Software Testing

Keynotes

Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 8:30am

Agile software development has fundamentally changed the way software testing is performed. No longer is testing relegated to the end of the lifecycle where its budgets are cut and its conclusions ignored. Now we live in a world where testing drives development and, for better or worse, this world is here to stay. Jeff Payne discusses what impact a test-driven world has on the types of testing we perform and the impact this has on our careers.

K2 Surviving or Thriving: Top Ten Lessons for the Professional Tester

Lloyd Roden, Lloyd Roden Consultancy

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 10:00am

As testers and test managers we often find ourselves struggling just to survive within our organization—sometimes with the possibility of job loss due to outsourcing looming. Often, we are told to become more “effective,” “efficient,” and do “more with less.” However, most testers and test managers are unsure of what those mandates actually mean. Today, it is not sufficient to just survive; we must take initiatives to thrive. Lloyd Roden shares ten valuable lessons on how you can become better at testing and thrive in your career.

K4 Asking the Right Questions? What Journalism Can Teach Testers

Thomas McCoy, Australian Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 8:30am

As the testing discipline continues to evolve—and the demands on testers increase—we need to look for new paradigms to guide our work. Thomas McCoy believes the profession of journalism has much to offer in helping us ask the right kinds of questions, be heard, and deliver bad news effectively. In many ways, our profession has ideals similar to those of journalism: our first obligation should be to the truth, we must maintain independence (even when embedded in agile teams), and our mission includes the protection of society.

Tutorials

TB Key Test Design Techniques

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 8:30am

All testers know that we can identify many more test cases than we will ever have time to design and execute. The major problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset from the almost infinite number of possibilities available. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class and boundary value testing, decision tables, state-transition diagrams, and all-pairs testing. Explore white-box techniques with their associated coverage metrics.

MB The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 8:30am

Large-scale testing projects severely stress “normal” testing practices. This can result in a number of less than optimal results. A number of innovative ideas and concepts have emerged to support industrial-strength testing of large and complex projects—some successful and others not so successful. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and the strategies he's developed over the years for large testing on large projects. He describes the possibilities and pitfalls of outsourcing test automation.

MC Fundamentals of Risk-based Testing

Dale Perry, Software Quality Engineering

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 8:30am

Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices and processes, the Systematic Test and Evaluation Process (STEP™) offers a flexible approach to help you and your team succeed. Dale Perry describes this risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. The STEP™ approach helps you decide how to focus your testing effort, what elements and areas to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation.

MD Managing Application Performance: A Simplified Universal Approach

Scott Barber, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 8:30am

In response to increasing market demand for well-performing applications, many organizations implement performance testing programs, often at great expense. Sadly, these solutions alone are often insufficient to keep pace with emerging expectations and competitive pressures. Scott Barber shares the fundamentals of implementing T⁴APM™ including specific examples from recent client implementations. T⁴APM™ is a simple and universal approach that is valuable independently or as an extension of existing performance testing programs.

MG Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers

Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 8:30am

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics is complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them.

MI How to Break Software: Embedded Edition

Jon Hagar, Grand Software Testing

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 8:30am

In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series How to Break … Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to the domain of embedded software systems. Jon defines the sub-domain of embedded software and examines the issues of product failure caused by defects in that software. Next, Jon shares a set of attacks against embedded software based on common modes of failure that testers can direct against their own software. For specific attacks, Jon explains when and how to conduct the attack, as well as why the attack works to find bugs.

ML Exploratory Testing Explained

James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 1:00pm

Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of testers to continually optimize the value of their work. It is the process of three mutually supportive activities done in parallel: learning, test design, and test execution. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover an order of magnitude more problems than when the same amount of effort is spent on procedurally scripted testing. All testers conduct exploratory testing in one way or another, but few know how to do it systematically to obtain the greatest benefits.

MM Testing the Data Warehouse

Geoff Horne, NZTester Magazine

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 1:00pm

Data warehouses have become a popular mechanism for collecting, organizing, and making information readily available for strategic decision making. The ability to review historical trends and monitor near real-time operational data has become a key competitive advantage for many organizations. Yet the methods for assuring the quality of these valuable assets are quite different from those of transactional systems. Ensuring that the appropriate testing is performed is a major challenge for many enterprises.

MO Essential Test Management and Planning

Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 1:00pm

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.

MP Creative Techniques for Discovering Test Ideas

Karen N. Johnson, Software Test Management, Inc.

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 1:00pm

Feel your testing’s stuck in a rut? Looking for new ways to discover test ideas? Wonder if your testers have constructive methods to discover different approaches for testing? In this interactive session, Karen Johnson explains how to use heuristics to find new ideas. After a brief discussion, Karen has you apply and practice with a variety of heuristics. Need to step back and consider some of your testing challenges from a fresh perspective?

MA A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing

Michael Bolton, DevelopSense

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 8:30am

You're under tight time pressure and have barely enough information to proceed with testing. How do you test quickly and inexpensively, yet still produce informative, credible, and accountable results? Rapid Software Testing, adopted by context-driven testers worldwide, offers a field-proven answer to this all-too-common dilemma. In this one-day sampler of the approach, Michael Bolton introduces you to the skills and practice of Rapid Software Testing through stories, discussions, and "minds-on" exercises that simulate important aspects of real testing problems.

TC Critical Thinking for Software Testers

James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 8:30am

Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker, too. Critically thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master.

TD Management Issues in Test Automation

Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 8:30am

Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from automated test execution. Surprisingly often, this is not due to technical factors but to management issues. Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use or your current state of automation.

TF Rob Sabourin: On Testing

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 8:30am

Are you continually testing software the same old way? Do you need fresh ideas? Are your hum-drum tests not finding enough defects? Are your tests too slow for today’s fast-paced lifecycles? Then this workshop will help you spice things up, improve your testing, and get things done. Rob Sabourin outlines more than 150 different ways to test your software to quickly and efficiently expose relevant problems. Each is illustrated with custom artwork and explained with real world examples. Testing is examined from several perspectives—agile and otherwise.

TH How to Break Software: Robustness Edition

Dawn Haynes, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 8:30am

Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all of the features were covered and all of the tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions.

TK Production Performance Testing in the Cloud

Dan Bartow, SOASTA, Inc.

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 1:00pm

Testing in production for online applications has evolved into a critical component of successful performance testing strategies. Dan Bartow explains the fundamentals of cloud computing, its application to full-scale performance validation, and the practices and techniques needed to design and execute a successful testing-in-production strategy. Drawing on his experiences, Dan describes the methodology he has used for testing numerous online applications in a production environment with minimal disruption.

TM High-flying Cloud Testing Techniques

Ruud Teunissen, Polteq Test Services BV

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 1:00pm

The cloud can deliver services over the Internet in three ways—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Each of these approaches requires testers to focus on more than classical functional testing. Ruud Teunissen explores the new techniques and skills testers need to master for testing cloud services. Examples include testing for elasticity; testing fall back scenarios to guarantee continuity of business processes; testing for adherence to laws and regulations; and testing apps, web services, and the numerous platforms that need to be supported. Join Ruud and learn how to test these additional cloud requirements to get a grip on technical test issues, explore cloud services operations, and jump-start the broader scope of testing in the cloud. Take back practical approaches for tuning and tweaking your present test techniques to fly high in the cloud.

TO Introducing Keyword-driven Test Automation

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 1:00pm

In both agile and traditional projects, keyword-driven testing has proven to be a powerful way to attain a high level of automation—when it is done correctly. Many testing organizations use keyword testing but aren’t realizing the full benefits of scalability and maintainability that are essential to keep up with the demands of testing today’s software. Hans Buwalda outlines how you can meet what he calls the 5 percent challenges—automating 95 percent of your tests with no more than 5 percent of your total testing effort—using the proven, keyword-driven test method he uses.

MQ The Craft of Bug Investigation

Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 1:00pm

At testing conferences, many presentations mention techniques and processes meant to help you find bugs, but few talk about what to do when you find one. If it’s as simple as writing what you saw, how do you know that’s the real problem? What do you do when you find a bug but the developer wants you to provide more information? How do you reproduce those pesky, intermittent bugs that come in from customers? Join Jon Bach in this hands-on tutorial to help you practice investigation and analysis skills like questioning, conjecturing, branching, and backtracking.

Concurrent Sessions

W1 Emotional Intelligence in Software Testing

Thomas McCoy, Australian Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 11:30am

As test managers and test professionals we can have an enormous emotional impact on others. We're constantly dealing with fragile egos, highly charged situations, and pressured people playing a high-stakes game under conditions of massive uncertainty. We're often the bearers of bad news and are sometimes perceived as critics, activating people's primal fear of being judged. Emotional intelligence (EI), the concept popularized by Harvard psychologist and science writer Daniel Goleman, has much to offer test managers and testers.

W2 The Test Coverage Outline: Your Testing Road Map

Paul Holland, Testing Thoughts

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 11:30am

To assist in risk analysis, prioritization of testing, and test reporting (telling your testing story), you need a thorough Test Coverage Outline (TCO)—a road map of your proposed testing activities. By creating a TCO, you can prepare for testing without having to create a giant pile of detailed test cases.

W7 Taming the Beast: Test/QA on Large-scale Projects

Shaun Bradshaw, Zenergy Technologies, Inc.

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 1:45pm

Large, complex projects—those with more than 100 people and lasting more that a year—require special considerations for developing, communicating, and managing the overall QA strategy and test plans. Shaun Bradshaw provides insights he gained from a $70 million financial software implementation project comprised of multiple components including a general ledger, business intelligence platform, data warehouse, and data integration hub.

W8 Think Different: Visualization Tools for Testers

Pascal Dufour, codecentric

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 1:45pm

Traditional processes have required testers to create a large amount of documentation in the form of test plans, test cases, and test reports. It’s time to think differently. Creating test artifacts in the “old school” textual style takes too much time away from actual testing. Besides, text is boring and uses only the left side of your brain. Visual images—charts, graphs, and diagrams—engage your right brain for more thinking power. The old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is really true!

W12 Presenting Test Results with Clarity and Confidence

Griffin Jones, Congruent Compliance

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 1:45pm

Test leaders are often asked to present the results of their testing to management—and even to auditors. Can you clearly and confidently explain and summarize your test plans and results? Can you prove that your testing is compliant with internal procedures and regulations? Griffin Jones presents a model for how to prepare and present your test work and demonstrate compliance. He explores how you can appear—and be—congruent, honest, and competent during formal and informal presentations.

W13 Increase Your Team’s Efficiency with Kanban

Derk-Jan de Grood, Valori

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 3:00pm

Test teams must perform a wide variety of tasks from testing new functions and performing regression tests to helping with bug fixes, producing test reports, and working on test improvements. With all these activities, it is a challenge to keep priorities straight, operate most efficiently, and clearly show stakeholders all that the team is working on. Derk-Jan de Grood shares his experiences with Kanban, a proven method for managing workflow, as a visual tool to help teams allocate resources, reduce waste, and make progress visible to all stakeholders.

W14 Deadlines Approaching? Budgets Cut? How to Keep Your Sanity

Geoff Horne, NZTester Magazine

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 3:00pm

Testing projects have a habit of dissolving into chaos—and even strife—as deadlines approach and budgets are cut. When asked to do the impossible, risk management and mitigation tools can be the only way for testers to survive. Geoff Horne presents a proven method he uses for identifying and assessing risks and the effects—both positive and negative—of various mitigation approaches. Through the school of hard knocks, Geoff has learned that the most plausible risk mitigation strategy is not always the best and may actually harm the project.

W18 Reports of the Death of Testing Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Ruud Teunissen, Polteq Test Services BV

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 3:00pm

Have you heard? It’s all over the social media. We are the “last generation of testers.” Testing is dead. No more classical testing—too much inflexible process. Context driven? That is a code phrase for do whatever. Agility? Developers do testing, and testers become developers. DevOps? Development and operations join forces—and test is not in the picture. And, companies don’t test anymore—they outsource. Ruud Teunissen believes we must save the indispensable craft of testing.

T2 There’s No Room for Emotions in Testing—Not!

Michael Bolton, DevelopSense

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 9:45am

Software testing is a highly technical, logical, rational task. There's no place for squishy emotional stuff here—not among professional testers. Or is there? Because of commitment, risk, schedule, and money, emotions often do run high in software development and testing. Our ideas about quality and bugs are rooted in our desires, which in turn are rooted in our feelings. People don't decide things based on the numbers; they decide based on how they feel about the numbers. It is easy to become frustrated, confused, or bored; angry, impatient, or overwhelmed.

T8 Better Unit Tests with ApprovalTests: An Open Source Library

Woody Zuill, Hunter Industries

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 11:15am

When a unit test fails, we want clear, expressive, rich feedback so we can quickly understand the nature of the failure and get a good idea of how to fix it. Unit testing frameworks are fantastic at running tests and alerting us to any failure. Unfortunately, sometimes (or is that often?) the details of the failure are difficult to evaluate. Isn’t there some way to make the specifics jump off the screen so we don’t have to dig through all the details? ApprovalTests library does just that.

T9 Flintstones or Jetsons? Jump Start Your Virtual Test Lab

David Silk, Verisign, Inc.

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 11:15am

The power of virtualization has made it easy and inexpensive to create multiple environments for testing. How you implement your virtualization strategy can boost not only the savings on physical gear and availability of test environments but also your testing productivity. Sharing his experience working through the evolution of Verisign’s virtual test lab, David Silk examines how a well-implemented virtual lab can push your testing productivity to new levels.

T12 Testing with an Accent: Internationalization Testing

Paul Carvalho, STAQS

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 11:15am

Finding time to test the basic functionality, performance, and security of a system is difficult enough, so how do you find time to add internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) testing? Today’s world is very small, and you may already have international users in your target market. Can you really afford to ignore those who can’t enter their name correctly with the default US-ASCII character set? Will it still be a quality product to them?

T13 Strength in Numbers: Using Web Analytics to Drive Test Requirements

Lindiwe Vinson, Organic, Inc.

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 1:30pm

Once a client’s website is built, you’d think it would be time for a well-deserved break. However, almost immediately, questions come up—can we capture a larger audience? close more orders? increase our sales? And so, it’s time to redesign the site—and the test strategy and plans—based on real-world data. Lindiwe Vinson sees web analytics as a tool for guiding your test planning and test case design efforts.

T14 White-box Testing: When Quality Really Matters

Jamie Mitchell, Jamie Mitchell Consulting, Inc.

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 1:30pm

Jamie Mitchell explores perhaps the most underused test technique in our arsenal—white-box testing. Also known as structural testing, white-box requires some programming expertise, access to the code, and an analysis tool. If you only employ black-box testing, you could easily ship a system having tested only 50 percent or less of the code base. Not good! Although you might believe that the developers have performed sufficient unit and integration testing, how do you know that they have achieved the level of coverage your project requires?

T18 Things Could Get Worse: Ideas About Regression Testing

Michael Bolton, DevelopSense

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 1:30pm

More Information Coming Soon!

T19 Maybe We Don’t Have to Test It

Eric Jacobson, Turner Broadcasting

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 3:00pm

Testers are taught they are responsible for all testing. Some even say “It’s not tested until I run the product myself.” Eric Jacobson believes this old school way of thinking can hurt a tester’s reputation and—even worse—may threaten the team’s success.

T20 Data Masking: Testing with Near-real Data

Martin Kralj, Ekobit

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 3:00pm

Organizations worldwide collect data about customers, users, products, and services. Striving to get the most out of collected data, they use it to fuel many day-to-day processes including software testing, development, and personnel training. The majority of this collected data is sensitive and falls under specific government regulations or industry standards that define policies for privacy and generally limit or prohibit using the data for these secondary purposes. Data masking solves this problem.

T23 HTML5 Security Testing at Spotify

Alexander Andelkovic, Spotify

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 3:00pm

HTML5 is one of the hottest technologies around right now because HTML5 apps are beautiful, engaging, and can perform important and entertaining functions. With the wide range of devices and platforms to support, the promise of multi-platform support is appealing. But HTML5 apps present their own range of security issues. So, what do you do about security? How do you test HTML5 applications to ensure their security? Alexander Andelkovic works at Spotify where their streaming music player desktop client applications are all HTML5-based.

T24 New Testing Standards Are on the Horizon: What Will Be Their Impact?

Claire Lohr, Lohr Systems

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 3:00pm

The history of testing standards has not always been auspicious. Testing standards documents have been expensive to obtain, limited in scope, inflexible in expectations, and inconsistent. However, they contain important lessons learned from experienced practitioners—if a tester is willing to overcome the obstacles to get to the useful information. A set of new international standards is coming. These new standards are tailorable, consistent, and comprehensive in scope. In addition, they will be freely available (some are already).