Test Management

Tutorials

MA A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing

Paul Holland, Testing Thoughts

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

You're under tight time pressure and have 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, Paul Holland 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.

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.

MC Getting Started with Risk-Based Testing

Dale Perry, Software Quality Engineering

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

Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices and processes, the Systematic Test and Evaluation Process (STEP™) offers a flexible approach to help you and your team succeed. Dale Perry describes this risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. The STEP™ approach helps you decide how to focus your testing effort, what elements and areas to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation.

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.

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.

ML Testing the Data Warehouse—Big Data, Big Problems NEW

Geoff Horne, NZTester Magazine

Mon, 09/30/2013 - 1:00pm

Data warehouses are critical systems for collecting, organizing, and making information readily available for strategic decision making. The ability to review historical trends and monitor near real-time operational data is a key competitive advantage for many organizations. Yet the methods for assuring the quality of these valuable assets are quite different from those of transactional systems. Ensuring that appropriate testing is performed is a major challenge for many enterprises.

MN Essential Test Management and Planning

Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering

Mon, 09/30/2013 - 1:00pm

The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Rick Craig introduces proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, system, integration, and unit testing. Rick explains how to customize an IEEE-829-style test plan and test summary report to fit your organization’s needs. Learn how to manage test activities, estimate test efforts, and achieve buy-in. Discover a practical risk analysis technique to prioritize your testing and become more effective with limited resources.

TF Alan Page: On Testing NEW

Alan Page, Microsoft

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

You name the testing topic, and Alan Page has an opinion on it, hands-on practical experience with it—or both. Spend the morning with Alan as he discusses a variety of topics, trends, and tales of software engineering and software testing. In an interactive format loosely based on discovering new testing ideas—and bringing new life to some of the old ideas—Alan shares experiences and stories from his twenty year career as a software tester.

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.

TN Collaboration Techniques: Forgotten Wisdom and New Approaches SOLD OUT NEW

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com

Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant

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

In our increasingly agile world, the new buzzword is collaboration—so easy to preach but difficult to do well. Testers are challenged to work directly and productively with customers, programmers, business analysts, writers, trainers, and pretty much everyone in the business value chain. Testers and managers have many touch points of collaboration: grooming stories with customers, sprint planning with team members, reviewing user interaction with customers, troubleshooting bugs with developers, whiteboarding with peers, and buddy checking.

TP Test Managers: How You Can Really Make a Difference NEW

Julie Gardiner, The Test People

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

When leading a test team or working in an agile team, becoming a trusted advisor to other stakeholders is paramount. This requires three key skills: earning trust, giving advice, and building relationships. Join Julie Gardiner as she explores each of these skills, describing why and how a trusted advisor develops different “mindsets.” Julie shares a framework of “quick-wins” for test managers and team leaders who need to show the value of testing on projects. To help provide timely, relevant information to stakeholders, she shares seven powerful monitoring and predicting techniques.

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.

Keynotes

K1 What Executives Value in Testing

Michael Kelly, DeveloperTown

Jeanette Thebeau, Ex2 Partners

Wed, 10/02/2013 - 8:30am

Professional testers and test managers are feeling the pressures of low-cost competition and tools that claim to replace them through automation. So, how can test teams add more value to their projects and organization? In a recent survey of executives and testers, Mike Kelly and Jeanette Thebeau found major disconnects between what executives and testers believe are most important to the business. They explore new insights into the risks and concerns executives perceive and what you should do differently.

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.

K5 The Bounty Conundrum: Incentives for Testing

Shaun Bradshaw, Zenergy Technologies, Inc.

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 4:15pm

When you think of a bounty, do you think of Dog the Bounty Hunter, a reality series featuring a biker dude with a bad mullet, or maybe Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film about a slave-turned-bounty-hunter? Shaun Bradshaw doesn’t have a mullet and isn’t a movie star, but he has witnessed his fair share of bounty-style incentives used to motivate test teams to find more bugs, in hopes of improving software quality.

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.

W2 Testing Lessons Learned from Monty Python

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com

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

And now for something completely different...Monty Python's Flying Circus revolutionized comedy and brought zany British humor to a worldwide audience. However, buried deep in the hilarity and camouflaged in its twisted wit lie many important testing lessons—tips and techniques you can apply to real world problems to deal with turbulent projects, changing requirements, and stubborn project stakeholders.

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.

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?

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.

W8 Data Warehouse Testing: It’s All about the Planning

Geoff Horne, NZTester Magazine

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

Today’s data warehouses are complex and contain heterogeneous data from many different sources. Testing these warehouses is complex, requiring exceptional human and technical resources. So how do you achieve the desired testing success? Geoff Horne believes that it is through test planning that includes technical artifacts such as data models, business rules, data mapping documents, and data warehouse loading design logic. Wayne shares planning checklists, a test plan outline, concepts for data profiling, and methods for data verification.

W10 Agile Code Reviews for Better Software—Sooner

Mark Hammer, SmartBear Software

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

Code reviews are often thought of as anti-agile, cumbersome, and disruptive. However, done correctly, they enable agile teams to become more collaborative and effective, and ultimately to produce higher quality software faster. Mark Hammer describes how lightweight code review practices succeed where more cumbersome methods fail. Mark offers tips on the mechanics of lightweight code reviews and compares five common styles of review. He looks at real-world examples and reveals impressive results.

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.

T8 Become a Big Data Quality Hero

Jason Rauen, LexisNexis

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

Many believe that regression testing an application with minimal data is sufficient. With big data applications, the data testing methodology becomes far more complex. Testing can now be done within the data fabrication process as well as in the data delivery process. Today, comprehensive testing is often mandated by regulatory agencies—and more importantly by customers. Finding issues before deployment and saving your company’s reputation—and in some cases preventing litigation—are critical.

T11 It’s All Fun and Games: Using Play to Improve Tester Creativity

Christin Wiedemann, Professional Quality Assurance, Ltd.

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

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.

T18 Get Testing Help from the Crowd

Matt Johnston, uTest

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

Crowdsourcing has become widely acknowledged as a productivity solution across numerous industries. However, for companies incorporating crowdsourcing into existing business practices, specific issues must be addressed: What problem are we trying to solve? How do we control the process? How do we incentivize people to achieve our goals? Ultimately, the key to successfully employing a crowdsourcing model is to move beyond the realm of the “mob” to create an engaged, interactive community of diverse and skilled professionals.

T20 Decoupled System Interface Testing at FedEx

Chris Reites, FedEx Services

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

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.