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2013 talks proposals

No change in size, 20:42, 9 November 2012
Relishing Quality Assurance Testing with Cucumber
*Joseph Dalton, The New York Public Library, josephdalton AT nypl DOT org
 
Libraries are usually, and sometimes emphatically so, not profit-driven institutions. But this doesn't have to mean that there isn't a valid role for software quality assurance within our own development environments. We've all heard "any test is better than no tests at all," but how do we effectively encourage our institutions to embrace a test-driven development path and quality-assurance testing when, unlike businesses, our organizations generally aren't tasked with obvious quality-drivers like generating a profit, ROI, etc?
For those starting on a test-driven development path, the plethora of options for QA testing can also be overwhelming, ranging from writing user stories and simple acceptance tests, to running automated tests with Cucumber and Gherkin (and optionally making these more visible to stakeholders with Relish), to utilizing complex, enterprise-level tools like Quality Center to model business processes.
 
Although libraries are usually, and sometimes emphatically so, not profit-driven institutions, this doesn't have to mean there can't be a valid role for software quality assurance within our development environments. We've all heard "any test is better than no tests at all," but how do we effectively encourage our own institutions to embrace a test-driven development path and quality-assurance testing when, unlike businesses, our organizations generally aren't tasked with obvious quality-drivers like generating a profit, ROI, etc?
In this presentation I'll discuss some of the steps the New York Public Library has recently taken to define and develop a QA/Testing framework, in the context of the Library's recent adoption of Agile development practices for its Digital Repository and other project teams.
== I woke up / fell out of bed / checked my mail / and what I read... : PHP to Java to NCIP to ... ==
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