Software Developer

Keynotes

K4 Asking the Right Questions? What Journalism Can Teach Testers

Thomas McCoy, Australian Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 8:30am

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.

Tutorials

MN Acceptance Test-driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 1:00pm

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.

TA Mobile Applications Testing

Jonathan Kohl, Kohl Concepts, Inc.

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 8:30am

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.

TM High-flying Cloud Testing Techniques

Ruud Teunissen, Polteq Test Services BV

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 1:00pm

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.

Concurrent Sessions

W17 Performance Testing Web 2.0 Applications—in an Agile World

Mohit Verma, Tufts Health Plan

Wed, 05/01/2013 - 3:00pm

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.

Gene Gotimer, Coveros, Inc.

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 1:30pm

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.