STAREAST 2016 - Tutorials
Monday, May 2
Getting Started with Risk-Based Testing
Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices, understanding risk is essential to successful testing. Dale Perry describes a general risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. Learn how to focus your testing effort, what elements to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation. Review the fundamentals of risk identification, analysis, and the role testing plays in risk mitigation. Develop an inventory of test objectives to help...
A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing
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...
Get Your Message Across: Communication Skills for Testers
Communication is at the heart of our profession. If we can’t convey our concerns in ways that connect with key members of the project team, our contribution is likely to be ignored—no matter how advanced our testing capabilities are. Because we act in an advisory capacity rather than being in command, our power to exert influence is almost entirely based on our communication skills. Join Julie Gardiner as she draws on techniques from psychology and marketing to help you get your message across. With people suffering information overload and deluged with emails, it is more important than...
Testing the Internet of Things
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...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
In test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture and no consideration for how to integrate those tools. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his...
The Keys to Agile Testing Maturity
You’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful. So, how do you know how well your test team is really doing? And how do you continuously improve your test practices? When things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? The path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick, and it helps to have a guide. So consider this tutorial your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance agile testing. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn as they share lessons from their most successful agile testing transitions. Explore actual team case...
Enhance Your Testing Workbox with New Approaches, Methods, and Ideas
What do you do when you are not testing? Whatever it is, you probably have a place where you work on your interests, some tools and equipment, and especially some things you always have with you. Perhaps you have a room or shed or tool rack with your favorite and your most used equipment easily at hand in a workbox. Wouldn’t it be great to have your own workbox for testing? Well, you already do! Everyone’s “mental tool set” is different, but we all need versatile,...
End-to-End Testing with the Heuristic Software Test Model
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...
Applying Emotional Intelligence in Testing
As test managers and test professionals, 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. The concept of emotional intelligence (EI), popularized by Harvard psychologist and science writer Daniel Goleman, has much to offer test managers and testers. Key EI skills include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Julie...
Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World
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...
Successful Test Automation: A Manager’s View
Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from system level automated test execution. Surprisingly often, this is due not to technical factors but to management issues. In this overview, Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, particularly when you are in the early stages of automation, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. Focusing on...
Pairwise Testing Explained
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...
Better Test Design for Great Test Automation
When we discover—often late in an automation effort—that the automated tests are cumbersome and costly to maintain, we often view this as a technical problem for the automator to solve. However, an often-overlooked cause is the role that testers who designed these tests play in making automation scalable and maintainable. In this interactive tutorial for both testers and automation engineers, Hans Buwalda explores how better test designs will result in much better test automation and can make the difference between automation success and failure. See why successful automated testing is not...
Service Virtualization: Making the Unavailable Available for Testing
Service virtualization—and how it can help testers begin testing earlier—is a hot topic in books and discussions. Now it’s time to demonstrate how service virtualization is more than just a buzzword. Join Carlos Pineda for this interactive session as he shares his experiences and proven practices for using service virtualization technology. Learn how to get started with service virtualization, how service virtualization fits into the overall delivery lifecycle, how to prioritize which services to stub out, and when to begin transitioning from testing with stubs to executing the real...
Tuesday, May 3
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
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. 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. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing puzzles that help you practice...
The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More
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...
Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up
Knowledge of Selenium, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. Many believe it is a “must have” skill for test engineers. If you want to learn Selenium, then this tutorial is a great start. Cheezy Morgan shows you how to build test automation using Selenium. But he doesn’t stop there. He uses his years of experience to show you how to build automation that is clean and easy to maintain. Cheezy introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, work with...
Technical Test Automation Challenges: Patterns and Solutions
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...
Performance Testing: Planning for a Successful Test
In today’s fast paced, ever changing world of software and technology, software performance testing is becoming essential to successful product implementation. To be successful we must understand several fundamental factors about performance testing. Dale Perry examines the activities required to be successful in software performance testing. Dale identifies key issues, how they determine our level of success at implementing the necessary testing, and potential pitfalls...
Fundamentals of Test Design
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...
What’s Your Leadership IQ?
Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies, explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and describes...
Security Testing for Test Professionals
Today’s software applications are often security critical, making security testing essential in a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeffery 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. Explore effective test techniques for assuring that...
Testing Under Pressure: A Case for Session-Based Test Management
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...
Test Attacks to Break Mobile and Embedded Software
In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series “How to Break Software,” Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to the domain of mobile and embedded software systems. First, Jon defines the environments of mobile and embedded software. He then examines the issues of software product failures caused by defects found in these types of software. Next, Jon shares a set of attacks against mobile and embedded software based on common modes of failure that teams can direct against their software. Like different kinds of software design patterns, attacks are test design patterns that...
How Testers Master Git and GitHub
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...
Testing Cloud Services
Cloud computing is rapidly changing the way systems are developed, tested, and deployed. New system hosting capabilities—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—are forcing us to review and revise our testing processes. At the same time, cloud computing is affording us opportunities to employ new test tooling solutions, which we call testing as a service (TaaS). In this technical session, Martin Pol and Jeroen...
Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing
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...
How to Break Software: Robustness Edition
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. By expanding basic tests and incorporating specific robustness...
What DevOps Means for Testers: Tips for Getting Testers Involved
DevOps is more than a buzzword or passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly delivering high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...
Measurement and Metrics for Test Management
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,...
Exploring Usability Testing for Mobile and Web Technologies
It’s not enough to verify that software conforms to requirements by passing established acceptance tests. Successful software products engage, entertain, and support the user experience. Goals vary from project to project, but if your users do not embrace your software—no matter how robust and reliable it is—business can slip through your hands. Rob Sabourin shares how to elicit effective usability requirements with techniques such as storyboarding and task analysis. Testers, programmers, and users collaborate to blend the requirements, design, and test cycles into a tight feedback loop....