Welcome to this month’s look at a few interesting stories over the previous few weeks from the worlds of software development and QA. If you are interested in checking out last month’s stories — including news about the new continuous testing QA methodology and the hope for standardized software testing practices in the video game industry — simply click on this link. Read further to see if any of July’s news inspires your own development and testing efforts.
Companies that are veterans of the Agile methodology typically use scrums to promote communication between developers and their business stakeholders. These daily stand-up meetings ensure project statuses get reported and important action items aren’t missed. In a July article for TechRepublic, Transworld Data President, Mary Shacklett, talks about the benefits gained including QA personnel in the scrum.
She describes a variety of software failures in her past that could have been prevented if only collaboration between QA and developers were improved. This needs to happen throughout a project, but it is especially vital at the beginning when application design and prototyping take place. In the past, we’ve talked about the importance of catching software (or design) errors early in the process, as the cost of fixing issues increases exponentially later in the SDLC.
Shacklett also feels both developers and QA engineers need to be involved with executing unit tests, a task typically falling to the developer who wrote the code in question. End users and business stakeholders also need to be involved at important points during the SDLC, most notably before the app (or enhancement) is deployed into production.
As we just noted, it is important that software engineers and QA professionals work well together on the same team. That doesn’t mean developers don’t have their pet sayings that annoy their software testing colleagues, as noted in an article in DZone. While humorous on the surface, they do reveal a need for better collaboration — something improving in the industry with the increased adoption of Agile. Here is a quick sample.
“But it works on my machine” — is a common refrain after a QA engineer finds a bug in code that probably passed the developer’s unit tests. Maybe that company needs to use a better environment manager, like Vagrant?
“Are you sure you are testing the right version?” — which is a phrase potentially illustrating the poor management of versioning and builds.
Check out the DZone article for other similar examples of programmer-speak.
A recent survey of software engineers from Evans Data reveals the hot technologies currently in vogue with developers. Four technologies stood out from the rest of the pack. The Internet of Things was noted by 45 percent of the surveyed Big Data developers, while the Cloud is considered hot by 27 percent of all developers.
Over half of the data mining app developers are working on robotics applications, and nearly a quarter of all developers are involved in machine learning development.
It is surprising to note the importance of parsing massive amounts of data among IoT and robotics applications, which probably speaks to the higher adoption rate of those two technologies in the industrial sector compared to the home.
Come back to the Betica Blog for additional news and insights from the related worlds of software development and QA.
Posted on July 29, 2016 | Categories News | Tags Cloud, Communication, Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Quality Assurance, Robotics, Scrum, Software Development