Test Automation

Tutorials

MB The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Mon, 09/30/2013 - 8:30am

Large-scale testing projects can severely stress many of the testing practices we have gotten used to over the year. This can result in less than optimal outcomes. A number of innovative ideas and concepts have emerged to support industrial-strength testing of large and complex projects. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and the strategies he's developed and used for large testing on large projects. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation and how to successfully incorporate keyword testing.

MH Management Issues in Test Automation

Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant

Mon, 09/30/2013 - 8:30am

Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from automated test execution. Surprisingly often, this is due not to technical factors but to management issues. Dot Graham describes the most important management concerns the test manager must address for test automation success, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use or your current state of automation.

TG Patterns in Test Automation: Issues and Solutions SOLD OUT NEW

Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant

Seretta Gamba, Steria Mummert ISS GmbH

Tue, 10/01/2013 - 8:30am

Testers often encounter problems when automating test execution. The surprising thing is that many testers encounter the very same problems, over and over again. These problems often have known solutions, yet many testers are not aware of them. Recognizing the commonality of these test automation issues and their solutions, Seretta Gamba and Dorothy Graham have organized them into a set of test automation patterns. A pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem.

TO Introducing Keyword-Driven Test Automation

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Tue, 10/01/2013 - 1:00pm

In both agile and traditional projects, keyword-driven testing has proven to be a powerful way to attain a high level of automation—when it is done correctly. Many testing organizations use keyword-driven testing but aren’t realizing the full benefits of scalability and maintainability that are essential to keep up with the demands of testing today’s software. Hans Buwalda outlines how you can meet what he calls the “5 percent challenges”—automate 95 percent of your tests with no more than 5 percent of your total testing effort—using his proven, keyword-driven test method.

Keynotes

K2 Testing the Xbox: Lessons for All

Alan Page, Microsoft

Wed, 10/02/2013 - 10:00am

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.

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.

W3 Intelligent Mistakes in Test Automation

Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant

Wed, 10/02/2013 - 11:30am

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.

W9 Model-Based Testing with Keywords

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Wed, 10/02/2013 - 1:45pm

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.

W11 Automated Performance Profiling with Continuous Integration

Ivan Kreslin, Mitchell International

Wed, 10/02/2013 - 1:45pm

Historically, performance tests are run long after the code has been checked in, making performance issues time consuming to resolve and thus not a good fit in the agile process. Ivan Kreslin presents a solution that he’s implemented to address this problem. Learn how Ivan integrates the functionality in Microsoft Performance Profiling tools into a test automation framework to capture performance-related issues during continuous integration.

W14 Model-Based Testing: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques

Adam Richards, Critical Logic

Wed, 10/02/2013 - 3:00pm

For decades, software development tools and methods have evolved with an emphasis on modeling. Standards like UML and SysML are now used to develop some of the most complex systems in the world. However, test design remains a largely manual, intuitive process. Now, a significant opportunity exists for testing organizations to realize the benefits of modeling. Adam Richards describes how to leverage model-based testing to dramatically improve both test coverage and efficiency—and lower the overall cost of quality.

W15 iOS Test Automation: The Trifecta

Elizabeth Taylor, Digimarc

Wed, 10/02/2013 - 3:00pm

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.

T1 Eliminating Software Defects with Jidoka—The Overlooked Pillar of Lean

Bill Curtis, CAST

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 9:45am

Many development organizations are experimenting—but getting mixed results—with lean development techniques. As a test or development manager, you have the power to help eliminate defects—the largest source of waste in development—and the enormous rework costs they incur. Bill Curtis discusses Jidoka, another pillar of lean, which uses automation to help developers detect and eliminate defects during development.

T6 Test Automation Challenges in the Gaming Industry

Brett Roark, Blizzard Entertainment

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 9:45am

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.

T7 Test Status Reporting: Focus Your Message for Executives

Stephan Obbeck, KROLL Consulting AG

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 11:15am

Test status reporting is a key factor in the success of test projects. Stephan Obbeck shares some ideas on how to communicate more than just a red-yellow-green status report to executive management and discusses how the right information can influence their decisions. Testers often create reports that are too technical, losing crucial information in a mountain of detailed data. Management needs to make decisions—based on data they do understand—that support the test project.

T9 Automated Testing of a Dynamically Configurable System

Terry Morrish, Synacor

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 11:15am

You provide your clients a service and product, designed so that each component is customizable and can be dynamically changed right down to screen layout and field location. This greatly increases the amount of testing you have to perform on a release since there could be more than fifty variations of the component. So how do you ensure high quality outcomes with so much testing to be performed under tight timeframes? You automate the testing, of course.

T15 Confessions of a Test Automation Addict

David Rosskopf, LDS Church

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 1:30pm

Feeling fatigued, frustrated, and stressed at work? Wondering how you can stay relevant and highly valued in this fast-changing software development domain? David Rosskopf shares how you can become more productive through a non-traditional approach for automating testing—and much more. David, a self-admitted automation addict, confesses he is easily bored with repetitive tasks and frustrated with inefficiencies. Learn from David how to identify inefficiencies in your workplace and how to develop the right tool to fit each need.

T21 End-to-End Automation: Providing Stakeholders Feedback on Quality

Vikas Bhupalam, Intuit, Inc.

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 3:00pm

Are you running automated tests during development yet not providing automated feedback to the project stakeholders? Vikas Bhupalam approached this problem by leveraging and integrating monitoring, logging, and defect tracking systems to provide automatic feedback to stakeholders. Tests are executed using a Java-based framework, and the results are sent to a monitoring tool that shows up as traffic lights on a dashboard. The dashboard links to logs on the server that provide insights into failing tests and root causes of problems. Alerts can be triggered for specific conditions.

T22 Mobile Test Automation with Big Data Analytics

Tarun Bhatia, Microsoft

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 3:00pm

Organizations with a mobile presence today face a major challenge of building robust automated tests around their mobile applications. However, organizations often have limited testing resources for these increasingly complex projects, and stakeholders worry about the quality of the product. So how do you plan a mobile test automation project, recognizing the failure rate of such efforts? Discover how Tarun Bhatia used big data analytics to understand where customers spend most of their time out in the wild on their apps.