The Testing Show

How many times has the death of testing been touted? How many talks have been giving declaring the death of testing? Granted, those talks have a specific context that is not often noticed, but the statement gets said a great deal. In this episode, Senthil Ayyappan, Head of Market Strategy for Qualitest, joins Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about how Quality Engineering is much more tha...

As the idea of melding operations and software development led to the discipline of DevOps, so has the idea of melding testing and operations led to the concept of TestOps where many of the operations areas also fall under the role of the testing teams(s) and help organizations actually get a handle on how they can better test for infrastructure needs and make sure that feature enhancements and co...

Does the idea of wearing a device that can monitor your movement, heart rate, and blood pressure to lower your health insurance premiums (or raise them in some cases) intrigue you or scare you? Does the idea of a plug-in for your car that measures your driving habits, perhaps affecting your insurance rates have you questioning things? If so, then come join Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen as the...

Today's show gets away from the typical risk and testing approach, as in what techniques to use. Instead, Jenny Bramble, Director of Quality Assurance at Papa, joins Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to discuss the more challenging aspects around talking about risk, specifically how to talk to people who don't want to recognize that it exists or is possible.

It's our 100th Episode and Qualitest has a new Chief Executive and "Chief Testing" Officer designate in Anbu Anbu Muppidathi who joins Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about Quality Engineering as a unique discipline and differentiator. How does Quality Engineering go beyond traditional notions of Quality Assurance? Come join us for this milestone episode and find out how COVID helped ma...

For many organizations and educational systems, there's a need for testers and testing talent but there isn't a clear path for someone to go learn about testing and become a software tester, at least not in a traditional education sense. There may be a school or two that has some testing curriculum specifically but for many educations systems, it's taught superficially if at all. How does a potent...

What does test management mean in today's software development world? Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome Gwen Iarussi and Lalitkumar Bhamare to talk about the differences in test management of previous decades vs. today's needs and requirements. Finding that "what is the value driver for our business?" is a critical piece among many.

Have you ever wondered what happens when something like a nor'easter, a tornado, a blizzard, or a wildfire comes through your area? How to critical systems like utilities, hospitals, and emergency services deal withy these situations? How can they help ensure their IT capabilities will remain intact, or as intact as possible? Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome Kimberly Humphrey and Scott S...

In todays fast paced and ever more complex software development landscape, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are more important than ever. Testing them has their own unique challenges. This week, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen talk with Beth Marshall, Ben Dowen, and Andrew Knight about the unique challenges testers face when working with and testing APIs and the variety of methods to m...

Once upon a time, testing was about creating the right documentation, making sure requirements were correct, be the quality police, and tell everybody else to do their job well. Lagter, we focused on specific testing, diving in to find defects and problems, and act like an insurance policy so that if there's a problem, we find it, but stop telling people how to do their jobs. Have we gone too far...

On today's show, Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome Johanna Rothman, long time management author and coach to talk about the changing roles in management, the ways in which traditional management culture is not well suited for the Information Age, and ways in which thinking about managing oneself and managing others can be improved for the realities of today's workplace, specifically in the a...

For many software testers, it can be challenging to build up a portfolio of work that can demonstrate skill, knowledge, and expertise. Having GitHub account for coding skills is one approach but many testers work on proprietary systems where people outside their company cannot see what you are capable of. Open source projects are a way to get involved in an externally visible way but where does a...

Many of us are familiar with the idea of negative testing, where we feed bad data or inputs to a program or application to see how it behaves. That works for a program or an app but how about an entire infrastructure? A discipline that has come to be known as Chaos Engineering is where this level of "testing" comes into play. Intriguing but what is "Chaos Engineering?" Claire Moss joins Matt Heuss...

Now more than ever, the idea of working for one company and doing one job for our working life is an outdated notion. For many of us, curating and developing a career is a job unto itself, especially in today's ever-changing job and career landscape. Raj Subrameyer comes back to discuss his new book "Skyrocketing Your Career" and we all talk about our personal journeys and how we have arrived wher...

In this day and age, everything is becoming code. It used to be just the applications but with the proliferation of software to create software (think of Jenkins pipelines) or the aspects to Terraforming servers in the cloud (and Terraform being just one way to do it), there is ever more code being written to set up and deploy software. Who tests all that, and how does one get to play in these ext...

Software fills many niches and does many things for individuals and businesses. Some software is designed and developed for mass user interaction, while other applications are designed for specific purposes and markets. Some software is literally developed to work within a company for the benefit of its staff and is never seen outside of the company it serves. Still, it feels as though the testing...

The title this week may seem odd but it is indeed correct, as Michael Larsen participated in and in effect helped to test out the various challenges and solutions that go with putting on a virtual conference in this current period of time. In this episode, Michael talks with two long time veterans of the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, Philip Lew (Program Chair) and Bill Opsal (a lo...

As organizations get larger or infrastructure/software becomes more relied upon, testing itself can have its share of risks. For this episode, Matt and Michael chat with Simon Evans about how to approach larger systems (and perhaps not so large systems), make the needed decisions to focus on important areas and make QA a less risky proposition altogether.

It's safe to say that 2020 has introduced challenges into people's lives in unprecedented ways (at least in our current times). Some are thriving but many are feeling the results of burnout. Raj Subrameyer joins Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk through common issues of burnout as it relates to tech workers and some approaches and methods that can be used to deal with said burnout if not...

There have been record and playback tools available for the past few decades, with varying results and reputations. They often over promise and under deliver. Today, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen are joined by Rex Feizi of Subject7 and Leandro Melendez (Señor Performo) to talk about the latest generation of record and playback tools, how to leverage them effectively and use them in spaces whe...

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 pit...

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 way...

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 litt...