Better Software magazine was a quarterly digital magazine published by TechWell Corporation (formerly Software Quality Engineering). [1] It covered topics of interest to software testers, developers, project managers, and business analysts. Better Software was originally published in 1996 as Software QA magazine, focusing primarily on software QA and testing. Software QA (aka Software Testing & Quality Engineering) was renamed Better Software magazine in 2004.
In 1996, Software QA magazine was launched by Steve Whitchurch. In 1999, the magazine was relaunched by Software Quality Engineering (SQE) as Software Testing and Quality Engineering (STQE) with a companion website (STQE.net). In 2001, StickyMinds.com was launched whose name was inspired by STQE read: Sticky. In January 2004, the magazine name was changed to Better Software magazine to reflect the broader focus on the entire software lifecycle. In 2007, a digital edition was added alongside the print edition. In 2014, the print edition was discontinued and the magazine switched to strictly digital publication. Online version of Better Software magazine also ceased publication after the Summer 2018 issue. The issues are archived. [2]
Better Software and its parent company SQE were included in the History of Software Testing, [3] a comprehensive resource outlining the evolution of testing.
Better Software regularly featured on top-resource lists [4] [5] for software professionals. It was also cited in numerous software-testing focused books such as Software Test Attacks to Break Mobile and Embedded Devices, [6] Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, [7] and More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team. [8]
Better Software was a recommended testing resource by the American Software Testing Qualifications Board. [9]
2000 - The Silver Award of Excellence for "Best New Magazine" (Florida Magazine Association) [10]
2001 - "Best Overall Trade/Technical Magazine" (Florida Magazine Association), "Writing Excellence for Best Regular Column in a Trade/ Technical Magazine" (Florida Magazine Association) [11]
2002 – Honorable Mention "Best Redesign" in the Business-to-Business under 35,000 distribution (FOLIO: Ozzie Award)
2007 – “Best feature design Trade/Technical magazine” (Florida Magazine Association), “Best feature headlines Trade/Technical magazine” [12] (Florida Magazine Association)
2008 – “Best Special Theme Trade/Technical magazine” (Florida Magazine Association)
Better Software magazine writers have included: James Bach, Chris Wysopal, Rex Black, Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory.
In engineering and its various subdisciplines, acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met. It may involve chemical tests, physical tests, or performance tests.
Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and behavior of software via verification and validation.
In software development, agile practices include requirements, discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/end user(s). Popularized in the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development, these values and principles were derived from, and underpin, a broad range of software development frameworks, including Scrum and Kanban.
In software engineering, a test case is a specification of the inputs, execution conditions, testing procedure, and expected results that define a single test to be executed to achieve a particular software testing objective, such as to exercise a particular program path or to verify compliance with a specific requirement. Test cases underlie testing that is methodical rather than haphazard. A battery of test cases can be built to produce the desired coverage of the software being tested. Formally defined test cases allow the same tests to be run repeatedly against successive versions of the software, allowing for effective and consistent regression testing.
Game testing, also called quality assurance (QA) testing within the video game industry, is a software testing process for quality control of video games. The primary function of game testing is the discovery and documentation of software defects. Interactive entertainment software testing is a highly technical field requiring computing expertise, analytic competence, critical evaluation skills, and endurance. In recent years the field of game testing has come under fire for being extremely strenuous and unrewarding, both financially and emotionally.
Certification is part of testing, inspection and certification and the provision by an independent body of written assurance that the product, service or system in question meets specific requirements. It is the formal attestation or confirmation of certain characteristics of an object, person, or organization. This confirmation is often, but not always, provided by some form of external review, education, assessment, or audit. Accreditation is a specific organization's process of certification. According to the U.S. National Council on Measurement in Education, a certification test is a credentialing test used to determine whether individuals are knowledgeable enough in a given occupational area to be labeled "competent to practice" in that area.
The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) is a software testing certification board that operates internationally. Founded in Edinburgh in November 2002, the ISTQB is a non-profit association legally registered in Belgium.
Cem Kaner is a professor of software engineering at Florida Institute of Technology, and the Director of Florida Tech's Center for Software Testing Education & Research (CSTER) since 2004. He is perhaps best known outside academia as an advocate of software usability and software testing.
Watir, is an open-source family of Ruby libraries for automating web browsers. It drives Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, and is available as a RubyGems gem. Watir was primarily developed by Bret Pettichord and Paul Rogers.
Ron Jeffries is one of the three founders of the Extreme Programming (XP) software development methodology circa 1996, along with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham. He was from 1996, an XP coach on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System project, which was where XP was invented. He is an author of Extreme Programming Installed, the second book published about XP. He has also written Extreme Programming Adventures in C#. He is one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto.
Agile testing is a software testing practice that follows the principles of agile software development. Agile testing involves all members of a cross-functional agile team, with special expertise contributed by testers, to ensure delivering the business value desired by the customer at frequent intervals, working at a sustainable pace. Specification by example is used to capture examples of desired and undesired behavior and guide coding.
There is considerable variety among software testing writers and consultants about what constitutes responsible software testing. Proponents of a context-driven approach consider much of the writing about software testing to be doctrine, while others believe this contradicts the IEEE 829 documentation standard.
Rex Black is a software engineer, entrepreneur and an author in the field of software testing. Black graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1990 with a bachelors of science in computer science and engineering. In 1983, Black started work in the software engineering field and has spent more than 20 years in software testing.
DevOps is a methodology in the software development and IT industry. Used as a set of practices and tools, DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle. DevOps is complementary to agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the agile way of working.
Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate. Continuous testing was originally proposed as a way of reducing waiting time for feedback to developers by introducing development environment-triggered tests as well as more traditional developer/tester-triggered tests.
Scenario testing is a software testing activity that uses scenarios: hypothetical stories to help the tester work through a complex problem or test system. The ideal scenario test is a credible, complex, compelling or motivating story; the outcome of which is easy to evaluate. These tests are usually different from test cases in that test cases are single steps whereas scenarios cover a number of steps.
Specification by example (SBE) is a collaborative approach to defining requirements and business-oriented functional tests for software products based on capturing and illustrating requirements using realistic examples instead of abstract statements. It is applied in the context of agile software development methods, in particular behavior-driven development. This approach is particularly successful for managing requirements and functional tests on large-scale projects of significant domain and organisational complexity.
Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
TechWell Corporation, was founded in 1986 by Bill Hetzel and David Gelperin as a consulting company to help organizations improve their software testing practices and produce higher quality software.
TestOps refers to the discipline of managing the operational aspects of testing within the software delivery lifecycle.