading Software Centers of Excellence Foster Quality Assurance
Geometric Value in Continuous Integration
One of the most important measurements in software development is related to the defect queue. I don’t mean simply the count of defects. A queue has a depth, latency, service time and throughput. The depth is the count of issues assigned to a team or person. The latency tells you how long an issue sits… Continue reading Geometric Value in Continuous Integration
Creating Successful Requirements for Performance and Scalability from Subjective Goals
Whenever I work on a performance problem, I need a maturity assessment of the existing requirements. A great place to start is characterizing the performance issues from the stakeholders. Let’s separate this into three archetypes to guide the discussion: Subjective, Low Precision, and Monitored. For each of these, I will try to describe some patterns… Continue reading Creating Successful Requirements for Performance and Scalability from Subjective Goals
A Tale of Two Sites…
As a software quality assurance professional with over 15 years’ experience in the field, I was initially shocked by the technical problems with healthcare.gov. I’ve devoted a large portion of my professional career towards ensuring that things like this never happen to my customers! However, after much thought, I realized that the ramifications of bad… Continue reading A Tale of Two Sites…
QA Automation within CD Pipeline
One of the best ways to improve the quality of IT solutions is to leverage automation, to shorten the iterations between changes and validation. Let’s start with the tools available to a modern software developer. In the diagram above, a developer has some code ready to go and they have an approved change ready to… Continue reading QA Automation within CD Pipeline
Sample Deployment Pipeline Diagram
Deployment Pipeline In the diagram above you can clearly see that the IT organization created a rich and robust set of approval processes and committees to improve the quality of every change that goes into production. When this team needs to react quickly, they skip some of the manual review processes. This is a top-down… Continue reading Sample Deployment Pipeline Diagram
Using Subversion for Loadrunner Projects with an Eye on Continuous Delivery
We were working on a project that required us to bring everything under version control to facilitate continuous delivery. Our team came up with a solution for the performance testing elements. The key was to include more than just the scripts. We needed a design for everything to reproduce the test runs and store results… Continue reading Using Subversion for Loadrunner Projects with an Eye on Continuous Delivery
Repeatable and Trustworthy
These are key tenets of any enterprise testing organization but too often the testing teams are at the mercy of the hardware, operating system and middleware configuration of their system under test environments. How can the testing professionals really do their job without a clean and well controlled laboratory? They are mixing chemicals in dirty… Continue reading Repeatable and Trustworthy