This article describes how to use techniques from extreme programming for teams that have not implemented XP.

It is possible to mitigate risk and speed up the process of adding new development to your legacy code by establishing a strategy to handle it. The strategy involves finding inflection points, applying test coverings, and refactoring code.

Developers and testers often do not work effectively together. Either the developers can change, we can change, or both. I've never had much luck directly changing other people's behavior. I have had luck changing my own behavior to indirectly elicit improvements in the way developers act. And those changes feed back to me, producing a virtuous cycle in our relationship. This paper is about my approach to working effectively with developers. I expect that you, my reader, are a tester and spend most of your time looking for bugs, talking to developers, and writing bug reports.

The protocol used for exchanging files on the Web is stateless, but maintaining state is essential for most websites. To maintain state, one option that Web developers have is to use cookies. This article provides a technical background and real-world examples to help you understand how cookies work and how to test systems that employ cookies. The amazon.com website is used as a real-world example to demonstrate cookie testing techniques.

It is important for a business to understand the fundamentals of running a vulnerability assessment in order to determine how one will be run and what can be expected from the results. A web application security scanner can automate the process, but a quality assessment may still require actual human eyes to catch specific issues. Learn more about the whys and hows of vulnerability assessments.

Everyone agrees that developer testing is important, but why is it so darn time consuming to run tests? This month, Andrew Glover reveals the three categories of testing needed to ensure end-to-end system soundness and then shows you how to automatically sort and run tests by category. The result is a dramatically reduced built time, even with today's massive test suites.

The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with a clear understanding of what is actually required to successfully implement cost-effective automated testing. Rather than engage in a theoretical dissertation on this subject, I have endeavored to be as straightforward and brutally honest as possible in discussing the issues, problems, necessities, and requirements involved in this enterprise.

Advanced static-analysis tools have been found to be effective at finding defects that jeopardize system safety and security. This article describes how these work and outlines their limitations. They are best used in combination with traditional dynamic testing techniques, and can even reduce the cost to create and manage test cases for stringent run-time coverage.

The test manager has two responsibilities: to report the right information, and to report the information right. Both are equally important. If you don't have the right information, you're not doing your job. If you don't report it so that it's accepted, valued, and acted upon, you might as well not be doing your job. To address both topics, this paper is organized around the situation in which the test manager presents "the public face" of the testing team: the status meeting. It covers the information to be presented and the needs of the people involved (which govern how to present that information usefully).

For the past 15-plus years, organisations have turned to test automation as a way to improve efficiency in the software development life cycle. Yet despite heavy investment, software testing is still often the bottleneck in the delivery cycle. A recent survey found that only 6% were totally happy with their automation. The scary thing is that this is tolerated - it's the norm! Undoubtedly Test Automation has failed to achieve for the masses. But why is this the case? This article I take a light-hearted look at Dante's Divine Comedy to uncover some home truths about software test automation...