Concurrent Sessions

As more and more organizations transition to agile, many still do not understand how testing fits into agile teams. Does it simply mean placing a tester on every team? Or does it mean doing away with the role of testers? Pradeepa Narayanaswamy explains the importance of working in cross-functional teams that integrate development and testing. Pradeepa shares her insights into the keys of agile testing including understanding the agile testing mindset and goals. She discusses the responsibilities of a tester in an agile team and describes the diverse skill sets required in those teams. Pradeepa also shares her ideas on how to manage defects, what to measure, and what to document. She concludes by describing what is NOT agile testing and debunks certain agile testing myths. Review these important basics and align your testing with concepts that may have been overlooked, forgotten, or misunderstood in your teams.

Good software testers often interact more with people than with software, especially when reporting on the results of testing. Yet our industry provides little training or guidance on the social and psychological aspects of our jobs. There are times when the results testers deliver to project teams and stakeholders can be difficult to accept. It is fascinating to observe the reactions a negative testing message can provoke in people during the final, stressful phases of a project.  Based on the speaker’s experience in highly contentious test reporting and background in psychology, Nancy Kelln discusses the psychological side of test reporting and examines the challenges when reporting difficult information to project stakeholders. Learn why test reporting problems are often people problems and how to understand the emotional reactions from project stakeholders when delivering less than ideal testing results.

The role of the Product Owner in Scrum is only vaguely defined—owning the Product Backlog and representing the “customer.” In many organizations, Product Owners go it alone, trying their best to represent business needs to their teams. What’s often missing is a collaborative connection between the teams’ testers and the Product Owner—a connection in which testers help to define and refine requirements, broaden the testing landscape and align it to customer needs, provide a conduit for collaboration between the customer and the team, assure that the team is building the right thing, and help demonstrate complete features. This relationship is central to the team and facilitates transparency to help gain feedback from the entire organization. Join seasoned agile coach Bob Galen as he shares techniques for doing just this. Return with new ideas and techniques for helping your Product Owner and team deliver better received and higher value products—not just by testing but by fostering collaboration.

Whether you have dedicated test teams or testers distributed over Scrum teams, you have the challenge of planning, tracking, and reporting their testing not only in a meaningful way but also in a way that can adapt to the rapidly changing environment of software development projects. Many commonly used planning methods do not allow for flexibility, and reporting often relies on horribly flawed metrics including number of test cases executed or test pass percentage. Paul Holland explains a planning, tracking, and reporting method he developed during his last five years as a test manager at Alcatel-Lucent. Paul describes how he uses powerful “high-tech” tools like whiteboards and spreadsheets to create easy-to-understand visual representations of his group’s testing. Learn how you can create status reports that provide the details that upper management seeks. These status reports are effective in both waterfall and agile environments—and will stand up to management scrutiny.

Transitioning to agile development isn't any easier for the test team than it is for the development team. New features and fixes appear daily, priorities change fluidly as customer feedback shapes the backlog, and design documents are frequently sparse as developers use iterations to zero in on design solutions. On top of all this, with agile testing there is rarely time to build the giant spreadsheets of test cases that management loves to use for tracking testing progress. So, how do we handle the constant flood of change, balance exploratory testing and automated testing—and  communicate progress to senior management? Matt Attaway shares his experiences developing a successful lightweight agile testing process that helped his team move from testing two waterfall projects at once to six agile projects simultaneously. Matt discusses lightweight test plan development, the use of BDD tools such as Cucumber, and methods for measuring testing progress.

When you're responsible for testing, it's almost a given that you will find yourself in a situation in which you feel alone and out in the cold. Management commitment for testing might be lacking, your colleagues in the project might be ignoring you, your team members might lack motivation, or the automated testing you had planned is more complicated and difficult than you anticipated. You feel you can't test enough, and you will be blamed for post-release quality problems. Hans Buwalda shares a number of typical chilly situations and offers suggestions for overcoming them, based on his experiences worldwide in large projects. Specifically, Hans focuses on management commitment, politics, project dependencies, managing expectations, motivating team members, testing and automation difficulties, and dealing with overwhelming numbers of day-to-day problems. Take away more than forty-five tips and approaches to use when temperatures drop on you.

When implementing test automation, many people encounter problems: where to start with automation, high maintenance costs for the automated tests, or unrealistic management expectations. The good news is that solutions to these problems exist and have been effectively used by many. A “pattern” is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem. Patterns have been popular in software development for many years, but they are not commonly recognized in system-level test automation. Dorothy Graham shares a collection of common problems (issues) and their solutions (patterns) which she and others are now developing as a wiki. To help resolve typical issues, Dot gives you a brief guided tour of some patterns—from Maintainable Testware and Domain-Driven Testing to Fail Gracefully and Kill the Zombies. Dot helps you recognize test automation issues and shows you how to identify appropriate patterns to help solve them.

The classic software testing team is becoming increasingly obsolete. Traditional processes and tools just don’t meet today’s testing challenges. With the introduction of methodologies such as agile, testing processes with a "test last" philosophy cannot succeed in a rapid deployment environment. To exacerbate our testing difficulties, we now have to deal with "big data" which introduces an entirely new set of problems. In the past, we have relied on tools such as test automation to solve these problems; however, classic test automation simply will not suffice on its own and must be integrated with the right testing activities while being supported by correct procedures. When you combine these problems with inadequately defined requirements and limited resources, you have a recipe for testing disaster. Regg Struyk shares real-world examples and offers constructive ways to move away from traditional testing methods to a more integrated process using concepts such as test-driven development and TestOps.

Organizations implement automated testing in hopes of reducing time and cost while creating higher quality products. They invest in tools, training, and development; identify candidates for automation; and then develop and execute test scripts. Unfortunately, some of these projects are considered failures because the promised savings are not realized. Funding for future automation efforts may be reduced, or automation projects may be cancelled outright. Management support, effective test design and test data management, low maintenance requirements, along with meaningful reports are key to a successful and cost effective automation. Paul Maddison shares how CUMIS has invested more than ten years in test automation—continually growing their investment, reducing costs, and shrinking time-to-market. Paul details their approaches for script design, data management, test candidate selection, and effective reporting to management. Learn approaches that can mitigate challenges and give you a higher return on investment—today and well into the future.

To be successful, test managers must keep pace with the constantly changing world of software development. The test manager’s job description—planning, supervising, and reporting the activities of the test process, with a focus on functional black-box tests—has remained virtually unchanged over the past decade. Meanwhile, the job requirements have changed dramatically—fast release cycles leading to widespread adoption of agile methodologies; increased security, performance, and usability requirements; and myriad smart devices in users' hands. And these are just the most obvious. Silvio Moser explains how these trends change the way we develop and test software, and describes strategies for tackling these challenges. Test managers must adapt to a new test management curriculum and a transformed role—the test master. While the classic test manager is mainly organizing and controlling, the test master acts as a mediator, moderator, and problem solver. Learn to stop managing and start mastering.

In the not-too-distant past, the only viable options for testing complicated web-based applications were commercial (i.e., expensive) tools. These tools were well designed but difficult to scale without significant investment in both human capital and licensing costs. Now, a number of open-source tools are available, allowing for rich, robust, expressive testing against applications as complicated as any in the world—and they’re free. However, your savings in licensing and support fees can potentially be eclipsed by the cost of maintaining a team of developers to support these "free" tools. But as the tools progress, the industry is starting to shift toward open-source test frameworks to help manage these tools, allowing their support and maintenance to be done through the “community.” This leaves your team with only the challenge of modeling your application. Marcus Merrell presents one such framework, which allows for quick modeling and implementation of a robust, low-maintenance test suite that requires minimal Java skills.

As organizations mature in their testing processes, the perennial quest to achieve ultimate excellence has led many to establish a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE). Many of these initiatives have been plagued with issues ranging from partial implementation to complete abandonment midway. Additionally, most TCoE initiatives meet heavy resistance and inertia from testing teams who perceive them as a threat to their independence and way of working. At the heart of these issues lie misalignment with business goals, faulty ROI analysis prior to investing, poor communication, and an incorrect organizational model. Drawing from their experience consulting with organizations on TCoE initiatives, Krishna Iyer and Mukesh Mulchandani share insights, experiences, and lessons learned from both their successes and failures. Learn how to go about creating your own TCoE while overcoming the common—and not so common—challenges you will face along the way. Draw on their experience to troubleshoot some of your unique problems.

The world of information technology is undergoing revolutionary changes. Advancements in mobile computing, fueled by mobile applications, are playing an important role in driving these changes. While developers build their technical skills to accommodate these evolving trends, it is equally important for testers to understand what it takes to test mobile applications. Testers must understand the scope of mobile device applications testing, whether automation is feasible, and what challenges will face the test team. Kunal Chauhan presents an optimized approach to testing smart devices, specifically focusing on mobile applications test automation, the various forms of applications (web, native, hybrid), and the tools available to assist in the automation process. Kunal demonstrates an automation framework using open source tools, providing a practical implementable solution to add to your mobile test automation toolkit.