In the prior article I talked about why quality is essential in the Product Management team, and why Product Management should be the steward of quality for the organization. In this article, I’ll give you some specific ways to measure and improve the quality of the product. Measuring Quality Other teams have their way of

Is there a role where quality is not essential? Whether for personal satisfaction, or as a requirement of your job description, we should strive to deliver quality in our work. In my first role as a graphic designer, I needed to send some business card designs to the printer, and I overlooked the quality check

I’ve said it. You may have heard me say it, or at least seen me write it. Automation development is software development, and we need to treat it as such. I’ve also said the use of record-and-playback, drag-and-drop, or low-/no-code tools is generally not a good way to create an “enterprise-class” automation endeavor. The reasons

DevOps started with a few revolutionary observations in their day yet seem obvious today. For example, before DevOps, you had the programmers, whose job was to create change, and operations, whose job was to ensure reliability or uptime. The easiest way to ensure uptime was to prevent change. Framed that way, operations and programming are

A few years ago, a friend emailed me a survey about software testing. The survey asked us to specify our roles, along with which kind of testing we thought was most important. As I recall, the question was, “If you could only do one type of testing, which would you pick?” Surprisingly, the point of

Behavior Driven Development was a mind hack. Dan North, the creator, was teaching unit testing to programmers and noticed that programmers found testing … well … boring – which made the idea of driving development with tests even less interesting.  Yet what those tests were doing was really defining behavior, or setting expectations. A test

During our recent webinar on revisiting the test automation pyramid, an attendee named Stephen asked for some guidance on when mocking was good or bad. The good folks at Subject7 asked me to take a look at the question and offer my perspective. Mocking Defined A strict definition of a mock is a bit of

In the preface to his book Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck said that he likes teams to run fast. Design documents, technical specifications and anything that needs to be changed as the software changes create cruft. Cruft will either become outdated (and incorrect) over time, or else need to be maintained, and maintaining cruft slows

The best part of a presentation might just be the Q&A.  After all, that is the part where the material meets the actual life experiences of the audience.  About a month ago, we hosted a panel discussion titled “Revisiting the Test Automation Pyramid – 20 years later.”  The panel attracted a lot of great questions,

You can skip the cup of coffee; this might be my shortest ever blog. Some have asked what you need to run performance testing in the CI/CD pipeline, and here’s my answer. To run performance testing in the CI/CD pipeline, all you need is to “just run the tests!” Well, except for a few minor nuances of course.