If you’re into test automation, you should know that the Google Automation Test Conference is held in Zürich this year. They formally opened the call for attendance today. You can submit a form to have a chance to be a GTAC 2009 attendee here. I sure hope I’ll be one of the lucky one ! I’m particularly interested by their roundtable discussion and I’ve made a few suggestion on topics I’m interested in. Topics around testing in the cloud, agile testing and building large testing organization in a downturn economy. …

If you had some doubt about SCRUM and Agile development getting real in the software development world, here is an interesting chart showing the evolution of agile and SCRUM related job for the past 4 years. A picture is worth a thousand words and I guess this one clearly demonstrate a clear growing trend. We’re part of that trend as my software organization is transitioning to SCRUM. I’m taking my green pill everyday !

One of the reason for this growing trend? The state of the economy.

I’ve attended the first day of SOFTEC 2009 in Kuala Lumpur and I had a chance to listen for the first time to Lee Copeland. One of his presentation was about the 9 things the software testing community tends to forget. He looks at each of these ‘forgettings’, the negative effects of each, how recognizing them can help us improve our testing, our organizations and ourselves. It’s definitely a good reminder for everyone involved in software testing !
His presentation was recorded but I’ve found the same one he gave in …

The term technical debt was first introduced by Ward
Cunningham and is a metaphor to describe the consequences of quick and dirty software architecture and development. It is not necessary a bad thing to fall into technical debt as long as you’re doing a good job at understanding how you’re going to pay it in the future. A quick parallel with financial debt can be made easily: It might be a good idea to get a student loan to get a proper education, but you better plan carefully you repayment …

While the Cloud platforms vendors (Amazon, IBM, Google, Rackspace etc.) are fighting to offer the cheapest and the most flexible environment for companies to use, we see some cloud testing services coming our way. After all James Whittaker did predict it, so it must be true
While cloud computing for business is still in its infancy and challenges still being worked on (security, lock-in, SLAs, regulatory compliance, privacy, data integrity etc.) a cloud platform offers some valuable advantage compare to a typical owned IT environment: on-demand access, scalability, …

It looks like the whole crowdsourced testing is really picking up steam ! While uTest covers pretty much everything you’d hope for, there are a number of players getting on some interesting niche. Usability testing for website is very often forgotten especially during audience ramp up. It’s usually difficult to find the right group of people which fit your target audience and get proper feedback.

If you’ve done quite a bit of hiring, you might have your favorite interview scheme, questions and dynamics which help you assess the skills of the testers in front you. I’ve done a lot of hiring the past 3 years for all position within my organization and I was thinking about the one question always coming back and which help me the most to get a feel about the person experience and pure test skills. I have a whole bunch of question around technical design for automation framework, pure technical …