InfoQ Homepage Quality Content on InfoQ
-
What does Quality Mean?
Is quality supposed to mean a lack of defects that are holding us back? Mike Bria, Lisa Crispin, James Bach and JB Rainsberger debate the meaning of quality and the limitations our current definition is placing on us.
-
Book Excerpt: Agile Testing
InfoQ brings you an excerpt from Agile Testing, a book is for testers on an agile team, test and quality assurance managers transitioning to agile development, and agile teams learning how to approach testing.
-
Throw Away Your Bug Tracking System?
Elisabeth Hendrickson, A.K.A "testObsessed", presents a thought-provoking stance on triaging bugs in an agile project. She discusses her feelings that problems found during the iteration are not "bugs", that only the Product Owner has the right to call something "bug", and that a healthy agile team might likely have no need for a bug tracking system.
-
Spolsky vs Uncle Bob
The last few weeks, a public dispute has been going on between Joel Spolsky and Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob) about Test-Driven Development and about the SOLID principles of OO design. Here is a summary and review of the match.
-
The Correct Ratio of Agile Testers to Developers? It Depends.
An long-standing question in the software development world is: what is the correct ratio of testers to developers? A recent thread on the Scrum Development list asked how agile impacts this ratio. The answer to the first question seems to be 'It depends'. The answer to the second question, according to Elisabeth Hendrickson, is that agile teams can do more testing, with fewer testers.
-
Presentation: Embrace Uncertainty by Jeff Patton
In this original presentation from the Communitech Agile Event, Jeff Patton, winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award, explains why one needs to embrace uncertainty in order to succeed with his/her Agile project and how to avoid some of the common mistakes leading to project failure.
-
.NET 4 Feature Focus: Code Contracts
By far the most important feature of .NET 4.0 is support for a language agnostic design by contract framework. When used properly, design by contract has the ability to greatly reduce the potential for bugs in software while at the same time reducing the number of unit tests that need to be generated.
-
Opinions: Measuring Programmers' Productivity
In the field of software development, managers need measurable metrics to appreciate the performance of their programmers. Shahar Yair and Steve McConnell discuss common techniques focusing on source lines of code and function points. They highlight the limitations of these approaches and seek to define some principles that could guide the analysis of programmers’ performance.
-
When is Ok to Break the Rules
In “Just Ship Baby” Kent Beck, author of the JUnit Framework, reminds us that the point of all the Agile processes and practices is to produce shipping software. If they’re getting in the way of shipping software – then perhaps you need to break the rules.
-
JProbe 8.0: The Java code, memory, and coverage profiler is back
Quest Software recently released JProbe 8.0, a Java code, memory, and coverage profiler. While JProbe has been one of the leading Java profiling tools since the late 1990's, JProbe 8.0 aims to help Quest regain the leadership position in the profiling market with new Eclipse integration and a more competitive price point.
-
Gallio .NET Test Automation Platform
Gallio is an automation platform targeting .NET test frameworks. Instead of each test framework creating its own toolset, including an automation API and test runner, Gallio seeks to provide a neutral, extensible platform with tools and automation services that can be leveraged by any test framework.
-
PartCover: New Open Source Code Coverage Tool
PartCover is beginning to fill the void left by NCover. Both SharpDevelop and TreeSurgeon have integrated PartCover to provide code coverage.
-
An Agile Developer's Responsibility
What is a developer's responsibility when a customer asks for a quick and dirty solution? Should they listen to the customer and take the short cut because, after all, they are paying the bill? Should they instead always do what is technically the "best" option in their opinion? Or is there a middle road that should be taken?
-
Debate: Scaling teams up in productivity rather than in personnel
Larger team size prevents from adopting the whole range of language abstraction tools and puts constraints on productivity. Reg Braithwaite believes that tools should not be tuned to the size of the team. He advocates for building teams around the tools and keeping them small. It appears however that team growth is often inevitable. What can be done then to maintain quality and productivity?
-
Testing and Quality Control the only Certification Needed?
A new certification for software developers that is neither about in depth knowledge of programming languages, nor any modelling and design techniques, was suggested by Reginald Braithwaite. Only one subject would be on the examination list - "Testing and quality control". Safety has to be the prerequisite to any software development job. For the rest marketplace will decide.