When a software development organisation has roots in traditional non-Agile development methodologies such as Waterfall, or the V-model, making the switch towards Agile can be surprisingly challenging. This isn’t just the case for the design and development team – who have to get used to shorter, faster sprints – but also for the testers who remain at the usual tail end of the process.

Agile testing requires a specific set of skills that have to be developed by testers in order for them to be successful as part of a sprint team. It isn’t enough for a manager to simply declare, “you’re Agile testers now”.

In this post, Joel Montvelisky explains what is so demanding about Agile testing, and offers some advice about what can be done to ease the transition. Hint: it’s not as simple as changing your t-shirt!

Read the post in full over at QA Intelligence.

Many project managers are aware of the value of testing in their projects, and understand that investing in the testing phase is an investment in the quality of their project as a whole. However, there are still some that view testing as that little bit that happens at the end after everything else is done: when the testers do a few quick checks just to make sure everything works.

In this article, Rex Black looks at how test managers can present a more enlightened view of software testing as an investment rather than a tiresome unavoidable cost. The article includes a useful case study which shows the difference in ROI between no formal testing, manual testing, and automated testing.

Read the article in full on the RBCS blog.

When it comes to non-functional testing, even many experienced testers aren’t sure of the difference between performance testing, load testing, and stress testing.

Do you know what type of testing is used to test the time difference between the generation of an HTTP request and the return of a response? How about the testing required to determine the maximum number of concurrent users a system can support before it fails?

In this handy article, Vijay from Software Testing Help looks at the fundamental differences between performance, load, and stress testing, and describes the goals of each technique – together with some useful examples.

Read the article in full on softwaretestinghelp.com.

As a test manager, if you focus on ensuring critical testing processes are performed well, your project will almost certainly succeed. Neglect your critical testing processes, and your efforts will fail – regardless of the level of your own talent or that of your team.

In this article, Rex Black of RBCS outlines his Critical Testing Processes (CTP) framework, and describes how critical test processes directly affect a test team’s ability to identify bugs, reduce risks, and generate information about the quality of software.

The article offers some useful direction on how to formulate an approach for using CTP to improve your own testing processes.

Read it in full on the RBCS blog.