Large-scale testing projects severely stress “normal” testing practices. This can result in a number of less than optimal results. A number of innovative ideas and concepts have emerged to support industrial-strength testing of large and complex projects—some successful and others not so successful. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and the strategies he's developed over the years for large testing on large projects. He describes the possibilities and pitfalls of outsourcing test automation.
Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices and processes, the Systematic Test and Evaluation Process (STEP™) offers a flexible approach to help you and your team succeed. Dale Perry describes this risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. The STEP™ approach helps you decide how to focus your testing effort, what elements and areas to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation.
In response to increasing market demand for well-performing applications, many organizations implement performance testing programs, often at great expense. Sadly, these solutions alone are often insufficient to keep pace with emerging expectations and competitive pressures. Scott Barber shares the fundamentals of implementing T4APM™ including specific examples from recent client implementations. T4APM™ is a simple and universal approach that is valuable independently or as an extension of existing performance testing programs.
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization.
So you’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful for a year or so. But how do you know how well you’re really doing? And how do you continuously improve your practices? And when things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? You realize that the path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick. It also helps to have a guide. So consider this workshop your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance.
To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and 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, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics is complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them.
In today’s market, global outreach, quick time to release, and a feature rich design are the major factors that determine a product’s success. Organizations are constantly on the lookout for innovative testing techniques to match these driving forces. Crowdsourced testing is a paradigm increasing in popularity because it addresses these factors through its scale, flexibility, cost effectiveness, and fast turnaround.
In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series How to Break … Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to the domain of embedded software systems. Jon defines the sub-domain of embedded software and examines the issues of product failure caused by defects in that software. Next, Jon shares a set of attacks against embedded software based on common modes of failure that testers can direct against their own software. For specific attacks, Jon explains when and how to conduct the attack, as well as why the attack works to find bugs.
“Testing costs too much.” “We don’t get the value we should from the investment we make.” “Testing just delays the project.” Familiar sayings in your organization? Although testing is accepted by most as an integral part of any software development lifecycle, some see it as a hole in which to throw money rather than as an investment in quality. In order to gain credibility and reduce the negative views of our work, we testers and test managers must show senior management a clear return on their investment.
You're under tight time pressure and have barely enough information to proceed with testing. How do you test quickly and inexpensively, yet still produce informative, credible, and accountable results? Rapid Software Testing, adopted by context-driven testers worldwide, offers a field-proven answer to this all-too-common dilemma. In this one-day sampler of the approach, Michael Bolton introduces you to the skills and practice of Rapid Software Testing through stories, discussions, and "minds-on" exercises that simulate important aspects of real testing problems.
It used to be that your work and results spoke for themselves. No longer is that the case. Today you need to be a better collaborator, communicator, and facilitator so that you focus your teams on delivering value. Join Bob Galen to explore the power of the story, one of the most effective communication paradigms. You can tell stories that create powerful collaboration. You can tell stories that communicate product requirements and customer needs. You can tell stories that inspire teams to deliver results.
Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of testers to continually optimize the value of their work. It is the process of three mutually supportive activities done in parallel: learning, test design, and test execution. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover an order of magnitude more problems than when the same amount of effort is spent on procedurally scripted testing. All testers conduct exploratory testing in one way or another, but few know how to do it systematically to obtain the greatest benefits.
Data warehouses have become a popular mechanism for collecting, organizing, and making information readily available for strategic decision making. The ability to review historical trends and monitor near real-time operational data has become a key competitive advantage for many organizations. Yet the methods for assuring the quality of these valuable assets are quite different from those of transactional systems. Ensuring that the appropriate testing is performed is a major challenge for many enterprises.
On agile teams, testers often struggle to “keep up” with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with Acceptance Test-driven Development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins.
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.
Feel your testing’s stuck in a rut? Looking for new ways to discover test ideas? Wonder if your testers have constructive methods to discover different approaches for testing? In this interactive session, Karen Johnson explains how to use heuristics to find new ideas. After a brief discussion, Karen has you apply and practice with a variety of heuristics. Need to step back and consider some of your testing challenges from a fresh perspective?
At testing conferences, many presentations mention techniques and processes meant to help you find bugs, but few talk about what to do when you find one. If it’s as simple as writing what you saw, how do you know that’s the real problem? What do you do when you find a bug but the developer wants you to provide more information? How do you reproduce those pesky, intermittent bugs that come in from customers? Join Jon Bach in this hands-on tutorial to help you practice investigation and analysis skills like questioning, conjecturing, branching, and backtracking.
All testers know that we can identify many more test cases than we will ever have time to design and execute. The major problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset from the almost infinite number of possibilities available. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class and boundary value testing, decision tables, state-transition diagrams, and all-pairs testing. Explore white-box techniques with their associated coverage metrics.
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. Jonathan Kohl says if you follow the same practices and techniques as you have before, you will miss critical defects.
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.
Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from automated test execution. Surprisingly often, this is not due to technical factors but to management issues. Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use or your current state of automation.
Today’s software applications are often security-critical, making security testing an essential part of a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeff Payne as he shares what you need to know to integrate effective security testing into your everyday software testing activities. Learn how software vulnerabilities are introduced into code and exploited by hackers. Discover how to define and validate security requirements.
Are you continually testing software the same old way? Do you need fresh ideas? Are your hum-drum tests not finding enough defects? Are your tests too slow for today’s fast-paced lifecycles? Then this workshop will help you spice things up, improve your testing, and get things done. Rob Sabourin outlines more than 150 different ways to test your software to quickly and efficiently expose relevant problems. Each is illustrated with custom artwork and explained with real world examples. Testing is examined from several perspectives—agile and otherwise.
Because the cloud introduces additional system risks—Internet dependencies, security challenges, performance concerns, and more—you, as a test manager, need to broaden your scope and update your team’s practices and processes. Ruud Teunissen shares a unique approach that directly addresses more than 140 new testing concerns and risks you may encounter in the cloud. Learn how to identify cloud-specific requirements and the risks that can ensue from those requirements. Then, explore the test strategies you'll need to adopt to mitigate those risks. Explore cloud services selection, implementation, and operations. Then, take a dive in to the wider scope of test management in the cloud. Take back the ammunition you need to convince senior management that test managers should participate during the cloud services selection to help avoid risks before implementation and, further, why you should work with IT operations to extend test activities after the system goes live.
Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all of the features were covered and all of the tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions.
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.
On traditional projects, testers usually join the project after coding has started, or even later when coding is almost finished. Testers have no role in advising the project team early regarding quality issues but focus only on finding defects. They become accustomed to this style of working and adjust their mental processes accordingly. In agile, testers must collaborate closely with customers and programmers throughout the development lifecycle, where their focus changes from finding defects to preventing them.
Testing in production for online applications has evolved into a critical component of successful performance testing strategies. Dan Bartow explains the fundamentals of cloud computing, its application to full-scale performance validation, and the practices and techniques needed to design and execute a successful testing-in-production strategy. Drawing on his experiences, Dan describes the methodology he has used for testing numerous online applications in a production environment with minimal disruption.
Are you overwhelmed by the number of mobile devices you need to test? The device market is large and new devices become available almost weekly. Karen Johnson discusses three key challenges to mobile testing—device selection, user interface, and device and application settings—and leads you through each. Learn how to select which devices to test and how to keep up-to-date in the ever-changing mobile market. Need to learn about user interface testing on mobile? Karen reviews mobile UX concepts and design. Wonder what device settings can impact your mobile app testing?
The cloud can deliver services over the Internet in three ways—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Each of these approaches requires testers to focus on more than classical functional testing. Ruud Teunissen explores the new techniques and skills testers need to master for testing cloud services. Examples include testing for elasticity; testing fall back scenarios to guarantee continuity of business processes; testing for adherence to laws and regulations; and testing apps, web services, and the numerous platforms that need to be supported. Join Ruud and learn how to test these additional cloud requirements to get a grip on technical test issues, explore cloud services operations, and jump-start the broader scope of testing in the cloud. Take back practical approaches for tuning and tweaking your present test techniques to fly high in the cloud.
In our increasingly agile world, the new buzzword is collaboration—so easy to preach but difficult to do well. Testers are challenged to work directly, effectively, efficiently, and productively with customers, programmers, business analysts, writers, trainers, and pretty much everyone in the business value chain. Many points of collaboration exist: grooming stories with customers, sprint planning with team members, reviewing user interaction with customers, troubleshooting bugs with developers, whiteboarding with peers, and buddy checking.
In both agile and traditional projects, keyword-driven testing has proven to be a powerful way to attain a high level of automation—when it is done correctly. Many testing organizations use keyword testing but aren’t realizing the full benefits of scalability and maintainability that are essential to keep up with the demands of testing today’s software. Hans Buwalda outlines how you can meet what he calls the 5 percent challenges—automating 95 percent of your tests with no more than 5 percent of your total testing effort—using the proven, keyword-driven test method he uses.
When agile development first gained popularity, agile meant collocated teams, including testers, programmers, analysts, and customers who were expected to perform many functions. As agile methods have spread and expanded, many organizations with globally-distributed teams are facing challenges with their agile deployment. Having worked with many such teams, Janet Gregory has observed ways that testers in agile teams can be very productive while delivering a high-quality software product and working well with the rest of the team.
In high volume automated testing (HiVAT), the test tool generates the test, runs it, evaluates the results, and alerts a human to suspicious results that need further investigation. What makes it simple is its oracle—run the program until it crashes or fails in some other extremely obvious way. More powerful HiVAT approaches are more sensitive to more types of errors. They are particularly useful for testing combinations of many variables and for hunting hard-to-replicate bugs that involve timing or corruption of memory or data. Cem Kaner presents a new strategy for teaching HiVAT testing.
Kick off the conference with a welcome reception!Mingle with experts and colleagues while enjoying complimentary food and beverages.
Agile software development has fundamentally changed the way software testing is performed. No longer is testing relegated to the end of the lifecycle where its budgets are cut and its conclusions ignored. Now we live in a world where testing drives development and, for better or worse, this world is here to stay. Jeff Payne discusses what impact a test-driven world has on the types of testing we perform and the impact this has on our careers.
As testers and test managers we often find ourselves struggling just to survive within our organization—sometimes with the possibility of job loss due to outsourcing looming. Often, we are told to become more “effective,” “efficient,” and do “more with less.” However, most testers and test managers are unsure of what those mandates actually mean. Today, it is not sufficient to just survive; we must take initiatives to thrive. Lloyd Roden shares ten valuable lessons on how you can become better at testing and thrive in your career.
Network with colleagues and speakers in the Expo...Read More
Bringing Order to Chaos: Mobile App Testing with a Private, Internal Device CloudDan McFall, Mobile Labs
Mobile Testing in the Cloud: Best Practices for Enterprise QAMark Shipley, KeynoteDevice Anywhere
Seven Things a Tester Should KnowTheresa Lanowitz & Charles Sterling, Microsoft
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As test managers and test professionals we can have an enormous emotional impact on others. We're constantly dealing with fragile egos, highly charged situations, and pressured people playing a high-stakes game under conditions of massive uncertainty. We're often the bearers of bad news and are sometimes perceived as critics, activating people's primal fear of being judged. Emotional intelligence (EI), the concept popularized by Harvard psychologist and science writer Daniel Goleman, has much to offer test managers and testers.
To assist in risk analysis, prioritization of testing, and test reporting (telling your testing story), you need a thorough Test Coverage Outline (TCO)—a road map of your proposed testing activities. By creating a TCO, you can prepare for testing without having to create a giant pile of detailed test cases.
Most test automation projects never die—they just become a mess and are redone. Initial solutions that start well and are full of promise often end up as brittle and unmaintainable monsters consuming more effort than they save. Political feuds can flourish as different automation solutions compete for attention and dominance. Tests become inefficient in both execution time and resource usage. Disillusionment ensues, projects are redefined, and the cycle begins again. Surely we can learn how to avoid such trouble on the next project.
While more and more organizations are practicing agile development methodologies, many have not learned how to “bake in quality” throughout the process. As an agile tester, you are an integral part of the development team—working on requirements, design, implementation, writing automated tests, and testing However, are all team members working together as they should to ensure quality from day one through final delivery? Dena Laterza offers proven tips to help you and your team make the cultural shift to adopt and foster a “quality first” team standard.
Are you frustrated by how long it takes your IT department to provision development and test environments? Have you performed load testing on inadequate hardware only to find performance problems emerge in production? Dave Ogletree leveraged virtualization to solve these problems. He and his team at Bridgepoint Education created and implemented integrated virtualized systems for both developers and testers.
Metrics are powerful tools when used to effect positive change in a project or organization. However, the value and benefits of metrics are often dependent on the context. While certain metrics provide information and insight to drive decision making for a traditional development approach, they may not be useful in an agile landscape—and vice versa. QA and agile experts Shaun Bradshaw and Bob Galen delve into the value, pitfalls, pros, and cons of various metrics in agile and waterfall development environments.
Increase Test Efficiency & EffectivenessSiva Sundararaman, Tricentis
Large, complex projects—those with more than 100 people and lasting more that a year—require special considerations for developing, communicating, and managing the overall QA strategy and test plans. Shaun Bradshaw provides insights he gained from a $70 million financial software implementation project comprised of multiple components including a general ledger, business intelligence platform, data warehouse, and data integration hub.
Traditional processes have required testers to create a large amount of documentation in the form of test plans, test cases, and test reports. It’s time to think differently. Creating test artifacts in the “old school” textual style takes too much time away from actual testing. Besides, text is boring and uses only the left side of your brain. Visual images—charts, graphs, and diagrams—engage your right brain for more thinking power. The old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is really true!
Exploratory testing provides both flexibility and speed—characteristics that are vitally important with the quick pace of short agile iterations. With session-based test management (SBTM), exploratory testing is structured and documented in pre-defined sessions. A newer approach, thread-based test management (TBTM), organizes test efforts by threads of activities rather than sessions. So, how do you retain the traceability of SBTM without losing the creativity offered by TBTM? The answer is xBTM—a combination of SBTM and TBTM.
Having problems with your website’s performance? Does it take too much time and effort to determine the cause of a particular page’s poor performance? Would you like to find the root cause of client-side issues in an automated way? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you. At GSI Commerce, an eBay company, Ron Woody manages a large team of performance engineers working on nearly nearly 100 eCommerce websites. Ron and his team have developed cutting-edge approaches for automating client- and server-side performance testing.
Test leaders are often asked to present the results of their testing to management—and even to auditors. Can you clearly and confidently explain and summarize your test plans and results? Can you prove that your testing is compliant with internal procedures and regulations? Griffin Jones presents a model for how to prepare and present your test work and demonstrate compliance. He explores how you can appear—and be—congruent, honest, and competent during formal and informal presentations.
The vast majority of problems found in web-based functional tests can be traced to a few common issues—dealing with dynamic page content, understanding the differences between explicit and implicit waits, choosing a proper element locator strategy, and understanding how to deal with setup or prerequisite data. Jim Holmes describes the basics of dynamic web page content (AJAX calls and the infamous spinning wheels and buttons) and how to create automated tests that properly deal with the main variants of dynamic content.
Building the Next Generation of TCoE and QACoEsVanessa López, Softtek
Managing Application Performance through SDLC – A Pragmatic ApproachPremkumar Balasubramanian, Cognizant
Finding the Real Value in Load TestingDuane Dorch, Compuware
Test teams must perform a wide variety of tasks from testing new functions and performing regression tests to helping with bug fixes, producing test reports, and working on test improvements. With all these activities, it is a challenge to keep priorities straight, operate most efficiently, and clearly show stakeholders all that the team is working on. Derk-Jan de Grood shares his experiences with Kanban, a proven method for managing workflow, as a visual tool to help teams allocate resources, reduce waste, and make progress visible to all stakeholders.
Testing projects have a habit of dissolving into chaos—and even strife—as deadlines approach and budgets are cut. When asked to do the impossible, risk management and mitigation tools can be the only way for testers to survive. Geoff Horne presents a proven method he uses for identifying and assessing risks and the effects—both positive and negative—of various mitigation approaches. Through the school of hard knocks, Geoff has learned that the most plausible risk mitigation strategy is not always the best and may actually harm the project.
Today, most businesses are heavily dependent on packaged systems, sometimes called commercial off-the-shelf software, for large parts of their operation. Highly-customizable packages such as BMC’s Remedy, Oracle's Maxim, and many others run the show at many of the world’s largest companies. While offering many features and feature options, these packages provide rich software development environments and a “configuration” that is a highly complex programming exercise.
For organizations developing large-scale applications, transitioning to agile is challenging enough. If your organization has not yet adopted an automation culture, brace yourself for a big surprise because automation is essential to agile success.
Agile methodologies bring new complexities and challenges to traditional performance engineering practices, especially with Web 2.0 technologies that implement more and more functionality on the client side. Mohit Verma presents a Scrum-based performance testing lifecycle for Web 2.0 applications. Mohit explains when performance engineers need to participate in the project, discusses how important it is for the performance engineer to understand the technical architecture, and explores the importance of testing early to identify design issues.
Have you heard? It’s all over the social media. We are the “last generation of testers.” Testing is dead. No more classical testing—too much inflexible process. Context driven? That is a code phrase for do whatever. Agility? Developers do testing, and testers become developers. DevOps? Development and operations join forces—and test is not in the picture. And, companies don’t test anymore—they outsource. Ruud Teunissen believes we must save the indispensable craft of testing.
Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes.
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As the testing discipline continues to evolve—and the demands on testers increase—we need to look for new paradigms to guide our work. Thomas McCoy believes the profession of journalism has much to offer in helping us ask the right kinds of questions, be heard, and deliver bad news effectively. In many ways, our profession has ideals similar to those of journalism: our first obligation should be to the truth, we must maintain independence (even when embedded in agile teams), and our mission includes the protection of society.
Testing Strategy for a Mobile-First EnterpriseSreekanth Singaraju, Alliance Global Services
Leveraging the Benefits of Early Automation Execution to Shift the STLC Left-wardNiraj Gupta, Wipro
It’s Agile, Not Fragile—HP Best Practices for Application Development and Testing in the Mashup of Mobile, Cloud and Composite ApplicationsKelly Emo and Michael Cooper, HP
“People are the most important asset of any organization.” Even though we hear that a lot, leaders and managers actually spend very little time focusing on the people side of testing. The skills and makeup of a test team are important and must be managed and cultivated properly. Individuals are very different and will react differently to various situations.
Software testing is a highly technical, logical, rational task. There's no place for squishy emotional stuff here—not among professional testers. Or is there? Because of commitment, risk, schedule, and money, emotions often do run high in software development and testing. Our ideas about quality and bugs are rooted in our desires, which in turn are rooted in our feelings. People don't decide things based on the numbers; they decide based on how they feel about the numbers. It is easy to become frustrated, confused, or bored; angry, impatient, or overwhelmed.
The ability to rapidly release new product features is vital to the success of today’s businesses. To accelerate development, teams are adopting agile practices and leveraging service-oriented architectures to integrate legacy applications with other systems. At the same time, testing these composite applications can take longer and cost more. Al Wagner explains the whys and hows of service virtualization and explores ways testers can employ this technology to simulate parts of complex systems and begin testing earlier.
Few topics are hotter than mobile software development. Every company seems to be rushing to release its own mobile applications. When it comes time to build that software, they quickly learn that things are hard. Many developers claim that it is difficult or impossible to test drive the application while it’s in development. Because traditional testing tools can’t automate the tests in the emulator or on the device, testers are usually left with a manual testing approach.
Is the cloud just another overhyped IT buzzword or a transformational technology wave? Steve Weisfeldt helps you get past all the noise and identify how you can leverage the cloud’s flexibility and scalability to save time and money on load and performance testing. Steve describes ways to generate user loads that are more geographically accurate and easily scaled to large user loads. He explores the myth that “generating load from the cloud” is the only valid testing approach and discusses when it is—and is not—important to test from the cloud for web and mobile apps.
Stakeholders always want to release when they think we’ve finished testing. They believe we have discovered “all of the important problems” and “verified all of the fixes”—and now it’s time to reap the rewards.
Mobile Continuous Integration for DummiesArchie Roboostoff, Borland, a Micro Focus company
Best Practices for Testing Mobile ApplicationsViabhav Agarwal, Jamo Solutions
Five Pains of a Test Manager and How to Overcome ThemRegg Struyk, Polarion
In the perfect world, you would prefer to hire and develop a large number of the most qualified testers to work on your projects. However, when that’s impossible, crowdsourcing may be the answer. Crowdsourcing provides a mechanism for finding and using large numbers of qualified individuals to work on the task at hand. Spread across various disciplines—design, development, testing, and R&D—crowdsourced testing is the powerful combination of cloud economics with the effectiveness and efficiency of the crowd.
When a unit test fails, we want clear, expressive, rich feedback so we can quickly understand the nature of the failure and get a good idea of how to fix it. Unit testing frameworks are fantastic at running tests and alerting us to any failure. Unfortunately, sometimes (or is that often?) the details of the failure are difficult to evaluate. Isn’t there some way to make the specifics jump off the screen so we don’t have to dig through all the details? ApprovalTests library does just that.
The power of virtualization has made it easy and inexpensive to create multiple environments for testing. How you implement your virtualization strategy can boost not only the savings on physical gear and availability of test environments but also your testing productivity. Sharing his experience working through the evolution of Verisign’s virtual test lab, David Silk examines how a well-implemented virtual lab can push your testing productivity to new levels.
In today's dynamic mobile marketplace—where new handsets and mobile operating systems are released every day—your ability to deal with these changes which impact your mobile product is vital. The mobile application lifecycle today must be short; must be of great quality; cover a myriad of handsets with different sizes, layouts, and enhanced capabilities; and, of course, cover as many operating systems as possible. This lifecycle requires a new methodology and approach. Eran Kinsbruner describes the mobile project challenges and provides real life examples of ways to overcome them.
Jim Trentadue describes how his organization first used the cloud for its non-production needs including development, testing, training, and production support. Jim begins by describing the components of a cloud environment and how it differs from a traditional physical server structure. To prove the cloud concept, he used a risk-based model for determining which servers would be migrated. The result was a win for the organization from a time-to-market and cost savings perspective. Jim shares his do’s and don’ts for moving to the cloud.
Finding time to test the basic functionality, performance, and security of a system is difficult enough, so how do you find time to add internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) testing? Today’s world is very small, and you may already have international users in your target market. Can you really afford to ignore those who can’t enter their name correctly with the default US-ASCII character set? Will it still be a quality product to them?
Testing Mobile Apps: Upscale Your Mobile Quality with AutomationEran Kinsbruner, Perfecto Mobile
Emerging Wave of Digital Strategy and the Assurance SurfboardPrasad Mk, Tata Consultancy Services
Transforming Testing--Optimizing and Accelerating Beyond the COEDarshan Dave and Manesh Thattil, Syntel
Although classic test automation, which usually focuses on regression testing, has its its place in testing, there is much more you can do to improve testing productivity and its value to the project and your organization. Through experience-based examples, video clips, and demonstrations, John Fodeh shares one company’s innovation journey to improve its test automation practice. John illustrates how they learned to apply automated “test monkeys” that explore the software in new ways each time a test is executed.
Once a client’s website is built, you’d think it would be time for a well-deserved break. However, almost immediately, questions come up—can we capture a larger audience? close more orders? increase our sales? And so, it’s time to redesign the site—and the test strategy and plans—based on real-world data. Lindiwe Vinson sees web analytics as a tool for guiding your test planning and test case design efforts.
Jamie Mitchell explores perhaps the most underused test technique in our arsenal—white-box testing. Also known as structural testing, white-box requires some programming expertise, access to the code, and an analysis tool. If you only employ black-box testing, you could easily ship a system having tested only 50 percent or less of the code base. Not good! Although you might believe that the developers have performed sufficient unit and integration testing, how do you know that they have achieved the level of coverage your project requires?
Mobile is an integral part of our daily lives, and if it’s not already part of your business model, it soon will be. When that happens, will you be ready to tackle the demands of testing web and native mobile apps? From the perspective of a test lead, Eric Montgomery describes the challenges Progressive Insurance, a company with a strong web presence, recently faced—learning new technologies, transforming the approach of testers from PC-based to mobile-based, and working with testing tools in a market that has yet to see a definitive leader emerge.
Even though many organizations claim that security is a priority, that claim doesn’t always translate into supporting security initiatives in software development or test. Security code reviews often are overlooked or avoided, and when development schedules fall behind, security testing may be dropped to help the team “catch up.” Everyone wants more secure development; they just don’t want to spend time or money to get it. Gene Gotimer describes his experiences with implementing a continuous delivery process in the cloud and how he integrated security testing into that process.
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6 Essential Cloud Testing FeaturesMughees Minhas, Oracle
Testers are taught they are responsible for all testing. Some even say “It’s not tested until I run the product myself.” Eric Jacobson believes this old school way of thinking can hurt a tester’s reputation and—even worse—may threaten the team’s success.
Organizations worldwide collect data about customers, users, products, and services. Striving to get the most out of collected data, they use it to fuel many day-to-day processes including software testing, development, and personnel training. The majority of this collected data is sensitive and falls under specific government regulations or industry standards that define policies for privacy and generally limit or prohibit using the data for these secondary purposes. Data masking solves this problem.
Test automation is undeniably a key strategy for any test manager—and for good Test automation is undeniably a key strategy for any test manager—and for good reason. Test automation promises faster regression testing, higher productivity, better quality, and cost reduction. However, many organizations fail to achieve these hoped for benefits, instead facing late deliveries, misuse of expensive tools, a frustrated testing team, and lack of confidence from their managers.
The burgeoning use of mobile devices has created enormous opportunities for organizations to leverage mobile to increase sales, advertise products, and collaborate with internal and external resources. However, with increasing usage, the need to perform testing on these devices is increasing significantly. This is not an easy task considering the number of devices, device operating systems, and operating system versions. To manage the number of variations, organizations rely on mobile testing tools to support their testing efforts.
HTML5 is one of the hottest technologies around right now because HTML5 apps are beautiful, engaging, and can perform important and entertaining functions. With the wide range of devices and platforms to support, the promise of multi-platform support is appealing. But HTML5 apps present their own range of security issues. So, what do you do about security? How do you test HTML5 applications to ensure their security? Alexander Andelkovic works at Spotify where their streaming music player desktop client applications are all HTML5-based.
The history of testing standards has not always been auspicious. Testing standards documents have been expensive to obtain, limited in scope, inflexible in expectations, and inconsistent. However, they contain important lessons learned from experienced practitioners—if a tester is willing to overcome the obstacles to get to the useful information. A set of new international standards is coming. These new standards are tailorable, consistent, and comprehensive in scope. In addition, they will be freely available (some are already).
Lee Copeland maintains that most organizations have some kind of metrics program—and almost all are ineffective. After explaining the concept of measurement, Lee describes two key reasons for these almost universal metrics program failures. The first major mistake people make is forgetting that the model we are using for measurement is not necessarily reality. The second major blunder is treating ideas as if they were real things and then counting them.
At the 2013 Testing & Quality Leadership Summit, program chair Jeff Payne brings together senior industry leaders for an interactive exchange of ideas and experiences.Please click here for more information.
Join us at The Workshop on Regulated Software Testing (WREST)—a free, full-day bonus session hosted by Scott Barber and Griffin Jones.Please click here for more information.
