STARCANADA 2018 - Test Techniques

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities, and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills help clear the way for...

To be most effective, those in testing roles (whether Agile or traditional) must develop and use metrics to help the team direct the testing effort and help the team make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, teams must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he...

Many traditional test teams are augmenting their documented test plans and test cases with a structured, exploratory approach. Teams adopting agile methods are replacing ad-hoc testing with exploratory techniques, allowing all development team members to effectively participate in product testing. Exploratory testing is all about simultaneously learning about the software you are testing while you are designing and executing the tests. It is used by developers for unit testing, independent testing teams for integration or system testing, and by customers implementing acceptance testing of...

Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Jeffery Payne as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...

Having a shared understanding of desired and undesired behaviors for each new product feature is key to delivering value to the business frequently and predictably. However, many teams lack this understanding even as they start coding. As testers, we can explore feature specifications early, contributing to a successful and timely delivery. With a testing mindset, testers can elicit examples from stakeholders and help turn them into test scenarios that guide development. Janet Gregory will explain how incorporating that tester mindset and using test techniques during requirements...

A bug-free product release is an ideal that testers, developers, and project managers strive for, but when it comes to the go/no-go decision, the balance is often struck between "good" and "good enough," leaving behind a rotting to-do pile in the bug-tracking tool that is rarely acted upon in the next release. How can testers stop adding new bugs to the ever-growing list and clean up the “bug dump”? Is it possible to speed development and deliver better software by sidestepping the bug-tracking tool? Join Jerry Penner as he shares his experiences in reducing the wasted time and effort of...

There are two main challenges to testing systems that incorporate elements of artificial intelligence. First, the same input can trigger different responses as an AI system learns and adapts to new conditions, and second, it is difficult to understand what the correct response really should be. Such behavior violates one of the main principles of traditional testing: the repeatability of test case execution. It's like shooting a moving target and not knowing whether you missed. Testers lose confidence in the outcome of their testing when traditional approaches no longer apply. Yury...

Stakeholders drop software on our desks and expect us to test it without any requirements, design, or product knowledge whatsoever. About the only clear thing is the absurd and unrealistic deadline. We are expected to bend over backward, spread magic pixie dust, and heroically test quality into a product we have never heard of before. But testing in the dark is not impossible, and as Rob Sabourin shows, it can even be a very valuable and fun experience. Learn strategies to emerge from a murky fog into clear, meaningful quality insights and leverage unlikely sources about what...

Traditional test approaches break down when applied to retail virtual reality systems. In this presentation, Nimesh Patel will share his experience developing a novel approach to retail VR testing that uses a blend of exploratory research and business- and user-focused testing strategies. Nimesh juggles the needs of a rich collection of company stakeholders, diverse clients, and highly specialized VR team members in order to draw critical insights from VR testing. Exploratory research of other retail VR applications was used to identify many domain-specific risks by studying their...