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.
Rob Sabourin
Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty-four years of management experience leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Rob has managed, trained, mentored, and coached hundreds of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. Rob wrote I am a Bug!, the popular software testing children's book; works as an adjunct professor of software engineering at McGill University; and serves as the principle consultant (and president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc. Contact Rob at [email protected].
Avoiding siloed development and test is a tricky business—even with agile practices in place. It is easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do testing and programmers only do coding. Rob Sabourin explores many ways to apply your testing knowledge and experience inside a Scrum sprint or iteration and throughout an agile project. He finds that testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Rob describes a host of ways testers add value to an agile sprint—using their analysis skills to help clear the way to make tough technical trade-offs; pairing with programmers to help design and review unit tests; studying static analysis reports to find unexpected code complexity or security; and much more. Join Rob to see how testers can start working hand-in-hand with developers, business analysts, and product owners to get more things done in agile sprints and projects.
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.