Project Management

W1 When Testers Feel Left Out in the Cold

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Wed, 05/06/2015 - 11:30am

When you're responsible for testing, it's almost a given that you will find yourself in a situation in which you feel alone and out in the cold. Management’s commitment for testing might be lacking, your colleagues in the project might be ignoring you, your team members might lack motivation, or the automated testing you had planned is more complicated and difficult than you anticipated. You feel you can't test enough, and you will be blamed for post-release quality problems.

Tom Roden, Neuri Consulting

Ben Williams, Neuri Consulting

Wed, 05/06/2015 - 1:45pm

Test management doesn't exist in the world of agile, or rather test managers don't—or do they? Agile methods such as Scrum have many traditional test management activities built in. With practices like self-organizing teams, role blurring, and skill diversification, the face of test management is changing. But is that a bad thing? Tom Roden and Ben Williams explore the key tenets of test management in an agile context, the likely dispersal of traditional responsibilities, and the profound effect on teams and managers.

David Dang, Zenergy Technologies

Wed, 05/06/2015 - 1:45pm

As online activities create more revenue, organizations are turning to Selenium to test their web applications and to reduce costs. Since Selenium is open source, there is no licensing fee. However, as with purchased tools, the same automation challenges remain, and users do not have formal support and maintenance. Proper strategic planning and use of advanced automation concepts are musts to ensure successful Selenium automation efforts.

Matthew Heusser, Excelon Development

Wed, 05/06/2015 - 1:45pm

Most traditional teams do testing at least twice—once during development as new features are created and again during release candidate testing right before release. As a system grows, regression testing takes more and more time, making tight releases impossible—or at least risky—and adding to the burden of maintaining automated tests. Matt Heusser suggests that adopting continuous integration (with its continuous testing) and continuous delivery (with its associated production monitoring) can eliminate the need for classic regression testing.

Bart Knaack, Professional Testing

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 11:15am

In our work we assess the quality of software to give well-grounded advice on the “go live” decision. We test software to prevent bad things from happening to users once the software is deployed. However, in some cases, the mere act of testing breaches safety barriers and can put companies on the spot, causing embarrassment, damage, or even death. The worst test ever to go bad—the Chernobyl meltdown which cost approximately 200,000 lives―was caused by a stress test executed in production.

T13 What Do Defects Really Cost? Much More Than You Think

Wayne Ariola, Parasoft

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 1:30pm

As software increasingly becomes the face of the business, defects can lead to embarrassment, financial loss, and even business failure. Nevertheless, in response to today's demand for speed and “continuous everything,” the software delivery conveyer belt keeps moving faster and faster. It's foolhardy to expect that speeding up an already-troubled implementation process will achieve the desired results. Wayne Ariola shares why and how to evolve from automated to continuous testing and discusses the methods to help you do so.

T14 Survival Guide: Taming the Data Quality Beast

Shauna Ayers, Availity

Catherine Cruz Agosto, Availity

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 1:30pm

As companies scramble to adjust to the demands of an increasingly data-driven world, testers are told “go test data quality” without any guidance as to what that entails or how to go about it. The fact that the data is often a living, flowing ecosystem, rather than just a single object, requires the use of different strategies to gain meaningful insights. Shauna Ayers and Catherine Cruz Agosto guide you through the challenges of data quality and apply a structured approach to analyze, measure, test, and monitor living data sets, and gauge the business impact of data quality issues.

Scott Tilley, Florida Institute of Technology

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 1:30pm

Some problems in software testing seem timeless. Other challenges—including SOA and cloud computing—arise due to the introduction of new technologies. Scott Tilley has led a three-year project at the Florida Institute of Technology to identify hard problems in software testing as voiced by leading practitioners in the field. The problems were identified through a series of workshops, interviews, and surveys.

Steve Hares, eBay

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 3:00pm

Have you ever stood in line at midnight to buy the latest release of a product? Have you worked on a product that created such delight in customers that they camped out overnight to be the first to buy it? Though this level of customer devotion is rare, it is possible to create everyday products that your customers will love. In the past, the designers and developers have received the lion’s share of the credit, but the role of quality teams is just as important in creating this level of success.

T22 How to Deliver Winning Mobile Apps

Joe Larizza, Royal Bank of Canada

Eran Kinsbruner, Perfecto Mobile

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 3:00pm

Do you find yourself confused about the definition of mobile testing? Do you understand the challenges of mobile testing and where to start? Is this your first mobile testing project? Joe Larizza and Eran Kinsbruner describe the techniques of mobile testing and the steps necessary to help testing teams transform to face these new challenges. Learn about test automation, testing tools, new methodologies—DevOps, DevTest, Shift Left and Right—and how to build a strategic mobile test road map to increase your market awareness and avoid common pitfalls affecting mobile testing teams.

Project Management

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