A Tester Is For Life, Not Just For Christmas
The Software Testing Club has done it again, our friend and Original Thinker, Rosie Sherry, Software Testing Club Author, has recently launched the latest creative eBook just for Software Testers! It’s great to see our Tester’s are being looked after 
The eBook entitled “A Tester Is For Life, Not Just For Christmas” can be downloaded for free and the STC just ask if you wouldn’t mind donating to the Oxfam charity that they support, which you can donate via the Just Giving website here: http://www.justgiving.com/testingclub.supporting
If you would like to know more about how your peers are coping in the software testing world I would recommend this brilliant PDF download. The STC asked their community a set of questions and have published some of the answers in this hilarious eBook. It is a great resource for getting in touch with others, who may share your practices or have found a way of improving them.
Check out “A Tester Is For Life, Not Just For Christmas” from The Software Testing Club
Five software non-failures for 2011
This time last year, Michael Krigsman posted an interesting blog predicting 5 main software failures for 2010. These ranged from failure rates remaining unchanged to social computing and Enterprise 2.0 adoption failures hitting the jackpot.
Was he right? Did his predictions come true? Were you impacted in any way?
It’s great to be able to look back and find out if a prediction came true. It’s a bit like reading a daily horoscope and then only realising at the end of the day that you didn’t meet that mystery stranger and fortune did not appear to smile on you or make any appearance.
So with that in mind, do we really want to be told again what not to look forward to in the year ahead? Are we not depressed enough being constantly reminded about our national debt, shrinking government funding, etc., etc.?
I am sure you’d agree that we are in need of some good news, after all it is nearly Christmas! How about learning how much better the year ahead is going to be compared to the last year? Well let’s start right now! I am going to tell you about five of the best software achievements in 2011 and I hope you will join me by adding your own software achievements to this list:
1. Application Quality Management – In 2009, the Standish Group CHAOS report indicated that nearly 25% of all IT projects fail. This is a sobering statistic when you consider the blood, sweat and tears that go into any IT project. The quality of application or software delivery is at the heart of many of the challenges faced with IT projects. It is therefore critical to manage the software delivery lifecycle process in a streamlined and efficient manner. Qualify is our unique solution for Application Quality Management (AQM) that unites all aspects of the software quality lifecycle from requirements through to deployment, providing an integrated approach to solving your management challenges. Find out how with the help of Yoda, Obi Wan and others from the Star Wars cast, you can learn to best avoid these challenges and deliver your projects on time, on budget and most importantly with quality. Register to attend our webinar “The Dark Side of Application Quality Management” today.
2. Dynamic Manual Software Testing – Praised by Paul Herzlich, Software Testing tools Analyst, Ovum, TestDrive-Assist requires such minimal training and set up time, it is an ideal solution for those software testers who may not yet need or want full automation, but want some way of capturing their work and improving their efficiency. It is the only software testing solution to monitor applications and provide screen, input, database and test status information for manual tests. This “5 Minute Regression Test” video shows perfectly the advancements in manual testing technology.
3. Agile Test Automation – With many organisations moving to or experimenting with Agile, Original Software has been acclaimed by the analyst community as the best solution for supporting Agile. Just as improvements in developer’s software tools and methods have enabled a shift in development approaches, next generation technology for test automation is similarly reframing the opportunities for testers to automate earlier in the delivery cycle without incurring the heavy burden of script maintenance so often associated with traditional automation tools. This means that not only can an agile environment be adopted, application quality is maintained and the total testing time reduced. We are hosting a webinar that explores application testing in an agile environment. Aptly named: “Agile Test Automation – Truth, Oxymoron or Lie?”, make sure you register to discover more.
4. SAP Software Quality – The word “upgrade” has been known to send shivers down the spines of many SAP customers, especially given the historical pain, time and cost of moving to a new version of the ERP software. Upgrades, especially functional upgrades, are resource hungry, take months of planning and require business users to take time out of their daily workloads to check the new system. TestDrive, enables the transition from manual testing into automation quickly and easily. Our powerful solution accelerates your SAP quality processes and increases SAP test coverage. This video shows how TestDrive works over an SAP application..
You can also learn more by registering for a January webinar called: “Enabling Business Users for SAP Testing”
5. Intelligent Test Data Management & Verification – Regulatory compliance and data protection laws continue to have an ever greater impact upon the ways that companies do business. The various data confidentiality and control measures all carry with them serious penalties including fines and imprisonment. TestBench, supports Application Quality Management (AQM) with functionality that uniquely controls, tests and manages the data required for effective testing, together with the server-side effects of the test. Testing on live data is now a thing of the past with the creation of subsets that retain referential integrity, providing a perfect miniature copy of the live environment. Data scrambling and de-sensitivity along with auto-analysis, data manipulation and extraction reports for auditing means you can be confident your testing processes with be fully compliant with all regulatory controls.
I hope these five pieces of good news above have brightened up your outlook for 2011. Season’s greetings to you all.
