The Testing Show

It may feel that your team may be doing a lot of testing but how do you know if you are doing the right testing or the needed testing and not wasting time on areas that are not as important or add little value to your efforts? Aviram Shotten joins us to have a conversation about optimizing QA efforts and putting those hard-earned QA dollars and cents to best use.

As software testers, we are often told that we need to check our biases at the door, to not go in with preconceived notions, to look past logical fallacies, and prevent them from entering into our daily work. As our guest Rachel Kibler helps us see, that is easy to say but much harder to do.

It's one thing to apply Agile principles to a new project or to a small initiative. It's another thing entirely to apply these principles to a large organization with many moving parts, focused teams, and existing products. How do larger companies take agile and actually "make it scale?" In today's show, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen go in-depth with Yoav Ziv to discuss the advantages and pitfalls of applying Scaled agile approaches to an organization and examine how these changes are having an effect on organizations and testing teams.

As the weeks turn into months and COVID-19 infections continue in many places around the globe, plans for Career Development and conferring with others are transforming to meet the unique challenges. In this episode, Smita Mishra and Anna Royzman join Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about ways that conferences and other providers of learning opportunities are coming together to address ways in which to create meaningful learning opportunities and the fact that going to a conference in person and attending a conference online from home are not at all the same thing. We also bring back the immediate news portion of the show with a quick discussion of both the technology and ethics of contact tracing and happily announce that The Testing Show will be moving to a two-week format starting in July.

It's tempting to think that, in an area like Software Testing, "it's all been done" in some ways or another. To say that there's some "secret weapon" out there can raise some skeptical eyebrows. Yet Maya Ben Lerner and Leandro Melendez both say that there is indeed an area that can unleash great power if approached from the right angle. We don't want to spoil the surprise... well, OK, we do a little bit. That angle is infrastructure automation. Even with that, there's a lot of meat to discuss, so join Maya and Leandro as they talk with Matthew Heuser, Michael Larsen, and returning guest Mike Lyles on how to make your environments stand up and help you take control of your testing.

In this "COVID" edition of The Testing Show, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome James Back to discuss the state of testing and the push towards DevOps. Are we missing something with this push? Are we losing the actual testing that is needed? Are there testers legitimately excited about these changes? Have a listen and find out!

With Shelter at Home orders in place in many cities and entire countries due to COVID-19, we are experiencing an experiment not yet tried in our history. Many are working from home who have not had the opportunity to before and it is creating some unique challenges. Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome back Yadira Arevalo and Elle Gee to have a frank conversation about the stresses and realities of working remotely. We talk about both the challenges and opportunities with so many working remotely, as well as ways to do the best work possible and cope with what may be a new normal.

In what is proving to be a challenging month for most of the world, we decided to tackle the topic of SAFe, basically the Scaled Agile Framework. Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen have a chat with Jennifer Fawcett about SAFe. What is it? Why does it matter to your organization as a whole and to testing and testers in particular?

We've heard of Performance Testing but what is Performance Assurance? In a One on One conversation, Matt Heusser talks with Leandro Melendez about the difference between Performance Testing and Performance Assurance and how the changing landscape of systems and infrastructure makes Performance Assurance an area worth paying attention to.

As it is a new year, we decided it would be interesting to discuss the hiring of testing talent as well as being the testing talent and looking to be hired. What do recruiters actually look for? Do I have the right skill set? What do hiring managers actually look for? How important is a culture fit and why does it matter? Also, what are the areas that we can't fake on our interviews? These questions and many more are being asked by Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen as they talk about the details of interviewing testing talent with Yadira Arevalo and Elle Gee.