2018 Rewind: The best of the Abstracta testing blog

Time flies! 2018 was another big year for Abstracta, as it marked our tenth anniversary as an official group of testers, coworkers, and friends! We participated in several conferences globally, co-hosted webinars, obtained new clients as well as took on new projects with long-time ones. Also, we welcomed our Chief Product Officer, Sofía Palamarchuk, as our first female Executive Board member. Read her inspiring story about becoming an entrepreneurial Latina tech leader.  

We are happy to have continued to blog this year and to have made FeedSpot’s list of Top 100 Software Blogs to Follow. This year we published 34 new blog posts which, combined, received approximately 50,000 page views! We’d like to thank everyone who contributed to our blog this year and all of our readers for visiting!

Here are our top 10 most popular software testing blog posts from the year (in ascending order).

10. The Software Testing Risk Matrix

Our Chief Process and Innovation Officer, Federico Toledo Ph.D., is one of the most prolific authors on the Abstracta blog and he also runs a very popular Spanish testing blog at www.federico-toledo.com. In this post, he explains how you can maximize testing when you don’t have time to test everything by creating risk matrices in just three steps.

Read “The Software Testing Risk Matrix“

9. Understanding the Importance of Cross-Browser Testing for Modern Web Apps

This year we had the chance to collaborate with CrossBrowserTesting on a couple of posts and we even hosted a webinar together on test automation’s impact on test coverage. You can watch a replay of the webinar here. In this guest post by SmartBear’s Content Marketing specialist, Alexandra McPeak, you can learn why it’s necessary to conduct cross-browser testing to ensure flawless and consistent user experiences across multiple operating systems and devices.

Read “Understanding the Importance of Cross-Browser Testing for Modern Web Apps”

8. How to Work with Remote Team Members Effectively

This year, I decided to write about a topic that I personally am very passionate about, how to make remote work “work”. I’ve been working remotely for Abstracta on and off for over three years, which has allowed me to live in various countries and experience different cultures. In this post, you’ll find some tips for working with colleagues across different floors of your building, to different cities, countries, and continents! Even if your team is all in one place, these tips will definitely help to increase productivity!  

Read “How to Work with Remote Team Members Effectively”

7. Testing as the Driver Towards a DevOps Culture

As Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory put it in another post on DevOps for our blog, “Testing is the heart of DevOps.” In this post, Federico Toledo explains why that is by sharing some lessons he has learned while helping several clients go through their Agile transformations.

Read “Testing as the Driver Towards a DevOps Culture”

6. When Do You Need to Hire a Software Tester?

As with every startup and small product team, there comes a point when the workload becomes too heavy and team members are spread too thin. While someone dedicated to just software testing may not be the #2 employee at any company, it’s always beneficial to have a good one on the team (who shares the responsibility for quality with the WHOLE team, and helps all to take it into account from day one)! Sofía Palamarchuk shares her thoughts on when to hire a tester.

Read “When Do You Need to Hire a Software Tester?”

5. Software Test Automation Patterns and Good Practices

At Abstracta we help almost all of our clients to boost their manual and exploratory testing efforts by implementing automated checks (test automation). Two of our senior test automation engineers, Matias Fornara and Alejandro Bernardinelli, share the fundamental test automation patterns and good practices to follow in order to reap the greatest benefits from your efforts.

Read “Software Test Automation Patterns and Good Practices”

4. Code Analysis Part 2: Analyzing Code with SonarQube

In the second installment of our blog post series on code quality, Matias Fornara shows you how to use the popular tool, SonarQube, to understand your system’s code quality and amount of technical debt. What makes SonarQube powerful is that it can even predict how many days it would take to eliminate all of the technical debt it finds! It’s important to maintain a high level of code quality in order to rapidly fix bugs that may arise in the future.

Read  “Code Analysis Part 2: Analyzing Code with SonarQube”

3. How to Show Your Tester Some Love this Valentine’s Day

A fun and lighthearted post in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, Sofía Palamarchuk compared hiring and retaining a software tester to courting and marrying one. She then shares how to “live” (work) happy ever after with one. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to have a good relationship with the tester(s) on their team!

Read “How to Show Your Tester Some Love this Valentine’s Day”

2. [Infographic] 6 Software Testing Outsourcing Myths Debunked

Speaking and meeting with prospective clients who want to boost their software testing efforts, we often hear some common objections to or misconceptions about nearshore outsourcing. To allay some fears, we decided to make an infographic to debunk these myths and explain why there is success to be found in outsourcing testing.

Read “[Infographic] 6 Software Testing Outsourcing Myths Debunked”

1. 75 Best Software Testing Blogs

Being testers, we love to scour the web for tester-generated content! When we find a good post, we typically share it in our internal Slack channels or with the world on social media. We love a great think-piece as well as a consistent and well-maintained blog! This post is a shoutout to all the other blogs we follow and draw inspiration from. So, after you go read all of these top 10 blog articles, we urge you to peruse the list and read a post from a site you’ve never visited before!

Read “75 Best Software Testing Blogs”

If you have any suggestions for what you’d like to see us write about on our testing blog in 2019, please let us know in the comments!  

Want to collaborate? Reach out to us at [email protected].

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