Management Articles

• A Fun Presentation on a Powerful Software Test Design Approach by Justin Hunter
  "My own consistent experiences and formal studies indicate that pairwise, orthogonal array-based, and combinatorial test design approaches often lead to a doubling of tester productivity (as measured in defects found per tester hour) as compared to the far more prevalent practice in the software testing industry of selecting and documenting test cases by hand."

• Summing it all up by Hemal Kuntawala
  "So testers, to summarise, if you have a 'QA' column on your task wall, you’re doing it wrong. Go pair with a developer, now. Don’t just wait to bat back a list of bugs to them, go help them avoid having to work on the same thing twice. ... Ask which scenarios are important and forget about the ridiculous edge cases for now. Now build it and get real feedback."

• Presenter and participants actually test software by Justin Hunter
  by Matt Heusser "The first session of the conference was Justin Hunter’s “Let’s Test Together,” which promised to not only introduce a new test design method, but to change the way we (the audience) think about software testing. ... It was a neat session and his passion came through"

• Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed by John Hunter
  "The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A

• Why Do Some Testers Find The Critical Problems?
  "Testers who find problems successfully can link tests, test activities, and test results to the mission. They’re far more concerned about the quality of the information they provide than the quantity... Testers, to be successful, must be given the freedom and responsibility to explore and to contribute what they’ve learned back to their team and to the rest of the organization."

• The Black Team - Software Testing at IBM
  "Management noticed that certain software testers were 10 to 20 percent better at finding defects than their peers. By putting these people on the same team, they reasoned, they could form a group that would be 10 or 20 percent more effective and then put the team to work testing the most critical system components. It didn't turn out that way. ... Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves "The Black Team.'"

• You can’t be Agile in Maintenance?
  "Agile development naturally leads into maintenance – the goal of incremental Agile development is to get working software out to customers as soon as possible, and get customers using it. At some point, when customers are relying on the software to get real business done and need support and help to keep the system running, teams cross from development over to maintenance. But there’s no reason for Agile development teams to fundamentally change the way that they work when this happens."

• Combinatorial Software Testing by Rick Kuhn, Raghu Kacker, Yu Lei, Justin Hunter
  While the most basic form of combinatorial testing, pairwise, is well established, and adoption by software testing practitioners continues to increase, industry usage of these methods remains patchy at best. However, the additional training required is

• If The Only Tool You Have is a Hammer
  "Eventually my journey in software and testing as extended into areas like Agile and particularly Lean. This gave even sharper context to the concept that there is no 'right way' to do something, only slightly better or worse ways and more often than not the distinction is unclear. Nowadays it causes me almost physical pain when someone refers to 'Best Practice' and I often have to restrain myself from physical violence when someone says “We tried that once, and it didn’t work.'"

• Practical Combinatorial Testing by Raghu Kacker, Rick Kuhn, Yu Lei
  "Combinatorial methods can help reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of software testing for many applications. ... With the NASA application, for example, 67% of the failures were triggered by only a single parameter value, 93% by 2-way combinations, and 98% by 3-way combinations. The detection rate curves for the other applications studied are similar, reaching 100% detection with 4 to 6 way interactions."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Hemal, Developer in Test by Hemal Kuntawala
  "I'm a test-developer enhancing testing practices using kanban and lean principles. ... I'm keen to see more development teams, agile-adopters or not, move away from the end-of-cycle testing model and embrace true quality assurance by testing throughout the production line."

• Hexawise - Combinatorial Software Testing by Justin Hunter, John Hunter
  This blog, by Justin Hunter, is about efficient and effective software test design strategies, including pairwise and combinatorial methods that are gaining traction in the testing community.

• Google Testing Blog
  "If it ain't broke, you're not trying hard enough" Software testing blog with concrete advice from Google.