Test Design

As testers, we can feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things that require our attention. We are pressured to meet the demands of a fast-paced development environment while grappling with the extreme complexities inherent in today’s software. How can we remember everything while prioritizing our work in a way that allows us to test thoroughly and with confidence? Kirk Lee shares how the proper use of checklists provides a lightweight yet powerful solution.

Many projects implicitly use some kind of risk-based approach for prioritizing testing activities. However, critical testing decisions should be based on a product risk assessment process using key business drivers as its foundation. For agile projects, this assessment should be both thorough and lightweight. Erik van Veenendaal discusses PRISMA (PRoduct RISk MAnagement), a highly practical method for performing systematic product risk assessments. Learn how to employ PRISMA techniques in agile projects using Risk Poker.

Have you found yourself forced to use outdated test tools because the cost to migrate was prohibitive? Have you abandoned or rewritten existing tests because it was easier (and cheaper) than migrating? With technology ever changing, most businesses struggle to keep up with producing high-quality products for the lowest price possible. And it is usually testers who suffer the most, as they are forced to use tools that are outdated, or no longer supported, because the company cannot afford the migration cost.

Quality starts with requirements. In small to mid-size companies, it is not uncommon for the communication chain to be broken. Florin Ursu shares ways to avoid miscommunication through a streamlined process in which requirements are communicated to both developers and testers simultaneously; then developers write code while testers document what will be tested. Florin explores what mindmaps are; what they can be used for, both in general and applied to software development; and then dives deeper into how mindmaps can be used for testing.

Mobile app testing has lots of good practices, some not so useful (bad) concepts, and some really ugly, don’t-ever-do ones. In the tradition of James Whittaker’s How to Break Software books, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to mobile app software. Jon starts by defining the big problems and challenges of testing mobile app software and examines the patterns of product failures that you must attack. He then shares a set of good, bad, and ugly test techniques, which testers and developers can direct against their software to find important bugs quickly.

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.

Thousands of times each day, network perimeter security defenses fail to recognize new and obfuscated attacks. Rather than attempting to build security firewalls, Declan O’Riordan asserts that project teams must design, code, and test security into applications―and that requires skills that are in short supply. As testers, we need to recognize which security tests we can perform and which require delegation to experts. Let’s stop our passive acceptance of designs that are weak on security and instead conduct analysis of the security features before we plan the system testing.

Many development and test organizations must work within the confines of compressed release cycles, various agile methodologies, and cloud and mobile environments for their business applications. So, how can test organizations keep up with the pace of development and increase the quality of their applications under test? Clint Sprauve describes how service virtualization and network virtualization can help your team improve speed and increase quality.