What is the biggest management problem you are facing in 2009? Doing more with less? Demonstrating the value of testing to your company? Improving your team’s skills while keeping up with projects? Automating more tests? Testing Dialogues is a unique platform for you to learn from experienced test managers around the world and share your ideas and experiences at the same time. Facilitated by Rob Sabourin and Lee Copeland, this double session focuses on test management issues that you face every day. You'll share your expertise and successes and learn from others' challenges and lessons learned. Lee and Rob will help participants generate topics in real-time and structure discussions in a framework so that everyone will receive a summary of the work product after the conference.  Many past participants in Management Dialogues have rated it session their best experience at the STAR conference.

As software becomes more complex, many strategic test automation issues emerge that put test automation projects and improvement programs more at risk than ever. Mukesh Mulchandani shares ten key questions you must answer before beginning a test automation project. He begins with the elementary questions: Should I automate now or wait? What specifically should I automate? What approach should I adopt? Mukesh then considers more complex questions: vertical vs. horizontal automation, handling static and dynamic data, and testing dynamic objects. The final questions relate to future automation trends: moving beyond keywords automation technology, making automation scripts extensible, introducing test-driven development, starting automation when the application is not yet stable, and offering the automation scripts to clients. Whether you are just starting with test automation or wanting to improve your automation, find out which of these questions resonates with you—and learn Mukesh’s suggested answers.

Building rich Internet applications (RIA) using Ajax is challenging partly because of all the variations in browser performance and functional issues. In addition, different browsers render Ajax differently depending on version and operating environment. Frank Cohen shares a free, open-source service to check Ajax application functions and create a gallery of screen shots to ensure browsers are rendering your application correctly. The unit tests run on a distributed set of test engines in a cloud of servers. Each server in the cloud operates a different browser version and operating environment combination. Frank also describes the skills and experience you need to be successful in testing Ajax applications and describes an appropriate test methodology you can employ. Frank demonstrates his approach using popular open-source testing technology, including  Appcelerator TestMonkey, PushToTest TestMaker, Quartz, Selenium, and JackRabbit/ Derby.

Testing teams are generally quite efficient at testing Web applications through a wide range of functional data, business processes, and click streams. However, testing for security defects, which requires testing and a different mindset, is another story. Security testing involves anticipating what the application is not expecting and building test cases to cover those situations.  Rafal Los demonstrates the approaches you need to understand negative security testing by offering insight into common attacks from simple parameter-based attacks like Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection (SQLi) to more complex attacks like Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF) and multi-stage persistent Cross-Site Scripting attacks (pXSS).  Rafal provides examples and methodologies for gathering information, creating a negative-test strategy, executing attacks, and interpreting the results. Take back a new understanding of Web security issues and proven methods for addressing them proactively.

What would you do if everyone on your new team wanted to quit?  Learn how one test manager went from a demoralized team of almost quitters to one of the most satisfied, sought after, and effective teams in the company—all within one year.  Rachel Pilgrim explains how listening to employee concerns, taking calculated risks, and finding solutions to individual  issues provided a solid foundation for turning around her team.  Learn to empower your team by defining roles and responsibilities and challenging the “business as usual” model.  Improve work-life balance by leveraging tools and automation to reduce workloads and increase satisfaction. Learn about low-cost training opportunities, mentoring programs, and ways to alleviate job boredom. After implementing these and other ideas, Rachel’s employees reported a 96% job satisfaction rating. You can do the same with your testing team!

Are you spending too much time setting up test environments? Do you have too many “can’t repro” defects? Test lab virtualization may be the answer you’re looking for. It’s no longer just a promise—it can be a reality in modern test labs today. Darshan Desai explains how to leverage virtualization to solve some of your complex testing problems. Virtualization provides the ability to create and share test environments quickly and do more testing in the same amount of time. Darshan explains how virtualization reduces the total cost of ownership of test labs and helps you test earlier on production-like environments. More importantly, you’ll be able to file high-quality, actionable defect reports that are reproducible for the developer. Learn how successful teams at Microsoft use virtual test labs and understand the best practices and the pitfalls to watch out for when you go virtual.

Value is based on objectives, so why do we test? We test to find defects effectively, gain confidence in the software, and assess risk. So, the value of testing should be measured based on test effectiveness, confidence validation, and reduced system risk.  In terms of testing effectiveness, the most useful metric is defect detection percentage (DDP)—the ratio of defects found in testing divided by the total number of defects found by testing and users in production. Dorothy Graham explains when to use this metric and outlines the choices, problems, and benefits of using DDP. In addition, Dorothy describes confidence and risk metrics that will tell you if you are going in the right direction—or not. She explains how to take costs into account to assess the return on investment for testing and outlines a simple way to bring home the message about the value of testing in terms of what the organization can save.

You’re part of a large test organization that has invested money, sweat, and tears in test processes, plans, cases, and automation tools that have served you well. You’ve built a team that excels in your development environment. In fact, everyone is depending on you to verify sound engineering practices and formally assure product quality. Now agile methods are being adopted in your organization and messing up everything. Developers and testers are pushed together with the hope that quality will somehow still happen. Is this your future? Bob Galen describes patterns of testing that he’s found helpful in large-scale teams when they transition from traditional to agile testing. Join Bob to explore compliance and regulatory actions, sorting out bugs in triage, test planning and tracking, reporting test coverage, making release readiness decisions, influencing the broader development team, creating agile test automation, thriving in large-scale agile environments, and more

Strategic alignment between testing and development is vital for successful systems development. Missing, however, have been actionable, how-to approaches for assessing and enhancing this alignment. Jasbir Dhaliwal and Dave Miller present STREAM, the Software Testing Reassessment and Alignment Methodology, a systematic approach used to achieve this alignment at both strategy and execution levels. STREAM incorporates a step-by-step procedure that can be used to: 1) identify symptoms of developer-tester misalignment, 2) analyze and understand the misalignment, and 3) formulate action-plans for fostering stronger developer-tester alignment. In addition, Jasbir and Dave identify specific mechanisms and tools for ensuring that the execution capabilities of testing groups are aligned with their stated strategies. This represents a natural pre-requisite for successful developer-tester alignment. STREAM extends ideas commonly used by corporate CIOs for ensuring business-IT alignment to the realm of ensuring alignment within the corporate IT unit as well. Take away a practical framework for thinking strategically about the testing function and its collaborative relationship with development.

Have you ever read a book, taken a class, or attended a conference session on test design concepts that you never actually incorporated into your work? Have others on your team rejected new design techniques that appeared promising to you? Sometimes the path from concept to real-world application can be wrought with challenges. Marie Lipinski Was shares the path she took to bring formal test design techniques from the classroom to the workroom.  Marie explains how she incorporated test design techniques—such as mind mapping, decision tables, pairwise testing, and user scenario testing—into the existing test processes at CNA Insurance.  From the case studies Marie offers, you will learn how to present these new concepts to key stakeholders, quantify the cost/benefit to management, and overcome the challenges of changing the status quo.

Implementing a test automation project can be like a mountain climbing expedition—many find the task daunting, some attempt it, and only a few are successful. Showing real-world examples—such as the need for scripting across different platforms—Mark Meninger explains how to embrace change and use abstraction to provide creative ideas and approaches for your test automation project. You’ll learn how to implement a platform abstraction layer in the automation architecture to overcome multi-platform issues and much more. Mark helps you understand how the roles of change and abstraction in test automation can impact your automation project. You can become one of the few who are truly successful by embracing abstraction in your test automation architecture. Otherwise, you may spend money, invest in tools, and build a team that never makes it to the top of the test automation mountain.

Due to more complex software and environments, the expectations placed on software labs have grown significantly. While under tighter budget constraints, test labs are expected to rapidly provide the infrastructure to create varied test environments for executing test cases. Traditionally, only physical machines and bare-bones hypervisors formed the lab infrastructure. Testers spent a significant amount of time creating and re-creating pristine test environments. Ravi Gururaj explains how virtual lab automation (VLA) leverages server virtualization and redesigns the lab to make it relevant to a broad set of stakeholders, including development, test, support, pre-sales, and training. Learn how you can create multi-machine configurations, execute test cases, and capture entire machine states quickly for later defect analysis. Because it is easy to create and share configurations, testers can rapidly expand the test environment and realize reductions in cycle time for functional, combinatorial, and regression testing.

It’s time to ship your product and you’re looking at pages of data about the testing work you’ve done over the last year. How well does this data prepare you for making the recommendation to ship the product or delay it—perhaps once again? Do you rely primarily on the data or do you fall back on “gut feel” and intuition to make your decision? In this highly interactive session, Alan Page discusses how common measurements, such as code coverage, bug counts, and test pass rates are often misused, misinterpreted, and inaccurate in predicting software quality. Learn how to select both quantitative and qualitative metrics that evaluate your progress and help you make important decisions and recommendations for your product. Share your own ideas for test and quality metrics and learn how to evaluate those metrics to ensure that they are accurately answering the questions you need them to answer.