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Process Improvement

Tutorials

MF Implementing Crowdsourced Testing NEW
Rajini Padmanaban, QA InfoTech
Mukesh Sharma, QA InfoTech
Mon, 09/30/2013 - 8:30am

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.

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MG Rapid Software Testing: Strategy NEW
James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.
Mon, 09/30/2013 - 8:30am

A test strategy is the set of ideas that guides your test design. It's what explains why you test this instead of that, and why you test this way instead of that way. Strategic thinking matters because testers must make quick decisions about what needs testing right now and what can be left alone. You must be able to work through major threads without being overwhelmed by tiny details. James Bach describes how test strategy is organized around risk but is not defined before testing begins. Rather, it evolves alongside testing as we learn more about the product.

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MJ Exploratory Testing Explained
Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.
Mon, 09/30/2013 - 8:30am

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—learning, test design, and test execution—done in parallel. 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.

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MM Exploratory Testing Is Now in Session
Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.
Mon, 09/30/2013 - 1:00pm

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.

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TB Key Test Design Techniques
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 8:30am

All testers know that we can identify many more test cases than we will ever have time to design and execute. The key 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.

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TD The Craft of Bug Investigation
Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 8:30am

Although many training classes and conference presentations describe processes and techniques meant to help you find bugs, few explain what to do when you find a good one. How do you know what the underlying problem is? What do you do when you find a bug, and the developer wants you to provide more information? How do you reproduce those pesky, intermittent bugs that come in from customer land? In this hands-on class, Jon Bach helps you practice your investigation and analysis skills—questioning, conjecturing, branching, and backtracking.

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TE Discovering New Test Ideas: Getting that Burst of Creativity NEW
Karen N. Johnson, Software Test Management, Inc.
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 8:30am

Feel your testing’s stuck in a rut? Looking for new ways to discover test ideas? Wondering 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?

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TH How to Break Software: Robustness Edition
Dawn Haynes, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 8:30am

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.

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TQ How to Break Software: Web 101+ Edition NEW
Dawn Haynes, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Tue, 10/01/2013 - 1:00pm

When testing web applications, you may feel overwhelmed by the technologies of today's web environments. Web testing today requires more than just exercising a system’s functionality. Each system is composed of a customized mix of various layers of technology, each implemented in a different programming language and requiring unique testing strategies. This “stew” often leads to puzzling behavior across browsers; performance problems due to page design and content, server locations, and architecture; and inconsistent operation of navigation controls.

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Concurrent Sessions

W1 Reducing the Cost of Software Testing
Matthew Heusser, Excelon Development
Wed, 10/02/2013 - 11:30am

The demand to deliver more software in less time is increasing. Give in to the pressure without thinking, and you end up facing burnout, stress, business risk, and, most likely, even more demands. Refuse, fight the good fight, and it is likely the business will replace you with someone else. Matt Heusser tackles head-on the problem of pressure, sharing his favorite concepts from the book How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing.

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W4 Working Testing Tasks into the Product Backlog
Michael Kelly, DeveloperTown
Wed, 10/02/2013 - 11:30am

If you've worked on an agile project, delivering to production on a regular basis, then you've struggled with the challenge of fitting in all the big tasks—performance, security, usability, and compatibility testing. To make matters worse, over time it becomes more and more challenging just to fit in all the functional testing that needs to take place, and that's even with rigorous unit and acceptance test automation. So how do you fit all that testing into the backlog when it doesn't tie nicely to one specific feature?

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W7 Key Strategies to Survive the Mega Test Program
Robert Goetz, Kaiser Permanente
Wed, 10/02/2013 - 1:45pm

Sometime in your career as a test manager, you’ll be assigned to lead the effort for a program so large that the CEO and board of directors monitor it. These are programs that bet the organization’s future and come with a high degree of risk, visibility, pressure, and fixed deadlines. Internal audit and external third-party reviews become de rigueur. Your upstream partners—analysis, design, development, and suppliers—all appear (at least to you) to miss their deadlines with no apparent consequences.

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T4 Mobile Testing Trends and Innovations
Melissa Tondi, ProtoTest
Thu, 10/03/2013 - 9:45am

As organizations implement their mobile strategy, testing teams must support new technologies while still maintaining existing systems. Melissa Tondi describes the major trends and innovations in mobile technology, usage, and equipment that you should consider when transitioning existing test teams or starting new ones.

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T10 Mobile Testing Success: Real World Strategies and Techniques
Clint Sprauve, Hewlett-Packard
Thu, 10/03/2013 - 11:15am

Today, consumers spend more time on mobile apps than on the web. With this increased demand and paradigm shift toward mobile devices, the role of the software tester is evolving and becoming more complex. Since mobile testing is a relatively new domain, software testers face the challenge of understanding not only what to test but how to test. Clint Sprauve focuses on real world strategies and techniques for mobile app testing including device provisioning, mobile network virtualization, multi-OS platform coverage, and hybrid app testing.

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T13 Swimming with the Salmon: Lessons in Moving Quality Upstream
Colleen Kirtland, The Capital Group
Harish Krishnankutty, Infosys Limited
Thu, 10/03/2013 - 1:30pm

Having difficulties getting your organization to recognize the value of QA? Is your “salmon team” losing to currents that impede continuous improvement and strategic planning? Colleen Kirtland and Harish Krishnankutty share their two-year uphill struggle to elevate QA to the position of trusted business partner. Move QA upstream before testing begins by aligning requirements to a business capability model (BCM). Translate the BCM model into key implementation assets with story maps.

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T19 Beyond Continuous Delivery—All the Way to Continuous Deployment
Kris Lankford, Microsoft
Thu, 10/03/2013 - 3:00pm

Just as those in the software world are getting their hands around agile practices, leading software organizations are going beyond continuous delivery for acceptance testing and now adopting continuous deployment—the practice of immediately releasing new code from development into production without human intervention. Continuous delivery promises to provide higher business value through faster deployment and leaner, more productive development and operations (DevOps). Many DevOps teams are concerned about what will happen to quality when they move to continuous deployment.

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T24 Introducing the New Software Testing Standard
Jon Hagar, Grand Software Testing
Thu, 10/03/2013 - 3:00pm

Software testing standards—who cares, anyway? You should! The new ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 software testing standard, driven by representatives from twenty countries and under development for the past five years, will be released soon. As a professional tester, you need to know about this standard and how it may apply to your environment. Jon Hagar describes the standard, how it was developed, and what types of projects will be impacted by it. This new standard offers risk-based approach to software testing that can be applied to both traditional and agile projects.

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