Software Development Certifications

Certifications have become an important part of the life of software development professionals. If there is some aims by hiring organizations to try to assess the capacity of their future employees, certification is also a lucrative market for training companies and professional organizations that sell, sorry provide the certifications. The situation is very competitive in the project management market where besides the traditional PMP certification provided by the Project Management Institute, there has been the increased adoption of agile project management certification, mainly the ScrumMaster official titles provided by either the Scrum Alliance or Scrum.org. This is so true that the PMI has now developed its own Agile Project Management certification. Certifications are also present in another number of software development areas. According to the Software Testing Magazine, the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) is the clear leader in the field of software testing certifications, with only few competitors that act more locally. In the area of software requirements management and business analysis certification, the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) is the main professional and certification organization. There are however alternative certification scheme provided by organizations like the International Requirements Engineering Board, the British Computer Society (BCS) or the Object Management Group (OMG) which specialize in UML-based analysis certifications.

Testable Java Design

Issues with testability boil down to our inability to write tests or the excess trouble we have to go through to get it done. The article “Guidelines for Java Testable Design” is excerpted from the Unit Testing in Java book by Lasse Koskela. In this extract shares a set of dos and don’ts for testable design and recommends to avoid complex private methods, static methods, logic in constructors and to favor composition over inheritance. He also suggests to treat the new keyword with care because it essentially hardcodes an implementation we cannot substitute.

Is Software Testing Dead?

The opening keynote of the Google Test Automation Conference 2011 was presented by Alberto Savoia, Director of Engineering at Google who discusses the proposition that software testing is dead. He suggest that software testers should shift their mindset from “Are we building it right?” to “Are we building the right it?”. The idea that it is more important to have a context where the right software product is developed, instead of setting quality procedures that verify the product at the end.

.NET Mocking Frameworks

Dependencies management is a difficult part of test-driven development (TDD). Mocks and stubs are created to isolate the behavior we would like to test. The article “The Art of Mocking” is a good introduction on this topic. Creating all these testing classes by hand can lead to troubles, but several open source tools to apply mocking principles in .NET. Tools like Rhino Mocks and Moq allow us to create mocks and stubs within our test method. The Mocking Frameworks in .NET video presents techniques that can  automate your unit testing process.

Load Testing Automation

The article “Scenarios for Load Testing” by Christopher Merrill discusses how to build a portfolio of scenarios to automate your software load testing activity. You have rarely only a single scenario to test, so you have to decide which scenarios to include in your test plans. Criticality, frequency, difficulty and verifiability are the four key factors that should be considered to determine the load testing scenarios to automate.

Read the article: Scenarios for Load Testing