Introduction In today’s dynamic digital landscape, Agile methodologies have emerged as a preferred approach to software development, promising flexibility, quicker time-to-market, and enhanced collaboration. Alongside this Agile evolution, numerous myths and misconceptions have sprouted, particularly regarding the role of Quality Assurance (QA) and its interaction with Agile practices. One of the most debated topics is the significance of requirements documentation in Agile projects. Many believe that Agile, with its emphasis on working software and iterative development, negates the need for ..read more

Introduction APIs were developed in the early days of programming but became commercially used with an API-centric architecture in the 2000s. This architecture allows companies to build modular and reusable APIs to leverage data efficiently. API testing is necessary to ensure the APIs are working correctly and that the correct data was sent and received. This manual process was very tedious and time-consuming during the early days. Organizations started building tools to enable and efficiently perform API testing. Over time, these tools developed capabilities, including automation, allowing a ..read more

10 Keys to Agile Transformation I have had the opportunity to lead an Agile team through a complete Agile transformation from a waterfall methodology and wanted to share some of my experiences of both success and failures. Agile adoption continues to gain traction and will continue to evolve over time. There are many different flavors of Agile that organizations have adopted, and thus many misconceptions of how it should work. Here are my critical success factors for Agile. 1. Agile Transformation Top Down Approach Agile must be driven from the top of the organization. This not only includes t ..read more

There has certainly been an impact of COVID-19 on the Software Testing Industry. There are several areas which I would like to analyze and break down into further detail. Those areas include: resource impact, testing impact, and workplace impact. The impact of COVID-19 on the software testing industry first area of impact is on resources. This includes both employees and contractors. There have been so many industries that have been significantly impacted, that it has devastated the software testing industry. Four industries that come to mind is: manufacturing, travel/hospitality, restaurants ..read more

 Cucumber is one of the most popular tools for behavior driven development testing.  Cucumber enables the creation of automated behavior driven development acceptance tests leveraging the Gherkin framework.  Cucumber is open-source so you don’t need to worry about paying expensive licensing fees.  Cucumber testing tool is written in the Ruby programming language. What is Behavior Driven Development? Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a software development process within Agile that Cucumber was designed to support.  It is one of the leading BDD testing tools on the m ..read more

There has been a lot of information shared over the past few years about Test Driven Development.  Initially it might seem complicated and counter to logical thinking but it actually makes a lot of sense.  Test Driven Development is defined as: a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle.  Requirements are turned into very specific test cases and the software is modified in order to get those tests to pass.  In the normal process of software development, code is written first and then tested to make sure that it works. &nbs ..read more

There has been a lot of information published about Behavior Driven Development or BDD.  It is counter to what most people are used to so it causes a lot of confusion.  It is very popular and a lot of organizations have started to embrace this methodology which results in great success to those who can consistently apply some basic principles.  Behavior Driven Development allows companies to shift further left and identify issues much earlier in the process than using the traditional waterfall methodology. What is BDD? Behavior-Driven Development is an extension of Test-Driven D ..read more

Let’s face it, writing detailed test cases takes a lot of time and effort.  As a tester, I know this is very tedious work.  However, I know first hand there are some tremendous benefits that far outweigh the time involved.  It certainly is not easy, but if planned out properly can be done extremely efficiently.  You will probably get some push back in certain areas and using certain methodologies but it is extremely important in my opinion.  Agile for example, is not in favor over detailed documentation.     Here are 7 Great Reasons to Write Detailed Test Cas ..read more

There is no doubt that AI is Transforming Software Testing.  Over the years you can see how software testing has transformed from manual testing into automated testing.  It now has reached another milestone and is further transforming with the advent of AI.  There are many tools today which have started incorporating AI in order to provide a high level of quality.  As a software quality engineer, it is important to understand those changes and be able to evolve with the technology.  If you haven’t done that yet, don’t worry since the technology is currently in a fairly ..read more

 Creating Predictive Analytics for Quality Engineering If you are in the IT profession, you know that metrics are extremely important in helping to make decisions.  This is also especially true for Quality Engineering teams.  10-15 years ago, testing was primarily conducted by software quality analysts and test cases were executed manually.  Most software testing teams were small, and they would run a limited number of test cases to ensure things worked.  Using this approach, it was relatively easy to know if there software was ready for production, and that QA manager ..read more