RBCS Podcast

If you have been in software engineering for a while—or in fact just in the working world in general for a while—you've probably seen someone do something stupid with metrics. Such mistakes raise a whole bunch of interesting questions. What are the most common metrics mistakes? Why are they mistakes? Why do people make these mistakes? Are you making these mistakes? Why use metrics at all, when there are so many mistakes? In this talk, Rex will give real-world examples of these mistakes, explain the management and economic theories behind metrics, and help you find ways to implement metrics that aren't stupid.

Is the V model dead, crushed by the onset of agile methods? In the age of agile, are those who talk about the V model anachronistic dinosaurs? Or was the V model actually ahead of its time, illuminating best practices that now form the core of agile testing? In this talk, Rex will show how the fundamental principles of the V model can be successfully applied in the context of an agile development effort, and how the application of those principles make agile software development even more agile. Sure to stir some controversy, attend Rex's webinar, submit questions and comments, and make up your own mind.

Perhaps you, like many software testers and test managers, are enjoying the benefits of incorporating a lightweight analytical risk-based testing strategy such as RBCS' Pragmatic Risk Analysis and Management (PRAM) technique into your test approach. What if your organization is adopting an agile methodology? Can you still use PRAM and other similar analytical risk-based testing strategies? Absolutely. In this webinar, Rex will explain the process for integrating quality risk identification and assessment into the release and iteration planning processes, and for integrating quality risk mitigation into each iteration. You'll return to work with a proven method for injecting risk-based testing into your agile processes.

What would John Connor, son of Sarah Connor, hero of the resistance in the “Terminator” movie series, say about the Internet of things, the ubiquity of mobile devices, the fact that we almost ran out of IP addresses, software that updates itself, and other signs of the coming computer apocalypse? He'd probably tell us to pull the plug, quickly! Beyond the nightmare scenario of the “Terminator” films, what are the implications of quality, and lack of quality, for the now-real situation that everything is connected to everything else? Will it be Neuromancer, “Terminator,” androids dreaming of electric sheep, or something more benign? Join us for some fun and interesting speculation and prediction on the future of limitless connectivity.

In many ways, leading a test team is like leading any other team. After all, people are people, no matter what work they do or where they live. Of course, there are some aspects that are specific to managing technical teams. And there are a few aspects that are specific to managing a test team. Given a good team, which you've developed carefully, how can you get the best work from them and keep them engaged and motivated? Rex will explore some ideas, and take your questions, in this free webinar.

Did you ever wonder why your colleagues sometimes look at you funny when you're explaining your test results, or ask you strange questions like, “Why don't you find all the bugs in testing?” Maybe they don't understand what you do or even why you do what you do. In this podcast, Rex will reveal ten common misunderstandings that your fellow software professionals have about testing, and discuss ways to resolve those misunderstandings to promote better communication.

So many test tools are bought, downloaded for free, built, or otherwise acquired in a given year, but how many of those tools are still successfully in use four or five years later? It's a depressingly small percentage. Many times, the root cause of tool failure was failing to understand the problem you were trying to solve with the tool in the first place. In this webinar, Rex will describe a straightforward process that you can use to ensure that you capture a detailed set of requirements for your test tool, which can be used to evaluate tools and vendors. By applying this process, you can improve your chances of avoiding the “failed test tool” syndrome!

In this month's webinar, we are happy to welcome guest speaker, Adam Leon Smith. Adam is CTO of Dragonfly and is focused on testing, quality and AI. With two decades experience in environments, development, testing, quality and project delivery in addition to commercial experience, he is the chair of the British Computer Society's Special Interest Group in software testing, and works with international standardization committees developing AI and quality-related standards. AI is a complex topic and is the biggest technical renaissance to impact testing for at least two decades. Adam will talk about intrinsic quality issues with AI, challenges in testing AI-based systems, and new techniques and methods. In addition, he will cover emerging AI-enhanced testing tools that are yet to get much coverage.

How many times have you heard statements like, “How did we miss this in test”, “This defect doesn't happen on my machine”, “We do not need automation”, or “We are waiting on testing to give us the green light”? Far too often, teams are spending a lot of time diving into discussions that they no longer need to have. This builds frustration, affects team alignment, and can potentially impact the quality and milestones of the project. Through the years, we have seen a need for processes, tools, and old-school approaches to change. Discussions we needed to have years ago are no longer the same now. There is a need for strategic changes in how we operate within a project and how we communicate across teams. With over 25 years of experience in IT, Mike Lyles has held various roles: from developer, project management office, development management, and ultimately testing. He has witnessed the paradigm shift required to measure success on teams and the speed at which we must reach goals as compared to the past. And most importantly, he has taken part in discussions which are losing their relevancy and need a major overhaul in our workforce today. Join the discussion, between Rex and Mike, as they discuss many of the well-known phrases, philosophies, and theories around testing of years past, and how that we must overcome the obstacles to be successful today.

We are inundated by scads of mixed messages about software development, testing, quality, and delivery today. There are the Agile Manifesto and principles, SCRUM, Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework, the book - How Google Tests Software, the tech talk - Test is Dead, murmurs about achieving 100% automation, goals of delivering faster and more frequently to customers, the idea that we can solve every problem with DevOps, and so on. Some of these messages leave organizations confused about the value of testing, and testers wondering if they have a career path at all. We indeed are at a critical juncture in the quality and testing space, and if we aren't careful, we could be joining the dodo and the dinosaurs. How will we survive all this? Dawn believes the heart of the issue is in becoming truly agile in our beliefs, approaches, and attitudes about testing. Without the flexibility to serve the needs of our teams and organizations TODAY (and tomorrow!), we should be concerned. So, what is the true meaning of agility for testers? Does it mean doing "Agile" things? Following SCRUM? Doing DevOps? Etc.? Dawn doesn't think so. Please join Dawn to take a deep dive into what true agility could look like for testers and teams moving forward!

In this month's “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex welcomes Gio Lodi to discuss how to adopt a Test-Driven Development mindset followed by a Q&A opportunity. We changed the start time of this month's webinar to 5:00 PM Central in order to allow for this multi-continent session. After all, it's 2 o'clock somewhere! Test-Driven Development (TDD), is a software development technique that flips the testing process on its head: rather than testing after the product is done, developers build tests first and use the failure as a guide to write the necessary code. TDD's immediate benefit is that it gives better test coverage, but there are more beneficial second order effects that come when applying it consistently. Moving in this step-by-step, feedback driven process improves the team productivity and results in a malleable software design. In this presentation, we'll look at how to bring this mindset that focuses on iteration and feedback in all the areas of software and product development. Gio Lodi is the author of Test-Driven Development in Swift. He's been exploring testing and automation since 2011, when he encountered TDD while working on a startup with his University housemates. Gio publishes his findings in his blog and with presentations such as this one. He lives in an Australian beach town with his wife and two little children, and works remotely as mobile infrastructure engineer at Automattic, where he helps teams working on apps such as WordPress ship quality code on a schedule.

“What Gets Measured Gets Managed.” Jamie Mitchell explains, “I have heard this since the first day I got into software. Management wants metrics. The managers would tell us that it allowed them to maximize our effort and the organizational profits. The more cynical of us always said that it was to make sure we were not sitting around drinking coffee instead of working.” Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that we can measure matters. And this applies to software test automation more than in most software endeavors. As an automator of almost 30 years, Jamie has struggled with the demand for metrics from management for most of his career. Most of the metrics that he has been forced to collect were—in his humble opinion—not only worthless, but also misleading and subject to manipulation by those who wanted to prove their point (no matter what that point was.) Join the discussion, between Rex and Jamie, as they cover various kinds of metrics that have been suggested for automation.

Shift left. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Continuous deployment. DevOps. What is all this stuff and what does it mean for you as the tester? In this keynote, Rex Black will explain these concepts and their test implications. He’ll then describe the emerging role of the SDET (Software Development Engineering in Test, also called SET) and what SDETs do. Yes, being an SDET is about test automation, but it’s about a lot more than that, and Rex will give you some examples of things you can expect to do as an SDET in a shift left world over the coming decade. Don’t worry. Life as a tester in the SDET reality is gonna be fun and exciting, and Rex will give you some ideas how.

TMMi has become the leading model for test process improvement, but how are organizations adopting TMMi and what issues are they addressing? Join us as we welcome guest presenter, Martin Adcock, Managing Director of Experimentus who have been helping organizations to deliver TMMi based solutions for over 14 years, as he explores how organizations have adopted TMMi and are using it to improve their test process and give them a competitive edge.

Join Rex Black and Rob Sabourin for a lively back-and-forth on the topic followed by a Q&A opportunity. Rob observes that, today, many software testers are challenged to quickly identify product quality concerns amidst turbulent project contexts. Business, technology, and organizational factors change frequently. Testers are forced to continuously adapt, to think on their feet, and to provide stakeholders, team members and even system users with meaningful feedback about quality concerns, and operational readiness. There are many different test automation technologies which can facilitate the control and observation of software. Rob notes that, among his customers, test automation technologies are mainly limited to implementing automated verification checks, as part of regression suites, in continuous integration and deployment processes. This webinar will address the problem of how test automation tools, methods, and techniques can be effectively used to facilitate, and improve the efficiency of, exploratory testing. Robert Sabourin has more than thirty-eight years of management experience, leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Robert has managed, trained, mentored, and coached thousands of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. The author of I am a Bug! the popular software testing children’s book, Robert is an adjunct professor of Software Engineering at McGill University. Robert is the principal consultant (&president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc.

Test case metrics. Defect metrics. Requirements coverage metrics. Code coverage metrics. Metrics, metrics, metrics: yep, we got metrics in software testing, but do we use them properly? Following up on his popular keynote and webinar, “Stupid Metrics Tricks and How to Avoid Them,” testing metrics advocate Rex Black decided to have a discussion about how we use and, all too often, misuse metrics in software with fellow testing professional Dawn Haynes, a testing metrics skeptic. There are sure to be some interesting disagreements as well as some unexpected agreements. Join Dawn and Rex for a lively back-and-forth on the topic of metrics, followed by a Q&A opportunity.

You may have heard the saying “The only constant on any project is change.” Yet the prospect of change is rarely welcomed—either personally or professionally. How is it that we still believe that these changes apply to others but not to us? Julie Gardiner says that now is the time to re-evaluate and transform how we test in order to deliver more value to organizations—from a people, processes, and tools perspective. She examines, how we’ve gotten to this stage in terms of our role and what skills are vital for us to be prepared for the next stage.

You know that testing and quality is important, right? Okay, prove it. Exactly how much money do you think testing saves? Yes, that’s right saves. Testing is often thought of as a regrettable cost center, something that must be funded to avoid some dimly-understood “bad stuff that could happen.” In fact, software testing and other quality assurance activities save money. Typically, every dollar spent on testing saves eight dollars in the long run. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of cost of quality, a technique known for over 50 years, using a real world case study and a spreadsheet you can download and use that same day. Testers, know your value!

In this month’s webinar, we are happy to welcome guest speaker, Adam Leon Smith. Adam is CTO of Dragonfly and is focused on testing, quality and AI. With two decades experience in environments, development, testing, quality and project delivery in addition to commercial experience, he is the chair of the British Computer Society's Special Interest Group in software testing, and works with international standardization committees developing AI and quality-related standards. AI is a complex topic and is the biggest technical renaissance to impact testing for at least two decades. Adam will talk about intrinsic quality issues with AI, challenges in testing AI-based systems, and new techniques and methods. In addition, he will cover emerging AI-enhanced testing tools that are yet to get much coverage.

Isn’t it amazing? Stakeholders drop software on our desk and expect us to test it with no requirements, no design and no product knowledge whatsoever. About the only clear thing is the absurd and unrealistic deadline. We are expected to bend over backward, spread magic pixie dust and heroically test quality into a product we never heard of before. But testing in the dark is not impossible – and as Rob Sabourin shows it can even be a very valuable and fun experience. Learn strategies to emerge from a murky fog into clear meaningful quality insights. Leverage unlikely sources about what stakeholder’s care about and what users really need the software to do. Join Rob’s quest to find important bugs fast, let “testing in the dark” illuminate you!

Automobiles can have millions of lines of code in them, and some of that code can have safety-critical implications. Various standards apply to safety-critical automotive code, dictating the level of code coverage required: statement, decision (or branch), or modified condition/decision coverage. To celebrate the launch of our new Automotive Software Testing course, we’re offering this free webinar. If you build or test automotive software, attend to get a taste of what you could learn in this course. In this free RBCS webinar, join Rex Black, President of RBCS, as he describes in detail what each of these levels of coverage means, how you can achieve it, and how to understand what code coverage tools are telling you.

In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome José Mata. José has worked over 20 years as a Software Quality Assurance consultant and manager, working in Austin, San Francisco, New York, and Paris. As a member of the American Software Testing Qualification Board (ASTQB) Technical Advisory Group, José wrote questions for the Foundation Level qualification exams. He is currently a Senior Software Test Engineer with NarrativeDx, an Internet startup in Austin Texas, providing AI-driven analyses of healthcare data. In this session, José and Rex will discuss moving Selenium automated testing from concept to implementation and overcoming basic “gotchas” in bootstrapping Selenium testing.

If you’ve been testing for any length of time, you know that the number of possible test cases is enormous if you try to test all possible combinations of inputs, configuration values, types of data, and so forth. It’s like the mythical monster, the many-headed Hydra, which would sprout two or more new heads for each head that was cut off. Two simple approaches to dealing with combinatorial explosions such as this are equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis, but those techniques don’t check for interactions between factors. A reasonable, manageable way to test combinations is called pairwise testing, but to do it you’ll need a tool. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of a free tool, ACTS, built by the US NIST and available for download worldwide. We can’t promise to turn you into Hercules, but you will definitely walk away able to slay the combinatorial Hydra.

Join Rex and Gary for a joint presentation on how TMMi can improve your testing and accelerate your business performance since testing is a key contributor to higher profits, customer satisfaction, personnel motivation and a bigger market share.

In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome Yalonda Haywood. Yalonda Haywood is a person of intention. As a professional speaker, trainer, and rebound coach, Yalonda helps companies and individuals recover in value, amount, and strength after any decrease or decline. The passion to see other’s reach their next level has been the driving force behind Yalonda’s career. Over the past 20 years, her journey has and continues to include speaking, training, coaching, people leadership and building high performing teams in the quality assurance space within information technology. In this session, Yalonda and Rex will discuss the key to building stronger IT departments including possible tension between quality assurance and development and operations teams, keys to creating a different culture that is not dependent on industry, practical steps organizations can take to make the culture shift and more.

In the 2010s, the software testing profession made a lot of big strides. Testing skills expanded significantly across the set of practitioners, and the number of professional testers grew. However, there remains one place where testing remains challenged, and was unable to surmount that challenge in the 2010s. Tune in to learn what that challenge is, and to get Rex’s thoughts on how to succeed in the 2020s decade, which starts just two days later!

Is software testing a waste of time and money? Many people outside of the testing profession seem to think so, and, based on the relative paucity of money devoted to testing compared to other activities in the lifecycle, it’s certainly not a high priority for many organizations. Is that smart? Why do we test software? What benefits, goals, and objectives does testing serve? Attend this presentation to learn solid, hard-headed, convincing reasons why testing is one of the smartest investments you can make, and why organizations that invest in testing receive long-lasting benefits from doing so. Rex will lay out the case for software testing and answer your questions.

Just like creating code for user stories, creating and maintaining automated tests for user stories have characteristic velocities. Are you measuring them? Do you know what good looks like for these metrics, and can you recognize the warning signs of a serious test automation death spiral when it emerges? In this One Key Idea webinar, Rex will explain how to use two simple, easy-to-gather metrics to calculate automated test creation velocity and automated test maintenance velocity.

Exploratory testing is a name given for a technique of using knowledge, experience, and skills to test software in a non-linear, investigatory fashion. Is it a powerful and important part of each professional tester’s repertoire, or actually magic quality pixie dust? Is this the only real way of testing, or is there room for other forms of validation as well as verification? What are the origins of exploratory testing, and who actually invented the technique (as opposed to coining the current name)? Does it always degrade into an unmanageable, unaccountable, random bug hunt, or are there ways to instill order, measure coverage, and build confidence with it? In this webinar, Rex will explore and burst some of the myths of exploratory testing.

Performance testing is easy, right? Grab a tool, record a transaction with the server, ramp up a thousand virtual users... What do you often get? A hot mess! Performance testing is likely the kind of testing most likely to be done poorly. It does not have to be that way. Join us to learn what performance testing is not: not easy, not guaranteed, but not impossible to do well. Much of a good performance testing program is not about using the tool at all; instead it includes all of the ISTQB buzzwords: static testing, early testing, planning and preparation. Learn the basics of successful performance testing and improve your performance test project.

Is your organization looking for growth opportunities? Do feel the status quo within your firm or your industry is ripe for disruption? Are you concerned your company will be swamped by the backwash of some else’s innovation? Your organization needs to innovate. Innovation requires a way of thinking, a reliable process and a toolset to identify the problem or challenge that you are best equipped to solve while solving it in a manner stakeholders will value. Innovation is risky, so is not adequately anticipating ever persistent change. This course discusses several approaches and tools developed to enable teams to apply designerly ways that center design on your users, and enables your users to help you help them. To learn design thinking well is to apply it. This Design Thinking course puts the evolution of a product design in your hands in collaboration with a participant design team. Join us to learn about the Design Thinking approach to solving problems, which will serve you well as an individual contributor, manager or leader.