Test Manager

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.