Software the Agile Way....

Technical proficiency -  automation can free the time of testers to do more exploration, which allows discovery.   Investigative curiosity Observational skills Communication skills Writing skills and bug advocacy Domain knowledge Willingness to learn Social skills Humor Practice "Testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it . Software testing is about revealing the unknown." Source-  http://www.ebaytechblog.com/2013/01/31/becoming-a-world-class-tester/#.VTNlhNKeDGd http://java.dzone.com/articles/3-technical-skills-every

A good TCM application should contain those fields and if not should allow for customization of fields.  It's a good idea to categorize the test cases down by Feature/Function  Test Case Template  Test Case ID:  Unique number that identifies the test. Allows to build library of unique test cases  Test Title/Summary:  A sentence summarizing the Test case  Objective/Goal:  What we expect to achieve with this test case  Description:  Multiline paragraph field that explains what the test case does and will perform in detail  Setup :  What is required to setup the test scenario? Could be bulleted list of setup steps, hardware/software required, lab resources required etc.?  Test Steps:   Bulleted Test steps; each step detailing exactly what step needs to be performed and how. Some companies have to comply with some Govt. regulations etc., in that instance each test step should have an expected result (Pass/Fail...

Strategy First  it should be clear about what your strategy for automation is. (And don't say Automate everything. The people who think you can automate everything are just as wrong as the people who think you can manually test everything. Automation can help, but you need to know its strengths and weaknesses.) Plan Secondly, you should decide what success might look like. Most teams will do a lot better if they try to achieve something close to the testing pyramid , that being where developers write a lot of unit tests and specific integration tests with dependencies, and then a combination of devs/testers write service level, and API tests, but in a smaller proportion. lastly any UI should probably be kept small and focused on critical areas of the software (because they are so slow). Implement Another thing you should consider, is that automation efforts slow down, the further from the code it actually tests it is to develop. This means that while your testers may be pur...