With warmer temperatures and long summer days ahead, many are planning their next beach day: cool breeze, salty air, and of course, the perfect beach read. Though some of us might reach for a relaxing novel, many will be diving into the latest in the field of quality engineering. They’re building their test automation skills, learning to lead quality teams, and discovering best practices to integrate quality into agile and DevOps.
In the spirit of continuous improvement, our team shared their best summer reads for quality engineering:
Michael Bungay Stanier draws on years of experience training managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills in his essential guide. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how by saying less and asking more you can develop coaching methods that produce great results. Every QA manager - or aspiring manager - can benefit from these lessons to help your team thrive.
Leading Quality: How Great Leaders Deliver High Quality Software and Accelerate Growth
Elevate testing with this guide to influencing and aligning your organization’s definition of quality. As you seek to transform software testing from development gatekeeper to DevOps and digital transformation enablers, you’ll need to understand how leaders make decisions, strategize, and deliver unparalleled user experiences. Supercharge your quality engineering leadership skills with this roadmap to a quality mindset that will help differentiate your product and your company for success in today’s digital-first world.
Starting Your Software Testing Career
Aspiring and early career quality professionals will find everything they need to jumpstart their journey in software testing in this comprehensive guide. Senior QA Engineer and QA Manager Nicola Lindgren has written an in-depth and engaging map to building a successful career in software quality, understanding the day-to-day life of a software tester, and the tools needed to continuously develop new skills. Discover everything from the different types of testing, the different career paths available to quality professionals, and advice from real-world testing leaders.
It’s hard to imagine a more successful software company than Google. The technology behemoth continues to set the standard innovation and lead the pack in quality. In this behind-the-scenes look, two top Google experts reveal exactly how Google tests software and explain best practices that apply to teams of any size, including how to analyze risk and plan tests, think like real users, implement exploratory, black box, white box, and acceptance testing, get usable feedback and choose the right tools.
For those looking to start or expand their test automation skills, this guide by Puppeteer expert (and mabler!) Dario Kondratiuk will take you on a pragmatic journey. Using real-world use cases, Dario explains the foundations of browser automation, the basics of end-to-end testing and how to create reliable tests. As you progress through the chapters, the focus shifts to more advanced browser automation topics such as executing JavaScript code inside the browser. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to make the most of Puppeteer’s API and be able to apply it in your real-world projects.
DevOps, CI/CD, cloud, microservices...the world of software is changing fast. This book is a comprehensive guide to building a robust and efficient change management process at scale. It focuses on improving organizational structure, architecture, process, and technology to achieve a fast, high-quality delivery without sacrificing control and transparency. The book describes the executable policy approach to continuous delivery, making it an engaging and informative read for QA leaders looking to reshape quality in the new paradigm of software development.
User Tested: How the World's Top Companies Use Human Insight to Create Great Experiences
This insightful and practical guide is a must-read for any quality-centric software team. Though it’s written for a wide variety of business and development roles, authors Janelle Estes and Andy MacMillan offer quality engineers a particularly useful roadmap to harnessing the empathetic and data-driven mindset that sets them apart in the enterprise. Find inspiration and best practices from leading organizations that help teams of all sizes turn data into true customer insights.
Quality teams are used to operating at maximum efficiency. But as their role grows and evolves, they need new ways to incorporate UX ideas into their quality strategy. With this practical, hands-on book, you'll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they'll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.
The establishment of Agile development as the new norm is both an enormous challenge and opportunity for quality teams. In Agile Testing, experienced Agile testing practitioners and consultants, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory define Agile testing and illustrate the tester’s role with examples from real Agile teams. They teach you how to use the Agile testing quadrants to identify what testing is needed, who should do it, and what tools might help. The book chronicles an Agile software development iteration from the viewpoint of a tester and explains the seven key success factors of Agile testing.
Whether you’re hitting the beach, visiting friends and family, or planning a staycation, summer is the time to explore the world of software development, career growth, and quality engineering through a wide range of books written by industry-leading experts. Share your summer reading list with us on Twitter (@mablhq) or LinkedIn and see what other QA professionals are learning this year.