STARCANADA 2016 - Test Design
Tuesday, October 25
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
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. 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. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing...
Just in Time Testing
Turbulent development projects experience almost daily requirements changes, user interface modifications, and the continual integration of new functions, features, and technologies. Keeping your testing efforts on track is a challenge while reacting to changing priorities, technologies, and user needs. In this interactive workshop Rob Sabourin offers a unique set of tools such as dynamic test planning, test idea development, and test triage to help you cope with—and perhaps even flourish in—what may seem to be a totally chaotic environment. Be ready for just...
Test Data: Create, Secure, Manage, and Reuse
The absence of a well-defined data management approach can cripple your testing and test automation, significantly reducing pre-release defect yield. Many teams invest lots of time and money managing test data and still do not achieve their goals for test coverage and quality. Test data challenges include test data creation, privacy masking, management, maintenance, replication, security, quality, scalability, and reusability. Chip Groder presents an engaging and interactive discussion on the critical factors for managing test data, including developing a defined...
Test Design for Better Test Automation
When automated tests are cumbersome to maintain, we often view this as a technical problem. However, an often-overlooked factor is the role that testers play in making automation scalable and maintainable. Test design can help or hurt how automation engineers can implement tests efficiently. If tests are too detailed or lack focus, good automation becomes virtually impossible. In this tutorial—for both testers and automation engineers—Hans Buwalda addresses what it means for test design when tests are to be automated. See why successful automated testing is not so...
Wednesday, October 26
A Rapid Testing Approach to Test Automation
There are many wonderful ways tools can be used to help software testing. Yet, all across the industry, tools are poorly applied, which adds terrible waste, confusion, and pain to what is already a hard problem. Why is this so? What can be done? Michael Bolton thinks that the fundamental problem is a shallow, narrow, and ritualistic approach to tool use. This is encouraged by the pandemic, rarely examined, and absolutely false belief that testing is a mechanical, repetitive process. Good testing, like programming, is instead a challenging intellectual process, and...
Using Artificial Intelligence to Test the Candy Crush Saga Game
Candy Crush Saga is one of the biggest mobile games today with more than 1000 levels of difficulty—and users continue to ask for more. When building new content, it is extremely important to make sure that the level of difficulty is balanced and that the user does not experience crashes or problems through some unforeseen level of play. Alexander Andelkovic shows you how King is training artificial intelligence (AI) programs (bots) to test its games by mimicking human interactions. Join Alex as he discusses how King is taking testing to the next level by employing...
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...
Slowing Down to Speed Up:The Benefits of A Custom Automation Framework
With today’s shortened software release cycles, products need to be tested quickly and reliably. Automating tests is even more challenging as we are often building the next generation product even as we maintain the legacy products. Join Christine McGarry as she describes how she automated tests for dataset comparison for data stored in substantially differing SQL database schemas. Christine shares a case study on how the test automation strategy and tactics were defined for testing datasets output from distinct versions of an application. She provides insight...
The Future of Applications and Application Testing
“Software is eating the world,” and as a result, companies are building novel applications to support their business and products. This is the main drive behind the microservices trend where a product's architecture is comprised of many independent applications, both new and legacy. Testing and deploying any microservices architecture require high levels of coordination between components. A significant part of this approach is keeping interfaces compatible with other parts of the infrastructure, which means that collaboration and automation are critical. Dwayne...