Software Testing

Tutorials

MB Software Requirements Fundamentals for BAs, Testers, and Developers NEW

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

You deal with software requirements all the time. Whether you are a developer in an agile environment, an analyst who identifies and documents requirements for plan-driven development, a software designer who studies requirements as the basis for agile development, a tester who employs or often must discover requirements as the foundation of test cases, or a technical user who describes your needs to development, you need the right approaches and skills to develop and interpret software requirements.

MK Continuous Integration and Deployment through Continuous Testing NEW

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 1:00pm

Continuous integration and continuous testing are two vital agile feedback loops that lead to a continuous deployment environment. Continuous integration monitors your source code―recompiling after every change, running smaller tests, and notifying the developer if anything goes wrong. Continuous testing (and potentially continuous deployment) monitors integration builds, installs the product in a staging environment, and runs integration tests, again looking for problems.

TH Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects.

TS Specifying Non-Functional Requirements NEW

John Terzakis, Intel

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 1:00pm

Non-functional requirements present unique challenges for authors, reviewers, and testers. Non-functional requirements often begin as vague concepts such as “the software must be easy to install” or “the software must be intuitive and respond quickly.” As written, these requirements are not testable. Definitions of easy, intuitive, and quickly are open to interpretation and dependent on the reader’s experiences. In order to be testable, non-functional requirements must be quantifiable and measurable.

Keynotes

K1 From Chaos to Order—Leading Software Teams Today

Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 8:30am

To successfully lead “the nerd herd,” you’re expected to motivate your team to perform, encourage innovation, and produce software solutions that delight the customer. Prioritizing your time for what’s most important can be quite challenging—especially when you’re swamped with a steady stream of incoming requests, meeting overload, and the ever-present personnel issues. The expectation of even faster product deployment, the evolution of software development to agility, and the establishment of self-directed teams often require even more time devoted to planning.

Concurrent Sessions

BW2 Requirements Are Requirements—or Maybe Not

Robin Goldsmith, Go Pro Management, Inc.

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 11:30am

Many people talk about requirements. They use identical terms and think they have a common understanding. Yet, one says user stories are requirements; another claims user stories must be combined with requirements; and yet another has a different approach. These “experts” seem unaware of the critical inconsistencies of their positions. No wonder getting requirements right remains a major challenge for many projects.

BT4 The Survey Says: Testers Spend Their Time Doing...

Al Wagner, IBM

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 10:00am

How can testers contribute more to the success of their project and their company? How can they focus on asking the right questions, improving test planning and design, and finding defects so the business releases a quality product―even though there’s always one more fire to extinguish or one more request to fulfill? There aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all. Join Al Wagner as he reveals recent survey results showing where testers actually spend their time and where testers think their time would be better spent.

BT8 Software Testing’s Future—According to Lee Copeland

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 11:30am

The original IEEE 829 Test Documentation standard is thirty years old this year. Boris Beizer’s first book on software testing, Software Testing Techniques, also passed thirty. Testing Computer Software, the best-selling book on software testing, is more than twenty five. During the past three decades, hardware platforms have evolved from mainframes to minis to desktops to laptops to smartphones to tablets. Development paradigms have shifted from waterfall to agile. Consumers expect more functionality, demand higher quality, and are less loyal to brands.

BT13 Managing Technological Diversity: Avoid Boiling the Ocean

Katy Douglass, Nationwide Financial

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 3:00pm

Drop everything! We need to regression test the newest browser version. Apple just released a new device and iOS. We need to test our site on IE11 with Windows 8.1. Sound familiar? The number of technologies our software products must be compatible with has grown exponentially, and the market is adopting new technologies with ever-increasing speed. So, how do we manage the diversity of technology with which our software products must be compatible? Katy Douglass shares Nationwide Financial’s story of transforming their reactive processes into proactive processes that anticipate change.

BT14 Data-Driven Software Testing: The New, Lean Approach to Quality

Ken Johnston, Microsoft

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 3:00pm

The Internet of Things and always connected devices are generating exabytes of user data and device telemetry. Organizations worldwide are leveraging this data for new products and new business insights, but this data is also fundamentally changing how organizations drive, assess, and improve product quality. Testers have traditionally relied on test results, but, with additional data sources now available to testers, the testers’ ability to process these is expanding like never before.

BT16 Automating End-to-End Business Scenario Testing

Sandra Alequin, Allstate Insurance

Monika Mehrotra, Infosys, Ltd.

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 3:00pm

Allstate Insurance had a problem. While thoroughly testing each of their more than thirty business systems, they were still failing to provide good service to their clients, agents, and internal customers. The reason was simple. Implementing end-to-end business processes requires more than just running data through a set of separate systems.