Software Testing

Testing a game console isn’t all fun and games. However, with more than 50 million Xbox 360 consoles sold, and the amazing success of the Kinect sensor, it’s certainly a hotbed of excitement for software developers and testers alike. Veteran tester Alan Page is having a blast on the Xbox console team and shares an insider’s view of what it’s like to test one of the most popular entertainment systems ever created. Learn the details of testing the Xbox from the guts of the operating system to the latest applications—and everything in between.

A number of test automation ideas that at first glance seem very sensible actually contain pitfalls and problems that you should avoid. Dot Graham describes five of these “intelligent mistakes”—automated tests will find more bugs more quickly; spending a lot on a tool must guarantee great benefits; it’s necessary to automate all of our manual tests; tools are expensive so we have to show a substantial return on investment; and testing tools must be used by the testers. Dot points out that automation doesn’t find bugs; tests do.

Load testing is just one—but the most frequently discussed—aspect of performance testing. Luckily, much of performance testing does not demand the same expensive tools, special skills, environments, or time as load testing does. Scott Barber developed the Rapid Performance Testing (RPT) approach to help individuals and teams with the non-load aspects of performance testing.

Model-based testing can be a powerful alternative to just writing test cases. However, modeling tools are specialized and not suitable for everyone. On the other hand, keyword-driven test automation has gained wide acceptance as a powerful way to create maintainable automated tests, and, unlike models, keywords are simple to use. Hans Buwalda demonstrates different ways that keyword testing and models can be combined to make model-based testing more readily accessible. Learn how you can use keywords to create the models directly.

Many of our stakeholders don't understand testing like we do, especially those whose focus is on making sales, growing revenues, and watching the bottom line. As testers, how can we support them in their efforts to be successful? How can we provide useful, timely information that helps them make important decisions? Pradeep Soundararajan shares his experiences with changing perceptions of testing for those in sales and the ripple effect it had on the testers’ freedom and responsibilities.

In this agile world, as the expectations for rapid mobile application development and delivery get shorter every day, the users’ patience with a buggy app has become almost nonexistent. Elizabeth Taylor shares how to reduce iOS application testing time and gain confidence in your code: use Xcode Instruments with JavaScript to automate your functional tests; verify potentially missed UI elements with manual testing including copy, labels, and images; and learn how to stress test your app.

Gaming is a multibillion-dollar industry, and good testing is critical to any game’s success. Game testing has traditionally been black-box through the client—a method clearly insufficient with increasingly more complex software incorporating 3D physics, thousands of linked and interacting assets, large databases, and client-server architecture.

The number of software test tools keeps expanding, and individual tools are continuously becoming more advanced. However, there is no doubt that a tester’s most important—yet often neglected and underused—tool is the mind. As testers, we need to employ our intelligence, imagination, and creativity to gain information about the system under test. Humans are biologically designed to learn through play, and even as adults we can exploit this and harness the power of play to encourage and drive our creativity.

Adding user acceptance testing (UAT) to your testing lifecycle can increase the probability of finding defects before software is released. The challenge is to fully engage users and assist them in becoming effective testers. Help achieve this goal by involving users early and setting realistic expectations. Showing how users add value and taking them through the UAT process strengthens their ability and commitment. Conducting user acceptance testing sessions as software functionality becomes available helps to build confidence and capability—and find defects earlier.

Due to the sensitive nature of the personal information often stored on mobile phones, security testing is vital when building mobile applications. Jeff Payne discusses some of the characteristics that make testing mobile applications unique and challenging. These characteristics include how mobile devices store data, fluid trust boundaries due to untrusted applications installed on the device, different and unique aspects of device security models, and differences in the types of threats one must be concerned with. Jeff shares hints and tips for effectively testing mobile applications.

If you work in a large-scale environment, you know how difficult it is to have all the systems “code complete” and ready for testing at the same time. In order to fully test end-to-end scenarios, you must be able to validate results in numerous systems. But what if all those systems are not available for you to begin testing? Chris Reites describes “decoupled testing,” an enterprise-level solution for managing interface data for capture, injection, simulation, and comparison all along your testing paths.