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Software Testing

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TA Test Estimation in Practice
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Tue, 06/23/2015 - 8:30am

Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task is. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The key to good estimates is to understand the primary variables, compare them to known standards, and normalize the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when very little is known about the project—and what is known is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking, and estimation can become a nightmare. Rob Sabourin provides a foundation for anyone who must estimate software testing work effort. Learn about the test team’s and tester’s roles in estimation and measurement, and how to estimate in the face of uncertainty. Analysts, developers, leads, test managers, testers, and QA personnel can all benefit from this tutorial.

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TB Testers in Value-Driven Product Development
J.B. Rainsberger, JBRAINS.CA
Tue, 06/23/2015 - 8:30am

Even in many agile projects, testers stand aside while others set product and project goals and requirements (stories). These other people aren’t doing poor work but rather are often developing artifacts that are too easily misinterpreted. J.B. Rainsberger presents two value-driven development techniques that testers—who by their very nature are critical thinkers—can use to help the team figure out what to build, which parts to build first, and most importantly, what not to build at all. Learn a powerful modeling technique to reduce a long laundry list of stories down to a clear, high-level path toward a great product. Join J.B. to practice the art of “talking in examples,” which will help you work with product owners, analysts, and programmers to develop a clear picture of what to build. Don’t remain relegated to after-the-fact acceptance testing. Learn how to play a vital role in building the right thing the first time.

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TC Essential Test Management and Planning
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
Tue, 06/23/2015 - 8:30am

The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Rick Craig introduces proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, system, integration, and unit testing. Rick explains how to customize an IEEE-829-style test plan and test summary report to fit your organization’s needs. Learn how to manage test activities, estimate test efforts, and achieve buy-in. Discover a practical risk analysis technique to prioritize your testing and become more effective with limited resources. Rick offers test measurement and reporting recommendations for monitoring the testing process. Discover new methods and develop renewed energy for taking your organization’s test management to the next level.

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TF Tips for Expanding Your Testing Toolbox
Alan Page, Microsoft
Tue, 06/23/2015 - 1:00pm

Regardless of how long you’ve been testing and learning—only a month or many years—there is always something new to help improve your testing and software development efforts. Although many testers, for better or worse, see test automation as their next—and sometimes only—step to grow their skill set and improve as a tester, there is much more to do. Alan Page discusses, demonstrates, and details concepts and tools that can help everyone test better and provide noticeable technical value to their organization. Alan explores a potpourri of suggestions to help you grow your testing toolbox: techniques for security and performance testing, tools to help you find better bugs, scripting that aids (rather than replaces) your testing, tester tips for code review that can be done with minimal (or zero) knowledge of coding, and more. Finally, you’ll learn simple approaches that will enable you to continue to grow your knowledge and skills throughout your career.

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Concurrent Sessions

W3 From Formal Test Cases to Session-Based Exploratory Testing
Ron Smith, Intuit
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 10:15am

Agile software development is exciting, but what happens when your team is entrenched in older methodologies? Even with support from the organization, it is challenging to lead an organization through the transformation. As you start making smaller, more frequent releases, your manual test cases may not keep up, and your automated tests may not yet be robust enough to fill the gap. Add in the reality of shrinking testing resources, and it is obvious that change is required. But how and what should you change? Learn how Ron Smith and his team tackled these challenges by moving from a test case-driven approach to predominantly session-based exploratory testing, supported by “just enough” documentation. Discover how this resulted in testers who are more engaged, developers who increased their ability and willingness to test, and managers who increased their understanding and insight into the product. Use what you learn from Ron to begin the transformation in your organization.

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W5 Building a World-Class Quality Team at eBay
Steve Hares, eBay
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 11:30am

Today, many test methodologies can be used to achieve high quality and productivity ―Agile/Scrum, TDD, data modeling, risk analysis, and personas, just to name a few. So how do you pick the best approaches and techniques for your team and projects? Learn how Steve Hares helped build a world-class team from the ground up at eBay through iterative best-fit analysis of processes and methods. Discover why and how they adopted agile processes in some areas, waterfall in others, risk-based testing where appropriate, data model-driven testing, ad-hoc testing, and work-flow testing. At the same time, they incorporated test automation and integrated load/performance testing into the development process to achieve world class quality. Steve’s team now tests everything from enterprise wide products to IVRs, from batch files to voice biometrics. If your methodology isn't working just right, chances are you need to find the best fit methods through a continuous improvement process.

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W6 Virtualize APIs for Better Application Testing
Lorinda Brandon, SmartBear Software
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 11:30am

In today’s interconnected world, APIs are the glue that allows software components, devices, and applications to work together. Unfortunately, many testers don’t have direct access to manipulate the APIs during testing and must rely on either testing the API separately from the application or testing the API passively through functional application testing. Lorinda Brandon maintains that these approaches miss the most important kind of API testing―uncovering how your application deals with API constraints and failures. Lorinda describes common API failures—overloaded APIs, bad requests, unavailabilities, and API timeouts—that negatively impact applications, and how application testers miss these scenarios, especially in third-party APIs. She explores how and when virtualization can and cannot help, including creating a virtual API that can fail. Lorinda discusses the importance of simulating API failures in web and mobile application testing, and identifies tools and technologies that help virtualize your APIs.

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W9 The Tester’s Role in Agile Planning
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 1:30pm

All too often testers passively participate in agile planning. And the results? Important testing activities are missed, late testing becomes a bottleneck, and the benefits of agile development quickly diminish. However, testers can actively advocate customer concerns while helping to implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers contribute to estimation, task definition, and scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, exploring typical, alternate, and error scenarios. Testers can anticipate cross story interference and the impact of new stories on legacy functionality. Rob discusses examples of how to break agile stories into test-related tasks. He shares experiences of transforming agile testers from passive planning participants into dynamic advocates of effective trade-offs, addressing the product owners’ critical business concerns, the teams’ limited resources, and the software projects’ technical risks. Join Rob to explore test infrastructure, test data, non-functional attributes, privacy, security, robustness, exploration, regression, business rules, and more.

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W10 Inside the Mind of the 21st Century Customer
Alan Page, Microsoft
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 1:30pm

Testers frequently say that they are the voice of the customer or the customer advocate for their organization’s products. In some situations this can be a helpful mindset, but no matter how hard he tries, a software tester is not the customer. In fact, there is no one better suited to evaluate customer experience than the actual customer of your software. However, getting actionable feedback from customers can be time-consuming, difficult, and often too late to have any meaningful impact on the product. Alan Page shares his thoughts and a number of examples of how to get customer feedback quickly, how to make that feedback actionable, and how to use customer data to drive better software development and testing on any team—and for any product. In this fast-paced session of information and fun, Alan discusses product instrumentation, analysis techniques, reporting, A/B testing, and many other facets of customer feedback.

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W14 Testing Hyper-Complex Systems: What Can We Know? What Can We Claim?
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 3:00pm

Throughout history, people have built systems of dramatically increasing complexity. In simpler systems, defects at the micro level are mitigated by the macro level structure. In complex systems, failures at the micro level cannot be compensated for at a higher level, often with catastrophic results. Lee Copeland says that we are building hyper-complex computer systems—so complex that faults can create totally unpredictable behaviors. For example, systems based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) model can be dynamically composed of reusable services of unknown quality, created by multiple organizations, and communicating through many technologies across the unpredictable Internet. Lee explains that claims about quality require knowledge of test “coverage,” which is an unknowable quantity in hyper-complex systems. Join Lee for a look at your testing future as he describes new approaches needed to measure test coverage in these hyper-complex systems and lead your organization to better quality—despite the challenges.

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W15 Automate REST API Testing
Eric Smith, HomeAdvisor
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 3:00pm

As an organization grows, the body of code that needs to be regression tested constantly increases. However, to maintain high velocity and deliver new features, teams need to minimize the amount of manual regression testing. Eric Smith shares his lessons learned in automating RESTful API tests using JMeter, RSpec, and Spock. Gain insights into the pros and cons of each tool, take back practical knowledge about the tools available, and explore reasons why your shop should require RESTful automation as part of its acceptance test criteria. Many decisions must be made to automate API tests: choosing the platform; how to integrate with the current build and deploy process; and how to integrate with reporting tools to keep key stakeholders informed. Although the initial transition caused his teams to bend their traditional roles, Eric says that ultimately the team became more cross-functionally aligned and developed a greater sense of ownership for delivering a quality product.

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T7 Transform a Manual Testing Process to Incorporate Automation
Jim Trentadue, Ranorex
Thu, 06/25/2015 - 11:30am

Although most testing organizations have automation, it’s usually a subset of their overall efforts. Typically the processes for the department have been previously defined, and the automation team must adapt accordingly. The major issue is that test automation work and deliverables do not always fit into a defined manual testing process. Jim Trentadue explores what test automation professionals must do to be successful. These include understanding development standards for objects, structuring tests for modularity, and eliminating manual efforts. Jim reviews the revisions required to a V-model testing process to fuse in the test automation work. This requires changes to the manual testing process, specifically at the test plan and test case level. Learn the differences between automated and manual testing process needs, how to start a test automation process that ties into your overall testing process, and how to do a gap analysis for those actively doing automation, connecting better with the functional testing team.

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T10 The Power of Pair Testing
Kirk Lee, Infusionsoft
Thu, 06/25/2015 - 1:30pm

Perhaps you have heard of pair testing but are unaware of its tremendous benefits. Maybe you have tried pair testing in the past but were dissatisfied with the result. When done correctly, pair testing significantly increases quality, decreases overhead, and improves the relationship between testers and developers. Join Kirk Lee as he shares the essential points of this powerful technique that moves testing upstream and prevents defects from being committed to the codebase. Kirk explores how pair testing facilitates discussion, increases test effectiveness, promotes partnership, and provides cross training. Learn why testers and developers say they love pair testing. Kirk describes key tips to ensure success, including the amount of time required for the pair-testing session, the best way to run the session, and how to know when the session is complete. He provides specific steps to take before, during, and after the pair-testing session to make it even more effective.

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T11 Test Automation: Investment Today Pays Back Tomorrow
Al Wagner, IBM
Thu, 06/25/2015 - 1:30pm

The results of a recent survey, authored by IBM and TechWell, showed that testers want to spend more time automating, more time planning, and more time designing tests—and less time setting up test environments and creating test data. So, where should testers and their organizations invest their time and money to achieve the desired results? What is the right level of technical ability for today’s testers to be successful? As this ongoing debate continues, the simple answer remains: It depends. Join Al Wagner as he explores the many opportunities in the world of testing and test automation. Consider the many approaches for building your automated testing skills and the solutions you create, weighing the pros and cons of each. Explore the options for test and dev organizations to consider to speed up releases and deliver more value to their companies. Leave with the ability to determine which approaches make sense for you and your employer.

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