Agile Dev West 2016 - Test & QA
Wednesday, June 8
What Hollywood Can Teach Us about Software Testing
If we observe the world through the lens of software testing, we discover that there are lessons all around us we can apply on the job, and one venue that’s packed with these tidbits is the movie theater. Bernie Berger gives examples of a few unlikely yet credible lessons from the language of some classic Hollywood movies—and how we can apply them as we test. Learn about the primary root cause of many software bugs from Office Space; see how the characters in Saving Private Ryan enacted ideas of exploratory testing; discover how to apply the skills of situational...
Identify and Exploit Behavioral Boundaries for Unit Testing
Whether writing unit tests after coding or using test-driven development (TDD), developers often ask themselves—How much testing is enough? Or too much? Or not enough? Rob Myers helps answer these questions using the techniques from his experience doing and teaching TDD. Look for those tests that cause us to write code, look for unique behaviors and code-paths, and strive to narrow in the boundary conditions. This gives us pinpoint accuracy when something breaks. Rob demonstrates what this approach looks like using graphs, tests, and code. To answer “What needs to be tested?” Rob...
Thursday, June 9
The Tester's Role in Agile Planning
If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be glossed over or missed altogether. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers can—and should—contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, collecting great...
White Box Testing: It’s Not Just for Developers Any More
Software development has improved dramatically over the past several years due in part to techniques, approaches, and development environments that take advantage of the power of modern computing machines. Software testing techniques have, by comparison, lagged. As projects and teams become more agile, the lines between the roles blur. Testers cannot remain uninformed about the underlying code and technologies that power the products they test. Join Robert Vanderwall as he shows how to take a deeper look at the code, using test-driven development (TDD) tests as a roadmap. Robert outlines...