Test Management

Do you find yourself with limited influence over what gets shipped on products you test? Is your report card on product quality often ignored? Do you think you can contribute more? Join Gerard Meszaros as he describes ways to transition from approaching quality with brute force testing to an enlightened and strategic perspective that will have real impact on product quality. Instead of criticizing the product, become an integral part of the development process and learn how you can help define what should be built. Gerard explores design for testability concepts and describes key testability requirements that will afford better, more efficient testing. He explains test design techniques that describe software functionality in layers of plain language tests. Gerard shows how a collaborative approach for building the right product results in much better outcomes from both quality and schedule perspectives. Stop rushing through multiple test-and-fix cycles that result in a less than quality product. Be part of the solution!

Embedded software—now being referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT)—continues to permeate almost every industry—from household appliances to heart monitors. It is estimated that there are at least a million lines of code in the average car. As IoT explodes from millions of devices to tens of billions in the next few years, new challenges will emerge for software testing. Security, privacy, complexity, and competing standards will fuel the need for innovative testing. Customers don't care why your software failed in the connected chain—only that it did fail. Companies that focus on quality will ultimately be the successful brands. Learn what new approaches are required for testing the “zoo” of interconnected devices. As products increasingly connect physical hardware with applications, we must revisit old testing approaches. IoT is about analyzing data in real time, allowing testers to make quicker and more informed decisions. If IoT testing is in your future, this session is for you.

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.

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.

Implementing test automation requires more than selecting the best tool and starting to write automated tests. Because test automation tools must integrate with your development lifecycle and its various project management, build, integration, and release tools, you need an automation comprehensive architecture implementation plan. Drawing on his experiences at a large financial institution, Mike Sowers discusses the steps for a test automation architecture, identifying tool dependencies, establishing deployment plans, and selecting and reporting metrics. Challenges Mike’s organization faced included ensuring that the selected tools worked well with other application lifecycle tools, driving the adoption of automation across multiple project teams or departments, and communicating the quantitative and qualitative benefits to key stakeholders in management. Mike discusses things that went right (such as including the corporate architectural review board) and things that went wrong (allowing too much organizational separation between testers and automation engineers). Take back a To Do list of opportunities and issues to improve your test automation implementation or start a new one.

Technical debt is slowing your software development projects. Any developer who has gone beyond version 1 has encountered it. Technical debt takes different forms, has many different origins, and does not always equate to bad code quality. Much of it is incurred due to the passage of time and a rapidly evolving business environment. Some is in the form of hundreds of little cuts; some is massive and overwhelming, the result of a single poor design choice. Philippe Kruchten explains how to distinguish different types of technical debt, identify their root causes, objectively assess their impact, and develop strategies suitable in your context to limit or selectively reduce the technical debt you incur. Discover what debt you can happily live with. See when to declare bankruptcy. And learn that not all technical debt is bad. Just like in the real world, some technical debt can be a valuable investment for the future.

Bad product quality can haunt companies long after the product’s release. And root cause analysis (RCA) of product failures is an indispensable step in preventing its recurrence. Unfortunately, the testing industry struggles with doing proper RCA. Moreover, companies often fail to unlock the full potential of RCA by not including testers in the process. Failing to recognize the real value testers bring to RCA is a process failure. Another failure is not recognizing how extremely valuable RCA results are for devising enhanced test strategies. Using real-life—and often embarrassing—examples, Jan van Moll illustrates the added value that testers bring and discusses the pitfalls of RCA. Jan challenges testers and managers to analyze and rethink their own RCA practices. Learn how to increase your value as a professional tester to your business by performing powerful RCA—and avoiding its pitfalls.

Manual test cases are difficult to write and costly to maintain. Beaumont Brush suggests that one of the more important but infrequently-discussed reasons is that manual tests are usually written in natural language, which is ineffective for describing test cases clearly. Employing a domain-specific language (DSL), Beaumont and his team approach their manual test cases exactly like programming code and gain the benefits of good development and design practices. He shares their coding standards, reusability approach, and object models that integrate transparently into the version control and code review workflow. Beaumont demonstrates two DSL approaches―a highly specified DSL written in Python and a more functional DSL that leverages Gherkin syntax and does not require a computer language to implement. By making your test cases easier to write and maintain, your team will improve its test suite and have time for automating more tests.

Giving and receiving feedback are tough for everyone. Who wants to criticize others or be criticized? Although managers have a duty to give honest feedback to staff and peers, many people resist change or differ on how to change—leading to interpersonal conflicts and impacting deliverables. Omar Bermudez explains several techniques—Giving Positive Feedback, Acid Reflux (when you get that sick feeling), and SARA (Surprise, Anger, Rationalization, Acceptance)—that allow people to give and receive honest feedback to promote incremental improvements. Omar explains how to give accurate feedback to and receive the same from senior team members or direct superiors, a skill critical to career advancement. To increase self-esteem, happiness index, and your power to influence, Omar teaches you how to present feedback to your peers, your boss, or other colleagues in a diplomatic and efficient way. Take away key insights into how to create a healthy organizational culture with clear and constructive feedback.