STAREAST 2016 - Consultant

You're under tight time pressure with 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, James Bach 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. The rapid approach isn't just...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big technology challenge for software testing. IoT testing uses not only concepts from traditional and mobile environments but also has new testing problems and new patterns. Jon Hagar begins by examining how to use data analytics from error profiles and social media to discover the new error patterns in IoT systems. Usage data on IoT devices is growing rapidly and becoming a big data issue. Through hands-on exercises, Jon explains how teams can use data analytics to improve development and testing. Next, he uses the analytics to define real-world...

You have just been assigned to a new testing project. So, where do you start? How do you develop a plan and begin testing? How will you report on your progress? In this hands-on session, Paul Holland shares test project approaches based on the Heuristic Software Test Model from Rapid Software Testing. Learn and practice new ways to plan, execute, and report on testing activities. You’ll be given a product to test and start by creating three raw lists—Product Coverage Outline, Potential Risks, and Test Ideas—that help ensure comprehensive testing. Use these lists to create an initial set of...

With the adoption of agile practices in many organizations, the test automation landscape has changed. Bob Galen explores current disruptors to traditional automation strategies, and discusses relevant and current adjustments you need to make when developing your automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and beat their commercial equivalents in many ways―not only in cost but also in functionality, creativity, evolutionary speed, and developer acceptance. Agile methods have fundamentally challenged our traditional automation strategies. Now we must keep up...

Many software systems are required to process huge combinations of input data, all of which deserve to be tested. Since we rarely have time to create and execute test cases for all combinations, our fundamental problem in testing is how to choose a reasonably-sized subset that will find a large percentage of defects and can be performed within the limited time and budget available. Lee Copeland says that pairwise testing is the most effective—but not well-understood—test design technique to deal with this problem. The answer is not to attempt to test all combinations of all values for all...

Large-scale and complex testing projects can stress the testing and automation practices we have learned through the years, resulting in less than optimal outcomes. However, a number of innovative ideas and concepts are emerging to better support industrial-strength testing for big projects. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and presents strategies for organizing and managing testing on large projects. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation, including how to incorporate techniques like keyword testing and behavior-driven development. Discover what roles virtualization and...

Many organizations find that test automation does not work as well as they thought it would. In many cases, these failures are due to technical reasons, which can be fixed relatively easily. These test automation patterns are common to automation efforts at any level with whatever tools you are using. Dorothy Graham focuses on often-neglected technical issues—things that are not management issues—and the patterns that help solve them. Using a set of patterns developed...

As testers, we know that we can define many more test cases than we will ever have time to design, execute, and report. The key problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset—from the almost infinite number of tests available—that will find a large percentage of the defects. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class testing, boundary value testing, decision tables, and state-transition diagrams. Explore examples of each of these techniques in action. Don’t just pick test cases randomly. Learn to selectively...

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 is often 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. In SBTM, testers explore an area of a product, framing their testing in time-boxed “sessions” meant to...

GitHub—a powerful online collaboration, code review, code management, and version control service based on the open source Git tool—is the new business card for professional developers working on software projects. That's why job interviewers often look to GitHub to gauge a potential development hire's creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Today’s testers need to learn about and use GitHub, too. Join Wilson Mar as he examines the major GitHub repositories testers should know about. In this hands-on tutorial, you’ll learn why and how GitHub is being used for most open source...

Influence diagrams provide a simple-to-create and easy-to-understand approach to address the complexities of real-life problems. For instance, as testers we may want to find more bugs, but does this have an unintended consequence for the developers? Developers now have more defects to debug, which affects their capacity to deliver new functionality. Influence diagrams provide a means of understanding and managing the complexities of key interactions among testers, developers, and business stakeholders. In the past few years, Isabel Evans has used influence diagrams as a practical tool to...

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 are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality,...

After the first wave of open source test automation tools like Fitnesse and Watir, we are now in a stronger, second wave led by Selenium-based frameworks. This powerful swell, fueled by a major shift toward web-based applications on desktops and mobile devices, is changing how corporations tackle software test automation. Add in a desire to replace old-guard, commercial tools in favor of newer technology with lower costs, we may have a perfect storm. However, with different technologies come new challenges....

Patterns—proven, repeatable solutions to common situations that occur again and again—are commonly used in development and to a lesser extent in testing. In addition to patterns, various anti-patterns have been discovered. These are common responses to recurring problems that, while promising, are actually counterproductive. Hans Buwalda describes a set of such anti-patterns that he commonly sees in automated test design and that he feels inhibit scalability and...

Within large enterprise organizations, DevOps transformations can be daunting and complex if not implemented with innovation, creativity, and the support of leadership. Implementing DevOps best practices can be a challenge, even for those companies that sell software that addresses this particular discipline. Imagine approaching a team that develops quality assurance tools and challenging them to build a developer-centric team for continuous testing and delivery—but you can't use any of your own tools. Join Clint Sprauve and Eran Bachar to learn how Eran created a dev/test team to...

As test managers, we face challenging situations that require us to draw on our past experiences, principles, and good practices in order to have any chance at all for success.  Michael Wasielczyk faced this challenge immediately after joining T. Rowe Price. He started his new job, responsible for managing the testing effort on a mission-critical data warehouse, and he had no experience managing a data warehouse testing effort. In addition, Michael found there were no...

With the proliferation of mobile devices, browsers, and IoT devices, each with its own eccentricities, performing end-to-end automated testing is starting to feel like navigating a zombie apocalypse. You need to fight off the zombies but lack the right tools. You need a set of rules to live by. You wish you had a buddy who would teach you all those rules because alone, you feel like you’re being eaten alive. On the surface, the rules are simple—Limber Up, Don’t Be a...

Chef, Puppet, and other tools that implement “infrastructure as code” are great for configuration management and automated deployments, but it is difficult to test these infrastructure scripts before putting them into production. Since infrastructure as code is a relatively new technology, methodologies for its testing are not yet standardized. Glen Buckholz shares a way to solve the two major problems with testing Chef scripts—[1] capturing a start state similar to your...

Substantial confusion exists about the roles and responsibilities of test management when using an agile software development process. Agile seeks to streamline project management and leadership under the role of a ScrumMaster. But what does this mean for test managers? How do they stay involved in the process? What role do they fill? Is it possible that test managers are no longer needed? Join Jeffery Payne for a collaborative dialog to discuss the pros and cons of a variety of test management models he has seen used by companies who have adopted agile. Learn how to best position yourself...

In today’s environment of plummeting software delivery cycle times, test automation becomes a more critical and strategic necessity.  How can we possibly keep up with software delivery's explosive pace while retaining satisfactory test coverage?  How do we keep the reins on costs and reduce risk?  Carl Nagle maintains that the long-term solution is a greater level of “sustainable” test automation.  The Software Automation Framework Support (SAFS) method separates test...

DevOps promotes continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment. And anything that breaks this continuity is a potential bottleneck. In many organizations, testing becomes that bottleneck for one or all of the following reasons:  unstable test environment, lack of good test data, and manual test processes. Tanya Kravtsov explores why treating test automation as a separate entity from development often results in a DevOps failure. She explores how integrating test automation with product...

A startup is an organization created to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Approximately 40 percent of all startups will cease operations with investors losing everything; 95 percent will fall short of their financial projections. And the number one cause of failure? No one wants to buy their product. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup...

Asad Faruqui and Moni Mau say that their old regression automation used to take three-to-four days of execution time as they ran against different browser versions, locales, and currencies. They wanted to make the automation framework more efficient so features could go to market faster. Symantec explored Selenium Grid which could reduce the run time by offering some parallelism, but Asad and Moni wanted even more efficiency. They explain how they created both a...

Is tracking metrics beneficial? What does it accomplish? How and what should be tracked with regards to software quality? Management wants software metrics to understand what the individual and/or teams are accomplishing and how they are doing with regards to management's expectations. Unfortunately, sometimes those metrics are used against the team and/or individuals. Join Annette Ash as she explores beneficial options to significantly increase software quality, excite...

Who owns DevOps? That's a question that many are asking as more and more organizations implement continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous monitoring capabilities—the essence of DevOps engineering. Join Jeffery Payne as he describes how leading-edge organizations are structuring cross-department DevOps teams and where those teams live within existing organizational structures. Learn who needs to be involved in a DevOps team, how the team works with...

Mobile devices are taking over the world and quickly outpacing the use of traditional desktop machines. But how should we test them? Jonah Stiennon has spent the past two years working with a team of open source contributors at Sauce Labs to establish Appium as the industry standard for cross-platform mobile test automation. A Node.js application, Appium uses a superset of the JSON wire protocol, the same protocol on which Selenium is built, to automate both iOS and...

Joe Colantonio shares how combining your existing automated tests with scalable automated visual testing can help you dramatically increase coverage, reduce maintenance, and substantially boost test robustness, efficiency, and ROI. Joe includes real-life use cases—automating cross-browser UI validation, adding full UI regression coverage to existing automated tests, handling dynamic content in visual tests, and more—to help you release faster and better, automatically...

The Selenium Grid unleashes the full power of Selenium to run multiple automated tests in parallel across multiple platforms. Brian Long demonstrates the use of an open-source framework developed at Virginia Tech to get up and running with a Selenium Grid in about an hour. He begins by discussing the Selenium Grid configuration and then progresses to the installation of the framework. Starting with a clean Selenium installation, Brian uses Git to retrieve and install...

When I was in high school, I always enjoyed weekly poker games with my friends. As I began my testing career, I realized many poker skills that I honed years ago are similar to those I need to be a good software tester. In poker, resource allocation (betting with chips) is easier knowing if your opponent has won a World Series of Poker bracelet or if he is a novice. In testing, it helps to know how much business, testing, and technical knowledge each team member has so...

When you go on a road trip and want to plan your journey, you need to know where you are, where you want to go, and why you want to go there. You need the same things when you want to improve your test process. It doesn’t matter whether you are agile, waterfall, or part of a Test Center of Excellence, you need to assess the current state of the process, your goal, and how to implement the improvements. Gitte Ottosen takes you through some of test process improvement...

How would you like to be in this position? Development sends the final release candidate for multiple systems with a user base of one million just a day before the production release, and you are expected to sign off on the overall software quality. Rahul Shah is responsible for providing QA sign-off for a dozen applications every week and is accountable for reporting the overall quality of functional, regression, automation, cross-browser, mobile, and performance testing...

How well do you know your data? Organizations are discovering the value in their data—as evidence of what they have done and a clue to how they can improve the bottom line. With the increase in analytics, it is no secret that there are more eyes on the data. And analyzing data can give valuable insight into patterns that drive efficiencies or errors. It is important to use this information and make sure it is being used correctly. However, excavating the data is not always...