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

Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse

As part of a workshop discussion someone posed the following example to our group of test professionals and asked how we would solve the following problems. I am paraphrasing. How do we insure data quality and integrity at the application programming interface (API) level in the new data warehouse? Note that the solution below is… Continue reading Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse

Quality Data for Quality Testing

Technology can be an accelerator, but, if not properly tested, it can bring everything to a halt… Software is often intended as an accelerator, to make lives easier while driving up efficiency and efficacy. However, as organizations and individuals come to depend on software more, the greater the impact when it fails. This has been… Continue reading Quality Data for Quality Testing

Steps to Implement a Java Selenium Automation Project: A Customer Story

Background In order to plug into the continuous delivery pipeline, one of our customers wanted us to implement an open source test automation solution from the ground up using Selenium WebDriver.  The customer had an existing automation framework that they were moving away from and we were given 2 weeks to get everything up and… Continue reading Steps to Implement a Java Selenium Automation Project: A Customer Story

Data Quality as an Initiative

If your business is capturing or coordinating persistent data as a primary function then it behooves you to create a data quality initiative that improves your Test Data Management (TDM). There are common opportunities in the way that IT organizations manage, coordinate and execute their processes around test data. The actual data are not securely… Continue reading Data Quality as an Initiative

Are Your Development and Testing Teams On the Same Page?

Traditionally, development and testing/QA teams have worked in isolation, with each group performing its respective tasks. Not only were they not on the same page, they weren’t even speaking the same language. Modern approaches such as Agile advocate for developers and testers to work in a more collaborative, closely synched environment. Companies that have achieved… Continue reading Are Your Development and Testing Teams On the Same Page?

Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance

Just in case you haven’t heard, Waterfall is out and Agile is in.  For organizations that thrive on innovation, successful agile development and continuous deployment processes are paramount to reducing go to market time, fast tracking product enhancements and quickly resolving defects. Executed successfully, with the right team in place, Agile practices should result in… Continue reading Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance

Test automation that lets you have it all? Eliminating the time/cost/risk trade-off with Scriptless Testing.

Anyone involved in a QA project understands the competing pressures of delivering high quality business applications and the business realities of schedule pressures, cost and resource constraints, along with the need to balance the risks associated with the decision matrix that these competing issues force. We all know how a project timeline works; the QA… Continue reading Test automation that lets you have it all? Eliminating the time/cost/risk trade-off with Scriptless Testing.

Finding Resource Leaks in Windows Processes with Microsoft Performance Monitor

Summary Performance monitoring is built into the Windows operating system and every metric available is being constantly monitored, whether you choose to view it or not. There are many different built-in tools that will allow you to view this performance data such as Taskgr.exe, Perfmon.exe, or Typeperf.exe. You can also access this performance data through code inside… Continue reading Finding Resource Leaks in Windows Processes with Microsoft Performance Monitor