How the classic concept of quality gates is inconspicuously hidden in modern agile development lifecycles — Quality gates, also known as phase-gates, are a fundamental tool in project management, but sound antiquated within a contemporary agile context. In the next few minutes we will demystify the extinction of quality gates and showcase their actual relevance within a modern software development lifecycle.

Fail fast is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is a release strategy within software development. What it actually is, among other things, is a business strategy; a software design pattern and also a test automation strategy. However, it is definitely not a strategy on how to handle quality. — I am sure that most Software QA Specialists/Engineers have been confronted by a colleague at some stage within their career, who claims that QA activities can be minimized to systematically „fail fast“. …

Almost everyone knows the testing pyramid which was introduced by Mike Cohn in his book “Succeeding with Agile” and which became common QA knowledge – if not even standard – through Martin Fowler. But how is the state it describes actually achieved? — An Introduction The original Testing Pyramid describes three test levels, from top to bottom: User Interface Test Service Test Unit Test Basically, the pyramid tells us to avoid too many automated tests on the higher (slow and brittle) levels and concentrate as many as possible on the lower, as these are fast…

The relationship between developers and testers is crucial for the delivery of high quality software. Without appropriate guidance it can take a long time to form a productive collaboration. — Regardless of whether working together in an interdisciplinary team or being completely separated, the relationship between developers and testers can generally be separated into four phases. Separation Dependence

In this short article you will be given some insights on the advantages of implementing automated integration tests within the system user test’s (SUT) code base and how to compromise it’s disadvantages. The greatest and most obvious advantage is the possibility to execute tests within the SUT’s development environment and…

Every now and then, I get involved in a repeating discussion in the context of test automation. When should an assume() be used instead of an assert()? Presuming that a test case verifies one functionality, each automated test case should include one assertion. The assertion is the last statement of…

I am sure every tester has reported that one bug early on in their career that was never fixed. It’s frustrating and hard to understand, after paying so much attention to detail. Having actually found that needle in the haystack. And then? Nobody seems to care. A knife in the…

Waiting for non-functional requirements often turns out to be similar to waiting for Godot. They never turn up! — Attaining functional requirements from business departments can be quite challenging, but acquiring non-functional requirements can sometimes seem impossible. So, how can Quality Assurance Engineers handle this tricky situation? Should missing requirements be ignored? Can cross- browser testing be overlooked, load tests be neglected and performance tests be disregarded? The simple…

How analyzing code coverage results unearths deceptive metrics — A few weeks ago I implemented my first UI test with XCTest for an iOS mobile app as part of a personal project. Apart from the implementation of the test being pretty easy I was impressed with the out-of-the-box coverage metrics that Apples framework provides. The simulation of a simple…