Test Engineer

One key to specifying effective functional requirements is minimizing misinterpretation and ambiguity. By employing a consistent syntax in your requirements, you can improve readability and help ensure that everyone on the team understands exactly what to develop. John Terzakis provides examples of typical requirements and explains how to improve them using the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS). EARS provides a simple yet powerful method of capturing the nuances of functional requirements. John explains that you need to identify two distinct types of requirements.

Mobile application development is now a mission-critical component of many IT organizations. Due to the security threats associated with mobile devices, it is critical that mobile applications are built to be secure from the ground up. However, many application developers and testers do not understand how to build and test secure mobile applications. Jeff Payne discusses the risks associated with mobile platforms/applications and describes best practices for ensuring mobile applications are secure.

Implementing non-functional requirements is essential to build the right product. Yet teams often struggle with when and how to discover, specify, and test these requirements. Many teams neglect non-functional requirements up front, considering them less important or unrelated to user requirements; other teams specify them incompletely or with untestable and non-measurable attributes.

For better or for worse, like it or not, mobile wearables are already changing our lives. Combined with social media, mobile wearable devices form a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate? The challenge for developing applications is correctly incorporating context to add value your users hadn’t considered while being sensitive to their privacy.

Privacy and data security are hot topics among US state and federal regulators as well as plaintiffs’ lawyers. Companies experiencing data breaches have been fined millions of dollars, paid out millions in settlements, and spent just as much on breach remediation efforts. In the past several years, data breaches have occurred in the hospitality, software, retail, and healthcare industries. Join Tatiana Melnik to see how stakeholders can minimize data breach risks, and privacy and security concerns by integrating the Privacy by Design Model into the software development lifecycle.

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.

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.

Mobile web testing is still a widely unexplored territory—with no standardized tools or testing processes—where testers often struggle due to lack of guidance and resources. With mobile devices, tools, operating systems, and web technologies rapidly evolving, testers must adapt their thinking in this quickly changing domain. Raj Subramanian is a tester who went through this experience, trying out different testing approaches including paired exploratory testing, blink tests, and tools to get quick feedback on the web pages.

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.