In most of your software testing activities, you need data. Sometimes you can rely on a small sample, but if you want to perform some load testing or if you want to test a features that needs to produce a multi-page invoice, then you start to need more than just two or three occurrences. Test data generators are tools that can help you in this task with the automatic generation of hundreds or thousands of customers, products or accounts items with different attributes for their id, email, name, etc.

As a software testing consultant and musician, I meet a lot of skilled testers who do amazing work. Through experience and a lot of trial and error, they have developed skills they can’t easily explain. Unfortunately, with software testing, there aren’t as many obvious avenues for skill development as there are for musicians. Many software testers don’t realize that there are learnable exploratory testing skills they can develop to help them become even more valuable to software development teams.

Sometimes, when testing user stories in Scrum, there's a final Waterfall interaction to deal with. The scenario I present here is based on this situation: a Scrum process with an interaction of sequential phases at the end of the process to (re)test the whole developed functionality. These sequential phases are mandatory for our organization, which follows a Waterfall process for the releases of the product. So, for the moment at least, we have to deal with this and my experience is that we aren't alone.

In this article, I introduce the acronym PURIFF as a concept containing all test categories to be conducted during the sprint. The Scrum team can use the PURIFF acronym as a checklist to determine which categories of tests are relevant in the given context.

Distributed systems, both large and small, can be extremely challenging to test and debug, as they are spread over a network, run on computers that can be quite different from each other, and might even be physically located in different continents altogether.

As software testers, it is very important to be able to understand your emotions. They can be a great heuristic which can guide your testing. But it is more than just that; understanding your emotions and the effect that they can have on others who you work with in your team is a key skill for all team members. One’s position within a team is often dictated by how well one can interact with others in the team. People who express extreme emotional reactions to events, particularly in cultures where this is not normal behaviour, risk becoming isolated and ineffective. This can be a particular problem for testers who are typically fewer in number, and frequently perceived to be the bearers of bad news. Paul’s behaviour above is not the best way for anyone to act.

The debate is always active in the software testing community about the usage of manual or automated testing. In this article, Art Trevethan explains that both have their value. He guides you on how to choose the test items to automate and proposes an approach to integrate test automation smoothly in your test plans.

An important part of software testing or coding effort is the ability to measure the progress. One technique for doing this is a technique called Earned Value Management, and we'll show you how easy it is to apply EVM to your own projects.

In a perfect software development world, you have all the time and the resources available to test every aspect of your mobile apps. In reality, the time and resources for software testing are limited. In his book “Tap Into Mobile Application Testing“, Jonathan Kohl discusses how to define a strategy for mobile testing projects.