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Skills needed to make a transition from Software Test Lead to Testing Manager

To make a successful transition from a Software Test Lead to a Testing Manager, you will need a combination of technical, leadership, and project management skills. Some key skills that are important for a Testing Manager include:

  • Extensive knowledge and experience with software testing processes and methodologies
  • The ability to develop and manage a team of software testers
  • Strong agile project management skills, including the ability to create and manage budgets and schedules
  • Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
  • The ability to identify and mitigate project risks
  • The ability to foster collaboration and teamwork among team members
  • Strong problem-solving and critical thinking skills

In addition to these technical skills, it’s also important for a Testing Manager to have strong leadership skills, such as the ability to motivate and mentor team members, provide constructive feedback, and foster a positive and productive work environment.

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Thoughts and Ideas on Future of Software Testing.

The future of software testing is likely to be more automated and focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. This is due to the increasing complexity of software systems and the need for faster and more accurate testing.

AI and machine learning can help to automate the testing process by generating test cases and test data. They can also help to identify errors and potential areas of improvement. In addition, AI and machine learning can be used to create virtual environments for testing, which can be more realistic and representative of the real world.

As the use of AI and machine learning in testing becomes more widespread, it is likely that the role of human testers will change. They will become more focused on overseeing the automated testing process and interpreting the results.

The future of software testing is likely to be more efficient and effective as a result of the increasing use of AI and machine learning. This will benefit both developers and users by reducing the time and cost of testing, and by improving the quality of software products.

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Practical Tips to Speed up the Software Delivery Performance

This post will give you enough ideas to improve software delivery performance (and Automation Plays a key role here) and how to measure software delivery performance using statistical methods. I would like to share industry proven and practical tips which helps you speed up the Software Delivery Performance.

Accelerate classified the capabilities into 4 categories:

Technology & Automation capabilities:

Product and Process Capabilities:

Lean Management and Monitoring Capabilities:

Cultural Capabilities:

In next couple of articles, we will go over these capabilities one by one.

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How to Speed Up Software Development?

Why is Faster Software Development Important?

Faster software development is important because it saves time and money.

In a business world that is more competitive than ever before, it’s important to be able to develop software as quickly as possible. Today’s software developers need to be able to build out new features for the company’s product or service, and they need to do so quickly. The faster that this can happen, the less time is wasted, which means that companies will be more prepared and have a higher chance of success in this competitive market.

What Practices Will Help You Speed Up Your Software Development?

  1. Shift Left through Automation
  2. Implement CI/CD
  3. Automate as many tasks as possible – coding, data entry, testing, etc.
  4. Make defects visible so they can be fixed early and often – unit testing, nightly builds, etc.
  5. Know what you want before you build it – are requirements clear? does the design make sense? are there risks or side effects we should know about?
  6. Do things in parallel wherever possible – running multiple tests, running multiple code reviews at the same time, etc.
  7. Be responsive to changes in requirements and design from stakeholders and teammates
  8. Limit your work in progress
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Agile Without Dedicated QA [Video]

In the early days of Agile, methods such as Extreme Programming advocated for shipping without a QA phase. In fact, they often didn’t have dedicated software testers or even bug-tracking systems. And yet there are stories of these teams producing an order of magnitude fewer defects than normal. What did these teams do, and why did it work? And what role does that leave for QA? In an age where Agile is interpreted to mean “sprints” and “story points,” the technical side of Agile is often forgotten. This presentation discusses the technical underpinnings of Agile and how they lead to true business agility.

Click here to download the slides.

Author: James Shore, The Art of Agile | First published at: PNSQC 2019

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[Tip] “Building Quality In” – Automation points to consider in while you prepare for the test strategy.

Building quality in means writing automated tests at multiple levels (unit, component, and acceptance) and running them as part of the deployment pipeline, which is triggered every time a change is made to your application, its configuration, or the environment and software stack that it runs on. Manual testing is also an essential part of building quality in: Showcases, usability testing, and exploratory testing need to be done continuously throughout the project.

[Reference: Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases.. – Humble, Jez. ]

[bctt tweet=”Building quality in also means constantly working to improve your automated testing strategy.” url=”yes”]

While preparing the Test Strategy for any feature, consider the following points from automation perspective:

  • The automation approach for each layer – Unit, Integration, Regression etc.
  • Technical Debt (Automation Maintenance / Debt)
  • Running automated tests after each commit
  • Running automated tests as a part of deployment pipeline


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[Tip] Practical Examples of Shift Left in Software Testing

Shift Left is a buzzword in Software Testing. It is not new, in fact it has always been around. Shift left is all about creating a culture where testers can be involved early in the software development life cycle to start testing activities early. Idea is to reduce the risks.

Perhaps inspired by the maxim, “a stitch in time saves nine”, Shift Left is a practical attempt to actually ensure a timely stitch; to check for errors in the software testing process earlier than the conventional time to do so.  Shift Left testing means testing earlier in the software development cycle, so that risks and unknowns can be reduced which enables smooth deliveries to the clients.

Few Examples of Shift Left:

  • Pair with the developers – More Collaboration and brainstorming on the requirements / test scenarios with the Team (including Devs and PO) so that unknowns and risks can be discovered earlier in the phase. Both Devs and QEs will have the same understanding on the requirements.
    • Rework (Issue fixing & retesting) will be less.
    • Scope creep will be less.
  • Test different layers – In SOA applications, APIs are developed first. Team should plan the API testing so that issues can be identified early in the cycle (rather than just testing from the UI).
  • Plan Non-functional Testing early in the cycle (Performance Testing, Security Testing etc) – Identifies issues early and reduces the risks.
  • Automate the “Automation Test Case Execution” – Integrate the automation scripts with Jenkins/any Build automation tools that automation scripts should run in CI region before the new code deployment. It will help in ensuring that new code change is safe or not.
  • Automate Unit Tests, Integration tests, API Tests – These tests runs faster and help in identifying the defects early in the cycle.