STARCANADA 2016 - Test Techniques
Wednesday, October 26
Test-Driven Everything—with Deliberate Collaboration
You've heard that quality belongs to everybody on an agile team. You've heard that testers and developers should collaborate in order to drive quality higher. You've heard that automated tests help a team continuously validate the quality. Well, it's time to stop just thinking and talking about these things! It's time to make them happen! Watch “Cheezy” Morgan do this in front of your eyes. Watch him build a web application, driven by acceptance and unit tests. Discover how a product owner, tester, and developer collaborate closely and deliberately to create...
Mindmaps: Agile and Lightweight Documentation for Testing
Quality starts with requirements. In small to mid-size companies, it is not uncommon for the communication chain to be broken. Florin Ursu shares ways to avoid miscommunication through a streamlined process in which requirements are communicated to both developers and testers simultaneously; then developers write code while testers document what will be tested. Florin explores what mindmaps are; what they can be used for, both in general and applied to software development; and then dives deeper into how mindmaps can be used for testing. He describes how his teams...
Better Together: Group Exploratory Testing
Jeff Abshoff faced a most difficult challenge in 2015. His team size tripled, with testers of varying skill levels spread across six sites worldwide. The product was moving to a more frequent release cycle, was of poor quality, and had multiple key stakeholders. Features were incomplete, defects were not discovered until late in the cycle, and downstream stability and feature integration problems were common. Join Jeff as he shares his experience with Group Exploratory Testing, and discusses the positive impact this approach has had on his team and the ANSYS...
Combinatorial Black-Box Testing with Classification Trees
A basic problem in software testing often is choosing a subset from the near infinite number of possible test cases. Consider the challenges of testing multiple browsers, multiple mobile devices, mobile applications, or use case paths. Testers must select test cases to design, create, and then execute to obtain sufficient coverage—all while managing the time it takes to test relative to risks. Even though test resources are limited, you still want to select the best possible set of tests. Peter Kruse shares his experiences designing test cases with TESTONA, the...
Thursday, October 27
Test Design for Responsive Websites
Websites built with responsive design come with the added testing challenge of having a single web application working across all screen sizes and many devices. So, how can you ensure your application will render correctly without testing on a huge number of smartphones, tablets, and desktops? Join Adam Rosenberg as he shares how to make intelligent test design choices for the best selection of devices to test on. For example, which is more important—the screen size or the pixel density? How do these affect how a page renders and what breakpoint is hit? When do...
Design for Testability in Practice
With the drive for continuous integration and delivery, the implications and approaches for designing more testable software are receiving substantial discussion and debate. What does testability really mean in practice? How do you take the idea of testability—how easy it is to test software—and put it into action through the different dimensions of designing and testing a real-world product? Nir Szilagyi recognizes that the challenges of difficult-to-test software can transform a testing cycle from a small automation and exploratory effort to a long struggle of...