CIO / Director

Tutorials

TA SOLD OUT! Testing Mobile Applications

Jonathan Kohl, Kohl Concepts, Inc.

Tue, 04/09/2013 - 8:30am

As applications for smartphones and tablets become incredibly popular, organizations face increasing pressure to quickly and successfully deliver testing for these devices. When faced with a mobile testing project, many testers find it tempting to apply the same methods and techniques used for desktop applications. Although some of these concepts transfer directly, testing mobile applications presents its own special challenges. If you follow the same practices and techniques as you have before, you will miss critical defects.

TB SOLD OUT! Critical Thinking for Software Testers

Michael Bolton, DevelopSense

Tue, 04/09/2013 - 8:30am

Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker, too. Critically thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master.

TD Planning Your Agile Testing: A Practical Guide

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.

Tue, 04/09/2013 - 8:30am

Traditional test plans are incompatible with agile software development because we don't know all the details about all the requirements up front. However, in an agile software release, you still must decide what types of testing activities will be required—and when you need to schedule them. Janet Gregory explains how to use the Agile Testing Quadrants, a model identifying the different purposes of testing, to help your team understand your testing needs as you plan the next release.

TE Essential Test Management

Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering

Tue, 04/09/2013 - 8:30am

The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Rick Craig introduces proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, system, integration, and unit testing. Rick explains how to customize an IEEE-829-style test plan and test summary report to fit your organization’s needs. Learn how to manage test activities, estimate test efforts, and achieve buy-in. Discover a practical risk analysis technique to prioritize your testing and become more effective with limited resources.

TG SOLD OUT! Testing Metrics: Project, Product, Process

Rex Black, RBCS, Inc.

Tue, 04/09/2013 - 1:00pm

One of the most challenging problems that test managers face involves implementing effective, meaningful, and insightful test metrics. Data and measures are the foundation of true understanding, but the misuse of metrics causes confusion, bad decisions, and demotivation. Rex Black shares how to avoid these unfortunate situations by using metrics properly as part of your test management process. How can we measure our progress in testing a project? What can metrics tell us about the quality of the product? How can we measure the quality of the test process itself?

TH Exploratory Testing Is Now in Session

Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.

Tue, 04/09/2013 - 1:00pm

The nature of exploration, coupled with the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience, make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. Unfortunately, exploratory testing often is dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you have these concerns, you may find a solution in a technique called session-based test management (SBTM), developed by Jon Bach and his brother James to specifically address these issues.

Concurrent Sessions

W5 Creating Dissonance: Overcoming Organizational Bias toward Software Testing

Keith Klain, Barclays Capital

Wed, 04/10/2013 - 12:45pm

Overcoming organizational bias toward software testing can be a key factor in the success of your testing effort. Negative bias toward testing can impact its perceived value—just as inaccurate positive bias can set your team up for failure through mismanaged expectations. A structured approach to identifying, understanding, and overcoming bias is an integral part of any successful enterprise testing strategy.

W8 Build Your Own Performance Test Lab in the Cloud

Leslie Segal, Testware Associates, Inc.

Wed, 04/10/2013 - 12:45pm

Many cloud-based performance and load testing tools claim to offer “cost-effective, flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing.” However, the reality is often neither cost-effective nor flexible. With many vendors, you will be charged whether or not you use the time (not cost effective), and you must pre-schedule test time (not always when you want and not always flexible). In addition, many roadblocks are thrown up—from locked-down environments that make it impossible to load test anything other than straight-forward applications, to firewall, security, and IP spoofing issues.

W9 Collaboration without Chaos

Griffin Jones, Congruent Compliance

Wed, 04/10/2013 - 2:00pm

Sometimes software testers overvalue the adherence to the collective wisdom embodied in organizational processes and the mechanical execution of tasks. Overly directive procedures work—to a point—projecting an impression of firm, clear control. But do they generate test results that are valuable to our stakeholders? Is there a way to orchestrate everyone’s creative contributions without inviting disorganized confusion? Is there a model that leverages the knowledge and creativity of the people doing the work, yet exerts reliable control in a non-directive way?

T4 Bad Testing Metrics—and What To Do About Them

Paul Holland, Testing Thoughts

Thu, 04/11/2013 - 10:30am

Many organizations use software testing metrics extensively to determine the status of their projects and whether or not their products are ready to ship. Unfortunately most, if not all, of the metrics in use are so flawed that they are not only useless but possibly dangerous—misleading decision makers, inadvertently encouraging unwanted behavior, or providing overly simplistic summaries out of context. Paul Holland reviews Goodhart’s Law and its applicability to software testing metrics.

T5 Snappy Visualizations for Test Communications

Thomas Vaniotis, Liquidnet

Thu, 04/11/2013 - 12:45pm

Do you struggle to find the best way to explain your testing status and coverage to your stakeholders? Do numbers and metrics make your stakeholders’ eyes glaze over, or, even worse, do you feel dirty giving metrics that you know are going to be abused? Do you have challenges explaining your strategy to fellow testers and developers? Visualizations are a great way to turn raw data into powerful communications. Thomas Vaniotis presents eleven powerful visual tools that can be created easily with simple materials around the office—sticky notes, graph paper, markers, and whiteboards.

T6 Using Mindmaps to Develop a Test Strategy

Fiona Charles, Quality Intelligence

Thu, 04/11/2013 - 12:45pm

Your test strategy is the design behind your plan—the set of big-picture ideas that embodies the overarching direction of your test effort. It captures the stakeholders’ values that will inspire, influence, and ultimately drive your testing. It guides your overall decisions about the ways and means of delivering on those values. The weighty test strategy template mandated in many organizations is not conducive to thinking through the important elements of a test strategy and then communicating its essentials to your stakeholders.